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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

This attitude is terrible and corrosive to your own sense of self-worth.

Yeah, life isn't fair, let alone performance reviews. No matter who you are, someone else has it easier, like the trust fund kid you see driving past in the Tesla, but do you think he's happy?

We all have to eat, so by all means take the next job that will pay you more. But when you're at that job, whatever you are working on, take pride in it! Always do the best you can, even if you hate your boss. This is not for the benefit of the company, it's for your own mental health and integrity. Over time this builds your skills and competence, which opens more doors. Petulantly slacking off because you weren't sufficiently recognized hurts no one but yourself; the universe does not care.

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>This attitude is terrible and corrosive to your own sense of self-worth.

I would argue that tying your self-worth too closely to your career can be even more corrosive. Sometimes doing the bare minimum and saving your mental, emotional, and physical energy for your life outside your work is even more rewarding.

I say this as someone who has spent time at both ends of the spectrum. I have had stretches in which my career is my only focus and times in which I honestly put in maybe half a day's worth of real effort in an average week. Which is better all depends on the specifics of your life, your job, and your personal motivations at the moment. And it is probably worth noting that my career didn't progressive any faster during those workaholic periods compared to my slacker periods. However those slacker periods were clearly better for my life outside of work.

I have experienced a different version of this.

I worked a lot on my studies, mostly in studying faster and a fair bit in obtaining high grades and studying wide/broad and studying deep (I studied for 8 years). Some things I have done were claimed to be impossible feats. I have taught others how to do it, how to think about learning, even one article was written about me.

But the resulting job search was so brutal that I flipped to the other end. For 18 months, I couldn’t find a job and I applied to a very broad bunch of positions and companies taking 4 hours on average to write a motivation letter and tailor my cv. The result? No response. No company cared what skills I have gained during my studies. They see courses like hardware security as non-practical and a course on multithreading as mostly theoretical. They couldn’t care less that a part of what I learned there are transferable skills.

When I learned that hard work isn’t proportional to career advancement, that’s where I decided to do whatever I feel like. I have too little control over it anyway.

This is a European perspective. I doubt that things would’ve gone this badly if I was American. My way of thinking seems to fit better there (though I could be wrong).

> The result? No response. No company cared what skills I have gained during my studies. They see courses like hardware security as non-practical and a course on multithreading as mostly theoretical.

I wouldn't take that personally, or even as a strong indication of a problem with your hard skills.

Sometimes recruiters mainly look for real-world experience because that makes a hiring a candidate easier to justify. People without work experience or a portfolio are a crapshoot. Also, resume embellishment is indeed a common problem, thus great but unverifiable CVs might raise a red flag. Furthermore, if a company is looking for someone to tighten nuts but they get a CV from a highly trained engineer, they might prefer to pass on him. After all, if he's being underemployed then he might not be planning on sticking around for long.

And finally, but not less importantly, soft skills matter. Sometimes they matter far more than hard skills. A recruiter can tolerate a competent candidate that is eager to learn, but they will be less inclined to tolerate an outstanding developer who is unbearable, insufferable, or unwilling to learn from (and work with) team members.

In the end it's all a crapshoot anyway. There is a lot of confirmation bias, and a lot of lottery winners offering advise on how to win lotteries, but we would do well to acknowledge that the stars need to be aligned for good things to happen, and often they aren't.

I have a similar experience, also European. While I'm not nearly as unlucky as you are regarding job interviews and getting a job, I can attest that the majority of corps I met do not respect transferrable theoretical skills (e.g. the ability to work in any language of the same paradigm, distilling overly corporate buzzword lingo back to basic programming concepts). Instead, they would rather have someone who learned enough trivia to pass a basic test filled with code samples you'd never* see in real life, or which a compiler would quickly correct for you and teach you not to do within a week.

Additionally, they will have you stuck doing mostly low-tier work spawning from bad decisions in the past instead of biting the bullet and having someone fix the foundation, and often perceive fixing that foundation as a skill only seniors / architects possess. I've met my fair share of seniors who believe design patterns are some of the highest order knowledge, despite having to learn them during my bachelor over a longer span of time than they get taught in-house, let alone having to actually use them.

NB: this is not a jab towards seniority. But I do believe most corporates do not value educated juniors correctly, often equating them to uneducated juniors, as well as underestimating what makes a senior a senior. Basic CS fundamentals shouldn't be a skill exclusive to seniors.

Not saying this is you or GP, but I've dealt with enough juniors who just thought they're really smart and awesome but lacked any sense of what it's like to develop software for actual, normal people. They couldn't grasp that you don't just break your software for 20% of your userbase because it results in a cleaner database layout or nicer abstraction layer for something internal. "No I know what I'm doing, look I have this github project with 500 stars and none of the super techy people who use it ever complained when a new release broke something"

Yeah, no.

Usually these people come in two flavors: Those actually smart and developing an understanding for what it means to sell software and have customers with demands, and those who live in their little bubble where they're the most awesome person on the planet, and everybody else is just retarded. Halting all development for a year and refactoring everything according to what they think would be way superior after spending 5 minutes with the codebase is obviously a sane thing to demand.

And I usually try to let them fall into this trap in a controlled manner, like when it's a relatively unimportant component/feature, or just one customer where I can more or less directly relay the expected complaints to the junior dev. Usually playing the "this guy is responsible for your paycheck" card makes something click after a while.

>Halting all development for a year and refactoring everything according to what they think would be way superior after spending 5 minutes with the codebase is obviously a sane thing to demand.

Sure, but this only paints one extreme. It's fair to expect adults to realize money has to come from somewhere, and halting any development and even bugfixes won't keep customers. On the other extreme, we have sales and management pushing insane demands, which get tacked onto already poor code, degrading further, causing bugs in the future, increasing the risk factor, on top of already taking more than 5x as long as it reasonably should with no difference in features whatsoever. Which further escalates into high turnover rates, worse code quality, dissatisfied employees, no seniority willing to come in unless they get paid big time, and more. It's a fine line no matter how you slice it. Both extremes can run a company into giant losses or even bankruptcy.

Additionally, demands on juniors to prove a business case are often far higher than their seniors or managers, despite giving juniors less resources to do so. With such a simple mechanism in place, it is fair to assume the juniors who do go through the trouble of speaking up care about the quality of the product and their responsibility in the matter. Likewise, I've seen plenty of seniors fall into the same trap you described, either halting all progress or spending (read: wasting) months developing a strategy out of analysis paralysis only to not even have a business case. If anything, they tend to be able to do this even easier, since they are met with much less resistance thanks to their reputation and/or authority.

My companies fired 2 PhD’s. They were super smart, understood all the leading research results etc. but had no clue how to turn theory into practice. Theory is not practice.

> This is a European perspective. I doubt that things would’ve gone this badly if I was American. My way of thinking seems to fit better there (though I could be wrong).

You are wrong, unfortunately. There's a reason for the saying: "The A students work for the B students, the C students run the business, and the D students get the buildings named after them."

A less cynical take is that in school, marketing skills (e.g. self-promotion and self-inflating) are irrelevant. In industry, they are at least on par with technical skills, and in most roles I've encountered, even more important. Look at the people you know who were fired (directly or made miserable enough to leave voluntarily): People are more likely to get fired for not understanding and exploiting social dynamics than for being poor in the technical arena.

Also, in school, they care about objective evaluation, and usually your performance is not dependent on others. At work, your work is heavily dependent on others, and almost no one tries to objectively evaluate your work (unless you're in sales or something).

But if you've done research or tried to get a recommendation letter, you know self-promotion and self-inflating also matters in academia. Especially if you go to a large public school.

> objectively evaluate your work

I suppose if you're talking about code quality et. al, yes, but you definitely do get evaluated on its impact on the business. If you are part of a successful product launch and you engineered major features (even if other people could've written those features) you get rewarded.

I wasn't referring to academic jobs, but being a student. I don't need recommendation letters to get an A or to learn.

> I suppose if you're talking about code quality et. al, yes, but you definitely do get evaluated on its impact on the business. If you are part of a successful product launch and you engineered major features (even if other people could've written those features) you get rewarded.

A few remarks:

If you do something fairly major, then probably yes.

If you do something fairly major, there will often be people around you who will attempt (and often succeed) to take a fair amount of that credit without having contributed much. So yes, you get rewarded, but so will others who shouldn't. This is very common where I've worked. I think it's generally the case in large companies.

We should not focus on major product launches where you did major work. Say there is an existing product and most of the work is bug fixing and adding features. This category is where most of the work in industry is, and is where my comment mostly applies. This is also the category where innovation is highly touted but rarely rewarded. I've certainly been in jobs where innovation is needed, but the one who steps up to solve those problems is often the one who gets poor reviews, because everyone in the team becomes more productive because of him, and the manager sees less output from him because he spent a big chunk of his time solving infrastructure issues.

When I speak of objectively measuring performance, people often compare how it's done between jobs. This is not the point. Compare with how it's done when you were a student. In most technical courses, it's highly unlikely that someone who barely understands the material gets an A grade while simultaneously the one who understood the material well gets a B or a C. In industry, this scenario is quite common.

Would you mind sharing your blog(if you have one) I'm a student and have only recently begun to appreciate the art of meta-learning and i would be grateful to learn a thing or two from people wiser than me? thanks!

Those skills seem like a perfect fit for the video game industry, did you try there?

I am scared of that industry unfortunately. Also, The Netherlands is not a good place for it I think.

I diagree, I think this person has the right idea. Corporations aren't people. They have no feelings, no loyalties, no empathy. Sure the people who work there do, but you all work for the Corporation.

Exploit the corporation. Give them exactly what they pay you for an not an ounce more. Stay within the bounds of the law and your personal ethics, but extract from the Corporation just as the Corporation extracts from everything else.

Don't tie your identity or self-worth to your contractual obligations to the Corporation. Use the money you extract from the Corporation to enjoy life and the things that do define you and give you your sense of self-worth.

The universe does not care if you're good at your job or not. You've only got so many years until you're dead and gone, spend as little of it as possible working and as much of it doing the things as you enjoy. If working is what you enjoy, good for you, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.

I completely agree with this line of thinking as I enter my 30s. But having lived in Europe for a while and seen the dark side of this "work to live vs live to work" mentality, we have to accept that building cutting edge stuff is the result of many hours of pain and suffering and most of all sacrifice. Somebody has got to do the pain and suffering part so that everyone else can do more of the "just work up to the requirements and not an ounce more" part.

If companies were structured as employee owned worker cooperatives, then that sacrifice would be meaningfully rewarded. As it is now, a lot of people sacrifice so a handful can walk away with the rewards created by everyone else's sacrifices.

Driven and intelligent people will always be pushing the boundary because they feel a calling to it. The only tragedy is they're often not justly rewarded for it.

I'm in the "not an ounce more" camp, but I also don't expect a cent more than I'm owed in return. Those who do push themselves further for the benefit of humanity deserve more than I do.

Why do you want to build “cutting edge stuff”? Honest question. Is it to prove yourself to the world? Out of interest? I am asking because 99.9% of real problems that customers are happy to pay large $ for is not cutting edge. Cutting edge is called cutting edge because it has sharp bits and you will bleed.

You're misinterpreting me here, I never said work overtime or devote your life to the company. My point was that your work and skills are an investment in yourself (especially if you work in software), and you're sabotaging yourself if you take the cynical view that what you do doesn't matter because interviewing pays off more than a capricious promo process. The fact is that doing good work has long-term feedback loops that build your opportunities from both a skills and relationships perspective. Job hopping early in your career will definitely ramp up your salary faster, but over the long-term it pales in comparison to having a good reputation.

Ok you make a fair point, but that is not what I took away from your original comment. I was not intentionally misrepresenting you.

This x 1000 !

There are not enough upvotes in the world for the parent post, but please add yours.

And yet, is he wrong? It's a plain fact that after busting your ass for a year, your promotion will in most cases be shot down during performance review for all the usual scope ("not enough scope", "I want to see more leadership", "almost there but let's consider it in a year", etc)... and yet a single day of strong interviews can get you that bump just like that.

Yes he's wrong: to be promoted you must be doing the next job already and the management must be terrified you leave.

You can love your job and hop out sometimes. But petulantly slacking off like OP says, is not going to make you happy.

So getting hired for 20% more salary is much easier than performing at the next level and getting a promotion?

Op is not saying he’s slacking off. He’s saying it doesn’t matter what he does.

Yes he's wrong: to be promoted you must be doing the next job already and the management must be terrified you leave.

Sure about this? This isn't even possible everywhere - doing the next job, for example, isn't generally possible for lower wage jobs. How the heck are you going to train for a shift manager position by learning the job when you literally don't have the authority access to do it?

You don't.

Terrified that you leave? Try that in a call center. You, no matter how good you are, will be easily replaced with another warm body or two and folks quit these jobs all the time.

Are you sure petulantly slacking off won't make one happy? I mean, what if you get joy out of seeing how far you can push that button - or alternatively, don't get satisfaction from a 'job well done' like you are told that you should? Or maybe you only do well for some recognition that you aren't getting... or maybe jobs don't give you satisfaction at all. They merely give you the means to do stuff that does make you happy.

The context here is software development. Depending on what field you are in, I would tend to agree with you that it might either not be possible or a bit harder.

That said, even in software, you don't always 'have the authority' to do that other job. But does that matter?

Example: you're the junior, new to the team. When the team does backlog maintenance, everyone just slaps some estimate onto the barely defined ticket and calls it a day. Sprints slip all the time because tickets "explode" once you actually start working on them. The team lead does nothing about it, the PO couldn't care less, he just screams at everyone when none of the tickets are done at the end of the sprint.

The junior could just resign himself and play along. Or he can start asking "dumb questions" during backlog maintenance. I.e. start a proper discussion. Suggest tickets to be split etc. The bad team lead and PO might ignore this and even actively try to get back to just slapping on estimates, not actually do the splitting or say "yeah I'll do the splitting by the time we do sprint planning" and then obviously nothing ever happens.

Do it yourself! Offer helping out, to give them a chance to be part of it. They might refuse or try to "pull rank". Ignore them. Split the tickets. If you can't do it before a sprint starts (e.g. cause they'll notice and try to pull rank), split them after you've started on one of those bad tickets. Split it into 3 nicely sized ones and at the end of the sprint you can show that hey, ticket 1 is finished, ticket 2 is almost done and ticket 3 isn't even started yet. We can release the functionality of ticket 1 to customers even!

You've just done all of the following:

    Shown that you're not the junior you've been hired as but much more!
    Ignored the team lead's authority when it became clear that even when shown the proper way, he's not going to act
    Ignored the PO's authority when it became clear that even when shown the proper way, he's not going to act

Let's take this to the call center:

Folks quit these all the time, like you said. Even the shift leaders or managers. I don't know enough about call center operations to know what the equivalent tasks of the little story above are but I do know from experience w/ some of our guys that it's totally possible there as well. We had a really great QA that came in through the call center. Started as a regular rep, became a shift lead, moved into QA and then became a BA. He was awesome at that. Knew everything by heart or was able to quickly try it out in-product. Heck the department lead came in through the call center as well. Similar trajectory but didn't move over to the software side and stayed on the business side.

It's not about petulance, it's about motivation. I'm in a similar position to the author but acting more like you would want; I care about being good at my job and want to deliver because that is how I was raised, but there is a constant tension in me that this is the "wrong" approach since no company actually rewards loyalty or expertise, at least not nearly as much as self-promotion and being a corporate mouthpiece.

Regarding promotion and being indispensable, that cuts both ways - in some roles being impossible to replace also means you are impossible to promote, since the next step up the rigidly defined corporate ladder may not have sufficient overlap with your current role.

Solution is give pay bumps without promotions.

> This attitude is terrible and corrosive to your own sense of self-worth.

For some context: That subreddit is historically very cynical. It's more of a support group and a place to vent than an actual advice forum. A lot of people arrive on /r/cscareerquestions thinking that the only way to succeed is to spend all of your spare time doing side projects and grinding leetcode while pursuing FAANG jobs.

I would sometimes try to answer questions there in between long builds but it became very demoralizing. Many of the regulars there are struggling with their careers or disgruntled with their jobs and they extrapolate to the entire tech industry.

There were occasionally people putting in good comments in the sub, but it tends to get drowned out by cynical complaints. You know how internet relationship advice forums devolve into everyone telling the OP to break up or get divorced? That sub felt like the CS equivalent of a relationship forum: The advice is always to blame your employer or the industry and quit your job, ignoring any nuance in the situation.

Cscareerquestions also has the same problem all most all of reddit has, you cant express any ideas outside of what the hivemind says.

For my own mental health why would I take pride in a job I hate? A job where I can't agree with my boss? Why would I care about more money when I have enough?

This sounds like accepting and denying more than anything. I would wish anyone a job they are actually valued in, a job they like.

I think he means take pride in the quality of your work, not in whom you work for, as you seem to be inferring. I.e., don't the job harm the good in you.

I dunno, my attitude is that capitalism is all a grift anyway so I do the best I can when I’m at work, then immediately forget all about it come 5 o’clock. The grift is that “fake it till you make it” legitimately works. Lie a bit in your interviews to make it look like you have experience, then you have at least 6 months to figure it out once on the job. Rinse and repeat every few years; if you don’t stay anywhere long enough then nobody will catch on. Just make some friends along the way you can call when things get out of your league and you’ll be fine. In my experience, good relationships will cover for poor execution every time, and the reverse is not true.

Why would I consider it 'good' to take pride in my work? So I can make another dollar for the shareholders of the company? So I can bring forward the destruction of the natural world by another millisecond? Even if you hunger for physical possessions, which I don't personally, why would that incentivise you when your level performance makes no difference?

Are you so much a slave that you have to search for meaning in the nobility of work? Work does not offer us purpose because there is no purpose in the operation of institutions in the modern world. Where the driving philosophical principle of an enterprise is "make as much money as possible", who among us can wring out a meaning that satisfies us spiritually?

Where even our charities are corrupted by the guiding principle of more money more good - from where is the conscious worker to draw their meaning?

We exist in an age of spiritual and moral vacuum and there is no guiding principle at this time that a non idiot can align themselves with while retaining some semblance of internal consistency.

How is Elon Musk working magic? A big part of it, apart from not being just another idiot with an MBA, is that he is giving people an actual purpose they can get behind. A purpose that is not just something slung over a money making machine in a vague attempt to align the workers. No, a real bottom up purpose that drives the enterprise. With that kind of purpose a team can move a mountain.

You have to ask yourself... If you are not trying to save the world from cooking itself, or trying to end poverty or trying to cure cancer, or trying to ensure the existence of humanity into the far future, what the bleep are you working for? Answer: You're working for the thoughtless vacuous industrial machine that is devouring both our souls and our physical world.

You should be depressed because this sh* is depressing. You should be angry because this sh* should make you angry. These emotions are deep intuitive reactions, they are drivers for change, hear them and move to change the way you work.

> You have to ask yourself... If you are not trying to save the world from cooking itself, or trying to end poverty or trying to cure cancer, or trying to ensure the existence of humanity into the far future, what the bleep are you working for?

Some people consider life to be a party, hence they are working to "get more beers" and to "wire up the amps" that the band will use to play.

In other words they spend time in working mode today in order to spend future time in leisure mode. And in their mind the future leisure mode is somewhat "better" or "more abundant" than the leisure they could have if they retired today.

Not saying they are right or wrong, but most people don't have the need to become the undisputed savior of the world.

I think getting emotional and screaming at them because they are focused on things that the intelligencia perceives as mundane is not the right way to encourage a healthy exchange of opinions between the aforementioned intelligencia and the general population

Thank you for expressing what I struggle with every day.

The additional counterbalancing layer on top of this is an internal drive for justice - this is what pushes me to work for a big tech company rather than doing something which gives me more self-respect. If other people can earn 6+ figures to fuck about with computers all day and deliver nothing of true societal value, why should I be the sucker doing scientific research for a fraction of that?

> like the trust fund kid you see driving past in the Tesla, but do you think he's happy?

With that horrible plastic interior? I doubt it.

The guy in a mclaren or a rolls royce? Probably.

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