Hacker News Reader

I think you're right that just quietly solving all the problems is not a great strategy for an employee, however I think this bit:

> Communicating this effectively is far more important than actually doing it, so I'd recommend spending 90% of your working time on this communication, and no more than 10% of your working time on actual problem solving.

...seems out of whack. We've probably all worked with someone like this, who did very little actual work and spent all their time on self-promotion and political maneuvering. They make awful teammates and bring everybody else down.

It's definitely worth advertising when you do solve problems, of course. If you hit a tricky one just send an email (either to team or just to boss as appropriate) with a quick description of the problem and how you solved it. No point doing good work if nobody's going to notice.

They do it because it works. Yes, they're bad teammates but they will move up, and they don't care about you or how it feels to be their teammate.

That kind of thing only works for a short while before word gets around. Maybe you can keep ducking the fallout indefinitely in a big enough city but where I live, it's a small world and you'll burn your reputation in short order.

Only if you do it badly. It's very likely that the people at the top of this "small world" in your town have done exactly this to get there.

If you spend 90% of your working time self-promoting instead of working, I guarantee you your co-workers will notice and they will hate you for it even if your current management are too incompetent to pick up on it. The only exception is if your entire department is a nest of weasels.

I do agree, focusing on communication is an important part of a job and for sure it makes your work visible across company.

The are other pros. Maybe someone else is facing similar issue - communication may lead to collaboration in this case. If you communicate (early!) about some issues, mgmt has time to account for extra risks or delays.

So yeah, communication will get you promoted earlier than focusing on your tasks and keeping everything to yourself. I just cannot agree with the 10% for work and 90% for the communication ratio, that seems like way too much overhead. I think I would rather swap those numbers. Because how are you going to do anything meaningful if you work less than an hour a day?

That depends on what you want to achieve with your time. Want to do something meaningful? Start your own business/startup, volunteer or become a cancer researcher (all debatable of course). Want to survive and get promoted in a corporate world? My recipe will get you there. 1 part work for 9 parts politics. If that makes you feel bad you can water it down to 1/8.

I define "corporate" as any human org greater than 100 members, including non-profits, academia, military, even your damn scout troop.

Also: never communicate early. Communicate after you've solved the issue to look like a go-getter, avoid prolonged discussions and prevent people from taking credit. If you manage to take credit for someone else's hard work (say, if they're not a good communicator), all the better. That will help with maintaining a low work/politics ratio.

There are two opposite approaches here. I do like my job, we have team goals, we work together to achieve those, we have successes and failures along the way. And to me, an engineer, it brings enjoyment, challenges and confiscation. And I also suck at politics and try to avoid it as much as possible. So I love what I'm doing and I am getting paid for it. But that is not the case for all the people.

The approach you describe sounds like a piece of advise for someone who hates his job. So one would do as little as possible just not to get himself fired. Sounds like an awful position to be in.

Most people, even in tech, consider their job to be just that - a job. In the worst case, they hate it.

Also, you seem to be content with being an individual contributor engineer, which is perfectly fine, but if you want to get ahead, you're not going about it the right way.

I've been an engineer for 20 years now. I switched to other roles 2 times but did not enjoy it that much so I went back. Salaries in engineering are decent and I prefer a job that I like over a promotion and having some extra money.

It's great that you know this about yourself and have been lucky enough to be able to make these kind of tradeoffs. You are in a much better place than a lot of others.

Love this thread from your end. I think you're speaking some really hard truths that folk don't want to hear. Because of the way big organizations work, it's true to politics is a huge part of what the vocation entails. I'd love to read a blog post about this at some point.

I've been doing this for a long time, rarely with good consequences for myself. So thanks for the positive comment.

I'm actually writing a book about this.

I'd be interested in reading it. How would I get updates on your work?

You wouldn't, to be honest, since I don't have a website, twitter or FB at the moment, and it's on the backburner. Besides, it's probably way too cynical and toxic to actually publish. Just look at the responses here.

Also, I'm planning for that book to have a slightly narrower focus, so I may have not done the project any justice.

I do have a lot of tech machiavellianism to write about though, from the small, but notable tech community in my country (Israel).

I don't know if this was intended to dissuade me or other readers, but you've only piqued my interest even further! If it is cynical and "toxic", is that only because it reflects the true nature of the thing it discusses?

Hard to separate "true nature" from the way I view things, so I can't really tell. Another person might view things differently and write a completely different story.

Do you think people would read this though? Maybe in blog form?

You document this in your PDP (personal development plan) and 121's