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Comment by Jemaclus | Hacker News Reader

When I was in 6th grade, I went on a field trip, and the teacher handed out awards to all the kids for what they did on the trip. Most of the kids got things like "most athletic" and "best teamwork skills" and "best singing voice" and things like that. Mine was "muddiest person" or something like that because I had slipped and fallen in the mud one day. Even back then, I felt like it was mildly insulting.

In my career, the "awards" I get are kind of similar. I get the "Funniest Slack GIFS" awards where everyone else gets praise for releasing good features and fixing the most bugs and giving the best presentation. I do those things very well too, but somehow the public perception of me is that I'm a klutz or a goofball, even though I try to be serious and professional.

It's kind of frustrating. So to answer your question, no, I don't think that people like me and enjoy my presence. And I don't know how to be better.

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Being able to make an otherwise silent team talk and joke is a very useful skill.

Yes you ship with the best of them, but you are also the glue making the individuals a team. That's something to be proud of.

I can be quite the oddball, colourful to put it mildly - in both "good" and "less then stellar" ways.

But I never really knew how people I work with perceive me, beyond the coworkers I was really close with. I figured they mostly saw me as some sort of weirdo that they tolerate at best.

Then one day, I left a job and went back to the same company a few weeks later. On day 1 of my come back, within the first 5 minutes of doing a mock welcome - I already knew everyone in this new team, another lad came behind me and lifted me up, in a celebratory fashion.

It was really unexpected but it's one of my fondest memory. This took place in small satellite office with an overall great vibe, so YMMV.

But all in all, I don't think there's anything wrong with being recognized for the morale boost you might provide to your surroundings.

The fact that people are openly praising you for acts that perhaps seem futile or downright insulting to you is a good sign. It means that you're approachable and able to handle a joke or two with no hard feelings. It can be an advantage if you learn how to leverage it.

can you expand on how, somewhat, for those of us who may not understand how to move to the next steps / leverage?

Thank you for sharing this nice snippet from your life. I can quote my experience from 3rd grade here. After being an average student for first 2 years, I came first in my third grade with 73%. I was proud and shared the report card to my father. Unfortunately, at the same time, a girl from neighbor also showed her report card to dad and he saw her 96%. He looked at me with a sigh in his eyes and said its good but it is not anyway near to 96%.

I was literally pissed, that I worked my ass off, and my father doesn't care that I am first as well in my class. He cared about the difference in percentage. So, I decided not to give a damn about my father's approval and till now I still give a damn about it, as he always comes out with some really high bar.

I recently have learned the Mantra to compare oneself today with oneself yesterday, or the week before, or a month before, or a year before. You can always find a balance of good and bad with the passage of time.

I often find myself at the other side of this situation, when people compliment my work (which is rather ordinary) because i do not do anything else of note.

Think about this is way -- if others don't have no other marketable skill other than coding, it makes sense that your off-beat skills are recognized and the coding skill award goes to your co-worker -- otherwise you might end up hogging all the awards :-). I think someone awarded "funniest slack gifs" would be a beloved person of the group.

This resonates with me.

Think of it as an opportunity to see how effectively you're promoting your work. Are you just letting your work speak for itself? Environment depending, you could benefit from a strategy for [shameless] self promotion.

Well.. I have yet to post a GIF to my work Slack. I don't even allow emoji.

I try to use emoji as little as possible myself, but one thing that I find genuinely useful are emoji reactions, because they don't generate notifications. When someone writes "I'm gonna $do_thing if that's okay with you", I can send a :thumbsup: reaction and they won't be disturbed by the notification, yet they can immediately see if I answered. Or when someone has a baby and posts the obligatory image to the team channel, people can pile up those reactions without my phone going pling-pling-pling-pling.

(To be fair, the same can be said about threads, but in my experience, people are way more consistent about using emoji reactions than they are about properly threading their conversations.)

I legitimately cannot fathom how ChatOps is even possible without mermaid, poop and cake emojis.

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