Being Good Isn't Enough
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The article 'Being good isn't enough' discusses the importance of going beyond technical skills to achieve career success, sparking a nuanced discussion on the role of agency, politics, and individual circumstances in professional growth.
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For example maybe your company gets bought by private equity and 0 people get promoted for years on end.
Or maybe you have a speech impediment and you never get promoted beyond a certain point.
The only career advice is - if you want to get promoted understand the motivations of those who can promote and try to make it in their self-interest to promote you.
That is, getting promoted is partly it, and partly explicitly not.
The author deals with the question of the advice recipient's goals near the start of the piece:
> For some people it means finding work they love. For others it’s about meaning. For many it’s just getting promoted. Still, here’s what I usually say.
The rest of the piece does sound like corporate ladder-climber advice. For example:
> [...] and people notice. That’s enough for a while. But eventually it’s not. Everyone around you is technically strong too. So for most of us, you won’t stand out anymore. You need to increase your impact in other ways. [...]
Where, to a ladder-climber, "impact" is corporate euphemism for recognition and promotion ("people notice" and "stand[ing] out").
And common corporate getting-recognition advice:
> And do it in the open. A common mistake is assuming work speaks for itself. It rarely does.
And even the closing words could be constructive advice for ladder-climbers:
> And in the long run, the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.
But it could also be applicable to the rare/mythical unicorns who just want to do good work within a corporate environment.
It's true that you need to understand the motivations of people in charge and align your output with that.
However, these overly reductive approaches to the workplace can easily backfire. A lot of the go-getter juniors I've had to work with in my career approached the workplace like a game of 4D chess to unlock, where they just need to identify what matters to their skip level boss and hyperfocus on that. Some times it works for a little while, but in my experience many employees underestimate how blatantly obvious these games are to any experienced manager.
From a management perspective, you can notice when someone is a hyper-responder to perceived incentives and trying to people-please you into rewarding them. Good managers learn to be careful about what's said, even in passing, and to carefully call out the behaviors they want to see to keep them on track.
Evil managers see this incentive-reward hyper response and use it against the employee. I've worked with some managers who will spot these go-getters early and then dangle carrots in front of them every time they want to get something done. The employee will chase every carrot aggressively, thinking it's their ticket to getting ahead. In reality, the manager isn't interested in promoting them out of that role because they can so reliably extract extra work by dangling another carrot.
When my coworker was leaving, I learned that he was earning 2x my salary. I went to my manager and asked for a raise. He told me he'd promote me if I do some project. I went above and beyond, but my manager simply set me up for failure. I don't think it was intentional, but rather that he's incompetent, because it's a pattern that I tell him to do X, he says that X doesn't make sense, one year later we go back to X.
Now my strategy is to slack off as much as I can. The company is comically dysfunctional, so the end result is that I have a livable wage for effectively two hours of work a day. The rest of the time I'm at home.
I have a go-getter in my team but they also got disillusioned when they fulfilled the promotion requirements but then the requirements changed. This means we're slowly building a team of lazy fucks, contributing to the overall rot in the company. Which honestly isn't a bad deal from my perspective when you think about it.
I used the extra time to start a consulting business and 3X my salary. When I was finally laid off a few years later, I just laughed and continued with my already successful consulting career.
The company was so dysfunctional, nobody really knew what I was doing. When asked, I would just say I was "really busy"/mention some technical stuff I was working on and I would always answer questions immediately from co-workers and management on Teams, to give everyone the idea that I Was still working hard.
What got me in the end was a new VP was hired and looked at the yearly budget. He started questioning why he really needed me and I was gone.
"When my coworker was leaving, I learned that he was earning 2x my salary."
Why would you assume you are worth 2X to the company or any more? Your co-worker might have had more experience than you.
One time, an excel spreadsheet with salaries was leaked at work and I learned I was paid 50% higher than a co-worker in the same position. Multiple things determined this: I had more experience/education and I was better at negotiating my salary when I was hired.
"He told me he'd promote me if I do some project. I went above and beyond,"
I'm not sure how much you were expecting as a raise, but it would have never been even close to 100%. Companies just don't do this.
> Why would you assume you are worth 2X to the company or any more?
I'm not. But the company isn't worth to me much either. So we're stuck in a situation where I do shit job and they pay me shit money, and that's their business model.
> I'm not sure how much you were expecting as a raise, but it would have never been even close to 100%. Companies just don't do this.
This is why employees who aren't lazy fucks like me jump ship every two years in order to maximize their income, because getting any raise whatsoever requires disproportionate amount of effort, which means that the whole model promotes keeping shit developers instead of good ones.
I'm not claiming I'm a good developer. Maybe I don't deserve to earn 2x. I'm just claiming that the company is dysfunctional because there's a self-correcting mechanism in place that promotes incompetence and laziness, and I'm acting as designed per the mechanism.
Will this actually prevent me from getting promoted? :(
Maybe I should look into some speech therapy but not exactly sure how effective that is past a certain age.
People in charge of promotions often have more than one choice for a given promotion and they will use any criteria they can to weigh for or against you
A speech impediment is more likely to weigh against you than for you, unfortunately
That's the sort of thing that anti discrimination laws and guidelines are supposed to remedy but I suspect they mostly don't actually fix
Personally, if speech therapy is an option I think I would try it? It can't hurt you any
I'm going deaf, and looking into fixes for that. I don't think you should be ashamed of your speech impediment, but I also don't think you should be ashamed for looking into help fixing your impediment either
I'm not talking about people who can't express themselves or can't understand, merely that they haven't mastered it - use clumsy wording, or have a thick accent. These are often some of the most technically capable and talented people I've worked with, but also typically are not perceived as such by others, and im ashamed to say, working together with them would often result on the credit being placed unduly on myself.
Their is also an effect that I have seen many times and experienced myself. Where it’s evident that someone has an idiosyncratic challenge, but you can tell they have put effort into overcoming or mitigating it. And they just work through it, not letting it get in their way.
It demonstrates life competence, and is a real positive.
Whatever you do, whatever you can do, don’t let “it” get in your way.
I also saw a bunch of C-levels being total sociopaths but that's another story :)
I don't know if you have a stutter as well, but I've had stuttering therapy again recently, it's not very age related. Happy to send you resources. Feel free to email me.
Slate Star Codex agrees https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any...
> The biggest gains come from combining disciplines.
Someone else said it's a good trick to be good at two things, because there are N things but there are N-squared pairs of things, so it allows you to specialize in a smaller niche without spending a lot of effort on gaining new skills. Can't remember who.
In Zion National Park, there's a hike called Angel's Landing. You wind up going along a ridge, with a dropoff of 1000 feet on one side, and a dropoff of 500 feet on the other side. And the ridge isn't very wide - sometimes only a couple of feet.
Mistakes in life often come in pairs. "Don't fall off that cliff!" That's good advice. But the problem is, there's more than one cliff. And if you move too far away from the cliff you're worried about, you may fall off the other cliff.
And the biggest danger is that we come in with our own bent, our own bias. Therefore the advice that most resonates with us may not be the advice that we actually need.
https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...
pg and tptacek and patio11 really drove that home to me - they are as well known and well regarded as they are because they tell people about it, well and often.
Even if it’s just on an internal wiki - get the stuff in your head out there.
On the other end of the spectrum, most truly famous people are not just good at what they do, but also good at creating a sort of myth about themselves, or else has had a friend who loved talking them up. Learning to take what you've done or learned and spin a compelling story around it is an amazing life skill that absolutely will get you ahead.
You can absolutely take this too far and become a narcissistic charlatan -- all talk and self esteem -- but this is extremely far away from the personality of many engineers so I don't think that's an immediate concern.
Sometimes there's great good to be had awakening these slumbering cultures, bringing them writing. But it's hard and you need allies that can bring their own enthusiasm for the change, and the old ways die hard.
That's good info to know. If you know, you can advocate for A and B, or shift focus to C.
In most tech companies, it's dog-eat-dog, people are even using the code they produce as a tool for lock-in, negotiation and manipulation... It's like they believe they will never get another similar opportunity in their lives and are trying to hang on to power like a dictator or sometimes a mafia boss. It's not even about money or growth. I've seen this same dog-eat-dog behavior in a crypto company which grew from $0 to $4 billion in a couple of years. It was like everyone was trying to backstab each other and the machinations behind the scenes were incomprehensible.
In big tech, it sounds like people are holding the door for each other like "you go first, no, you go first."
Being far above good isn't enough either. Being highly productive and effective result in work done faster.. and more work given !
Better to use your skill at your service rather seek/hope for promote.
They’re not mind readers, and most of them are pleasantly surprised when you do things that make them look good.
I love this quote from Jason Lengstorf[0]: "A career is a pie-eating contest & the prize for winning is more pie"
It's weird to think about and do, but you have to be strategic about what you are good at.
0: https://jason.energy/more-pie/
Love this quote.
And just a comment on agency: it's not necessarily rewarded or even acknowledged in all environments. Some expect that you're literally a worker-robot and just need someone to carry out menial tasks from up top. You don't want to end up at one of these places, regardless of what your life situation is.
Currently, statistics show that changing jobs rapidly pays much more than staying one place, no matter whether you deserve it or not.
Whether or not you deserve it is not a metric that is often applied in this field.
I agree with that. I've seen people get frustrated with this where they and their employer (as embodied by their manager or colleges) are talking past each other, in a sense.
Employee is very good at X, and wants their job to be about X and be judged on X. But to their manager and colleges, the job they want them to do is only partially about X; they'd also like a lot of Y and some Z in there as well.
Anyway, I generally agree with sentiment of the article, though it's too self-helpy for me.
Also: A lot of stuff happens in life that has no regard for your hard work, skill and diligence. Learning to roll with the punches is one of those soft skills everyone tends to need sooner or later, sometimes too frequently.
In MBA circles they talk about how organizational effectiveness enables competitive advantage. I.e be operationally good in all areas of your business but align your goals behind being great at one that differentiates you.
If this is true, you’ve hit the jackpot. Competence is usually rewarded by spreading the competent people thin enough that they rarely get to collaborate.
So yeah, I’m implying a pretty high bar. I guess an operational definition for me would be, “can adapt to an environment where most of their concrete skills don’t transfer.” A competent person will rise to the challenge, maybe even enjoy it if the reasons for the weird environment aren’t too stupid. The truth is, the rules change on us all the time, and if you don’t get the fundamentals, you’re a technician who needs to retrain from zero wherever that happens.
Excellence is something quite different. I’ve been in the presence of excellence. Excellence makes everybody in the room act smarter and smooths the path to competence. It shows you the way and gives you new ways of understanding the world. It’s truly rare, not 20%, maybe 0.2%.
Obviously, knowing one command is not mastery. It is not even competence for that matter. It is just one piece of information and how you use it determines whether you are considered competent or not.
I work in heavily regulated corporate and I sometimes yearn for a fintech or other startup, but, honestly, after all those years, I am not sure if I even would make it. My mind has not been built for competent. It was built for compliance and CYA.
It's honestly a stretch to say they're software developers as you're probably imagining, but if you walk into a random office, most people with that title won't use version control, won't ever ship, and are generally a bit concussed.
It can be hard to imagine because many times, when we find competent teams, many of the members have never directly experienced a truly average team, as the culture one acquires on those teams makes it hard to ever be accepted on a good team (frequently the weaker developers don't even understand there's anything lacking in their skillset).
I'm more sympathetic now than I was a year ago, but it's also pretty unacceptable when you remember they work at hospitals and the government!
> That’s how you increase your impact.
> High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait.
> ...the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.
It's unclear what problem(s) this advice is meant to address but perhaps TFA means obstacles to promotion, although TFA seems to assume a strong correlation between "impact" or feature/product delivery and promotion/career-advancement.
The fastest way to get promoted is:
1. don't get fired/let go
2. frequently interview for higher positions with other companies and become good at interviewing
There are exceptions but, on average, it is much harder to advance via internal promotion than by getting hired somewhere else with a higher title/compensation.
The reason for this is multi-faceted:
1. It's difficult to measure employee value, so companies rarely have a good handle on it. This incentivizes set rates of advancement ("employees" perceive "fairness") and creates a fear of promoting someone unready or unreliable for a new position.
2. Employees want to "advance" by being promoted to positions with higher responsibility and higher compensation. The ability to allow for this advancement requires a higher level employee to leave or a business case for creating the position out of thin air. Thus, companies don't always have a position available.
3. (etc.)
It's become easier to make "good enough" products that are of subpar quality. Just an example that's relevant for me recently: faucet heads. My local supermarket sells one that is identical—but 3 times the price—of one sold on AliExpress. The faucet head breaks after a few months.
If I start looking for them, I could make a whole post on goods and services like that.
So, while I agree that you must be excellent to stand out among your peers, that is certainly not what companies are recruiting or fostering. I didn't want to talk about LLMs, but one can easily imagine how that will impact product quality.
It's getting easier to be "good enough". Or at least fake it.
Only a certain tiny subset of SV engineers have this hypercompetitive mindset. If you think you're LeBron, good luck to you.