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Comment by allenu | Hacker News Reader

> You win if by win you mean fool everyone to pay you for nothing, if you're someone who gets satisfaction mostly from feeling smarter than others and "winning", that sounds adequate

There have been many times in my career where I went the extra mile, but didn't communicate it well enough and ended up not getting rewarded for it. I also noticed other people over-communicated what they did, even in cases where I didn't think what they did was really that hard. If they get rewarded for that, is it fair? My opinion today is it doesn't matter. If I want that bonus or that promotion, I'm going to "perform" for my boss to make sure I get my share.

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I hope my surgeon doesn't have your attitude.

You need to both do good work and take responsibility to communicate this to your manager.

If you just do good work, but don't communicate it, your manager might not know and won't reward you properly.

If you don't do good work but only "perform", you lack integrity, you're not developing yourself, you're cheating your customers, and you are a drain on your employer and society.

Given enough time. Yes, your surgeon has this attitude. Any system with a grade will be gamified to hit arbitrary targets. Even if those targets do not map back to customer value. Even if the targets are out of their control. Aka red beads.

https://youtu.be/ckBfbvOXDvU

“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don’t complain about illogical behavior.” – Eli Goldratt

Unsurprisingly, even in medicine doctors who do better at patient communication get better reviews. And there's an entire industry of alternative medicine which is bad at proving efficacy but good at selling it to the patient ...

I would argue that patient communication is a vital role in healing. Some doctors might get by beeing bad at it, but there should be someone in the system who explains the situation and possible tradeoffs to the patient instead of them. After all, the patient is the single person who is most motivated for healing to succeed. Quite a few doctors never grasp this concept (to be fair, they are similar to many engineers in this), which is a shame.

The placebo effect is so strong that doing nothing convincingly might be all they need.

Oh I don’t disagree with your comment about integrity. I just don’t think good work is enough in the corporate rat race. I know when I’ve done good work and I’m proud of it, and I do my best to put good effort into whatever I do, but I’m not naive enough to think that somehow that’s enough to get rewarded at work. Working for someone else is a combination of doing good work and managing expectations. Sometimes good work isn’t enough, or even needed.

> you are a drain on your employer and society

A drain on the people that are enabling this type of attitude in the first place? I have a hard time understanding your reasoning here.

Presumably medical work is different from this type of office work.

Perhaps most importantly/obviously in ease of measuring effectiveness, patient outcomes have a lot of other factors of course, but it seems like a better metric than 'number of closed tickets' or 'lines of code' or whatever.

My findings exactly, if an impactful project ships in a forest and no manager is around to see it will you get promoted? Not in my experience

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