How to impress Joel Spolsky

Also, there's a difference between thinking you're smartest and knowing it. Mostly in attitude.

If the person has a strong feeling of self worth that is independent of intelligence, they won't care very much, and so can be more objective about whether they're the smartest person in a room, regardless of if they are or aren't.

Put another way, there will undoubtedly be situations for a very high percentage of human beings where they happen to be the smartest person in the room. Being able to recognize this doesn't necessarily indicate arrogance or an inflated perception of one's intelligence.

Of course this issue is also obscured by the entirely vague and amorphous nature of the very concept of intelligence. There likely exist countless 'mentally retarded' people who have much higher emotional intelligence than a typical MIT genius, and are thereby probably better equipped for a happy, successful, and socially beneficial life.

It's funny how thought provoking your question is, though. Because a lot of developers, as you point out, care about far different things for their own reasons. One developer I knew, cared more about everything being 100% as "efficient" as possible before releasing it. She didn't care if things ever got released, really, that didn't matter as much as whether it fit her personal ideas of what's aesthetically ideal. To show you how extreme that was, she spent a week writing a caching layer (in python) using a hashtable + list for a least-recently-used algorithm. When I mentioned she could do this in 2 lines of code talking to memcached, she refused, pointing out how silly it is to talk to an external process with a context switch to look up some data.

Who's right and who's wrong? Hard to say. I guess it depends on the context, and what the company is trying to do. I think the answers are different if you're trying to show good, sustainable results for customers without muddying up the code base, versus if you're writing software for lunar rovers.

Not to take anything away from the value of his writing. It's good to stay engaged and delighted with the fundamentals. If you get bored with the simple things, you'll neglect them and spend all your thinking about novel, peripheral, trivial things that you aren't bored with yet. Making the important things you've known for ten years sparkle and rock again is a valuable contribution.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing inherently bad about that, but I just lost interest and moved to greener pastures.

I guess this depends on what someone wants to be recognized for. An interesting question worth asking is why the recognition they are seeking compels them to include their boss as part of their community.

At one of my past employers, my boss and I worked with one another more as peers. The organizational structure was there for the sake of everyone else who needed the place to feel more like a company, and he played that part when he needed to. Otherwise, he and I would interact as though he was just another software developer. Peer recognition is big, and if you happen to have a de jure boss who would rather be a de facto peer, this can be a good cause for recognition from a boss to matter.

You present a concrete alternative in your parenthetical note.

Plus, there are emminently practical reasons why one would like to have a boss think you were very good at what you do. It is an intermediate step to getting other things you want.

It can be an intermediate step, depending on two things: you know what is required for your boss to think you are very good at what you do; and, you know that your boss thinking you are a rockstar is going to lead you to what you ultimately want.

One of the things I've come to discover is that these can actually be opposing forces. It depends on the boss, and on the wants.

The more obvious negative implication is that if your want is to be recognized for your technical talents, and the only way to impress your boss is to compromise those talents, then it is an intermediate step to nowhere.

The less obvious negative implication -- because people do this all the time anyway -- is to believe that impressing your boss will ultimately get you what you want (usually, more money). It really depends on what impresses the boss, and if what it takes to make him think you are productive is actually what makes you productive. If not, you are paying for image capital by charging against economic capital. Since customers typically only trade in terms of economic capital, enough of this will result in things turning very bad very rapidly.

Granted, there are other aspects here as well; whether or not the company keeps profiting in spite of it own internal obtuseness, for instance. My point is, unless the boss is clairvoyant and nonpartisan, this levies a cost against all parties involved. Sometimes, that cost is enough to prevent anyone from getting what they ultimately want, because the company busts.

I realize that this may not be the perspective you took when you wrote this, but similar things I've heard from others who took this stance and meant precisely what I am arguing against: if my boss loves me, then I'll win big. That model doesn't seem like the sure bet corporate folklore makes it out to be.

Perhaps, like many other things about work culture, Japan is different. When I look around and see in our corporate culture, I can't help but think the same thing Deming saw in our manufacturing culture: "American management thinks they can just copy from Japan -- but they don't know what to copy!" Maybe we aren't copying and this is just emergent behavior, but we seem sort of schizophrenically halfway between salaryman and cowboy. Either way, I'm perplexed.