Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

My experience with corporate development has people in 3 buckets:

* beginner or crappy

* moderate or senior-delusional

* seniors/experts

Most of the time the actual seniors are not the people trying to prove themselves or validate their existence. They honestly know how they perform. If the current job doesn't work out they know they can get another easily enough. If anything this camp may even try to hide some of their skills to avoid getting pegged into those crappy tasks you cannot seem to hire anybody else for.

The middle group is composed of people who are honest about their station in life. These honest people are happy where they are and aren't dicking around with office politics, but they do play the game just enough to avoid rocking the boat.

Then there are the dishonest people in the middle group. Sometimes this dishonesty is intentional because they are an imposter... to the point of fraud. Usually, the dishonesty is unintentional. These people are often disillusioned into thinking they are some sort of senior level rock star but curiously wonder why their management completely disagrees. These people are easy to spot because they talk a big game and their work is hilariously out of sync with the hot air.

Warning. Dishonest people are dangerous to your career and will run you over because they are too busy looking out for themselves. If you challenge their dishonesty they may put up a fight that pits you are as the evil aggressor. If you don't challenge the stupidity you can easily get stuck cleaning up their code failure. Pick your battles wisely.

Likewise there are honest beginners who understand their station in life and are eagerly learning to improve their skills. These are the people you dream of mentoring. Then there are also really crappy developers who can't figure out why nobody wants to mentor them or why they always get the worst assignments.

In a hierarchical organization I can usually hide from this stupidity well enough. I can only imagine the horrid levels of back-stabbing that occurs in a flat organization.

Ever read the Gervais Principle?

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

This is a really insightful and intelligent comment, I have nothing great to add to your comment but wanted to pass along my praise.

You just described the Dunning-Kruger effect [1] in practice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Is there a similarly named condition for people of high ability who don't appropriately view their skills as superior resulting in distress when their peers fail to achieve equivalent performance?

I want to say something like Aspergers* but without the emotional or decision impairment that otherwise comes with Autism. I am thinking a similarly lacking self-awareness with regard to the immediate social environment, but a deflated sense of self-worth opposed to inflated.

The result of such inverted bias is judging one's self in reflection to the performance of that person's peers only to be frustrated that certain performance or results are seemingly incomplete or of noticeably weaker quality. Since the biased person is judging themselves in reflection to the performance of their peers they will incorrectly view this incompetence as a reflection of their own performance or potential while the people who actually performed the supposedly incompetent work don't see the ascribed faults resulting in the biased individual over-compensating for faults that are generally not valued. This reminds me of OCD and perfectionism.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome

I'm honestly no expert on the field but here's my take on it.

What you described is also covered by the Dunning-Kruger effect. From the Wikipedia page:

"the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Seeing the effect in visual presentation (as a graph) might also aid you in understanding the above.

I got an autism diagnosis in 2017 (and my partner a week ago at age 35 and 36 respectively). According to DSM-5 (in effect since 2013 IIRC), asperger syndrome and all other previous specific autism disorders are superseded as it falls under the larger umbrella of ASD (autism spectrum disorder).

You described: "but without the emotional or decision impairment that otherwise comes with Autism." Someone who has all the traits of what was previously known as asperger syndrome sans what you described can still get an ASD diagnosis.

I probably shouldn't have described autism as I did with so few words. I did not mean to sound insensitive in my limited understanding of the subject. As I understand it autism is a wide umbrella of various possible disorders.

FWIW, you didn't sound insensitive to me.

Honest and naive question: what does office politics actually means? I'm 25, I've been working for my company for two years, after working as an IT in the military for five. Can you elaborate?

To transpose the manner of organization here, one could achieve the same descriptive qualities with two tracks, and a gradation of experience levels:

  quality people: early, midterm, late
  full shitbirds: early, midterm, late

This is to say that terrible people (untalented, dishonest, delusional) and solid colleagues (eager learners, ordinary operators, seasoned experts) exist at all experience levels.

In organizations of chaotic leaderlessness, to keep one's wits sharp, usually the bellwether of choice is nerd signaling.

This is where knowledge of relevant trivia is used as a guideline for experience level, trading in quips, name dropping and advertisements of awareness in exchange for actual measures of skill. Actual measures of skill can prove extremely expensive, and sometimes require live fire incidents before a skill will show itself.

This is where the dishonesty starts to brew. It's easy to hear experienced people trade quips and advertise their qualities, and then become a poser somewhere else, and imitate the signals in a totally different group, while lacking actual skill.

Sometimes, in a leaderless organization, that's enough, because democratically nerd posers still add to a voting block, and doofy imitators know they are imposters and, are usually incapable of doing anything but vote a straight ticket, so adding a nerd poser to your team still ensures strength in numbers, and potentially amps up the current of buzz and gossip information channels.

But to stay alive, you need more than party members, because ultimately it still boils down to whataboutism, in the form of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? Party members are that fickle, and core experts are still required. So now the back-stabbing, and boys clubs form.

But who really matters? The truth is in a leaderless system, there are still leaders, but the convention is to avoid signaling. It's all expressed by waiting games. You have to sit around and wait for things to become evident. So lurkers are rewarded, over time, based on familiarity with a deeper awareness of organizational hierarchy. It's just a different system of control and signaling, that integrates literal time via in-group awareness of social histories, instead of titles awarded to people who just walked in off the street.

This sucks if you were cool somewhere else, because you'll be starting over with at least half of your significance and relevance rolled back to beginner status. It's a mechanism for only rewarding years of mediocre service (loyal nerd signaling party members), or clear-cut high performance (core experts that can prove their worth), or some mixture of the two. But the core tenets remain: proof of loyalty, or actual rock stardom.

The side effect here is flame-outs. People who have social currency or expect redemption of experience levels and recognition for past external work at a third party, or expect to level up on nerd signalling alone, find frustration at the pace of advancement, and if they can't find an opening to perform, wind up lumped in with the imposters.

Some of these are valid grievances, but if you want to make an omelette, something, something...

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