Hacker News Reader

Comment by leelin | Hacker News Reader

How about the talented people who are exceptional at their jobs, content with their cushy lives, and stick around even though they aren't learning as much anymore? They enjoy being a trusted go-to person on many matters and stimulate themselves outside of the workplace (or with the challenges of being a middle manager).

That doesn't describe my personality, but it certainly fits the personality of some of my favorite ex-coworkers. Aren't these folks exactly the type a company wants to hire?

View on HN

At that point, those people should be driving the direction of the company. The self-actualization motivation becomes implicitly linked to the success of the company. I think that's the only time it really breaks out of what this article is talking about. But that is effectively "becoming partner" when you look at it.

really? especially in technical jobs, often the best people don't have the skills /or the desire/ to obtain a management position, but they can still be extremely valuable. I know at some of the larger server farms I've worked in, there was often one guy who built a disproportionate amount of our infrastructure. The rest of us, in many cases, spent most of our time running scripts written by that guy.

Personally, I think having those sorts around as a script writer/mentor/troubleshooter is probably vastly more valuable than promoting another really excellent technical person to become a mediocre manager.

Agreed. It's easy to become lazy, but it takes motivation or a swift kick in the pants by a mentor to get somebody to begin "leading" their peers and affect the direction of the company.

Exactly my thoughts: neither of the two characteristics ("exceptional-ness" and "loyalty") are binary qualities. Both exist on a continuum, and more importantly, they're orthogonal. But the article assumes everyone is either moving up or moving out.

What ABOUT the really good engineer with a family, who's content to stay even if the work isn't bleeding-edge exciting? Are they ignorable just because they don't fit into this model? Do we stigmatize them because they're neither churning nor making partner?

The good engineer should not be doing bleeding-edge work so much as he should be doing things that are challenging even in small ways every now and then, and rewarded for his efforts. I once worked at a small place that has a really, really brilliant architect on staff (easily the best engineer I have worked with so far). He turned down invitations to interview at some rather prestigious tech companies and was happy to remain in his little kingdom. Most of the time he was fixing bugs, adding smallish new features, etc. - i. e. he was not doing cutting-edge stuff. But he had the freedom to improve the code base as a whole. So every time he had to fix a major bug he would do some refactoring that made the code better, not just for him but for the entire team, as this always involved tweaking the APIs he wrote for the team. It is pretty challenging to improve upon something that is already pretty darn good.

Absolutely. HN has an "entrepreneur bias" (part of its reason for existing, of course) that discourages becoming entrenched; but for some people becoming entrenched in a cushy job is probably their dream, and who are we to judjge them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com