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Comment by glouwbug | Hacker News Reader

It baffles me that anyone would want to tie the entirety of their self worth to their corporate career. Personally, no amount of extra effort has ever led to the reward I deemed suitable, so why work harder? The winners are the 0.75x - 1.5x engineers, those otherwise known as the Losers according to the Gervais Principle [1]

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

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I just really like developing stuff. If my company went under, and there was a big software crunch that made it hard to get a job, I’d probably try my hand at being a professional photographer, but I’d probably spend my evenings writing code.

I don’t tie my self worth to my corporate career at all. I tie it to my ability to produce excellent software, but I’m just lucky I ended up born on a world in a time that values such a thing, because it’s what I love to do.

If I was concerned with my career, there’s probably much better things I could be doing with my time than becoming a better software developer. :P

There was either a blog response or just an HN comment in reply to the Gervais Principle that theorized there's another archetype, that of the Engineer who just cares about solving problems.

These internet pop sociological schemas are fun thought exercises but over-reductive.

I think the point (which I would agree with) is that someone that is that good, in a corporate environment, will be exploited in many cases and the parent doesn't understand why they let themselves be exploited and tie their self worth to it too. It's not like all of these people are literally rocket engineers and even the rocket engineers I would argue in many cases are being exploited.

You can be a great rocket engineer without giving up everything else, practically living at the office, not seeing your newborn kid because "parental leave isn't something Elon would believe in" etc. Be a rocket engineer that takes 6 months of paternity! Be a rocket engineer that works sane hours and comes home at the end of a work day. That cooks a great BBQ on the weekend with friends and family, not with other rocket engineers on the lawn at the office because you realized that you all went in to do some work.

I'm with the parent on this and like you I would probably code if I had a different job. I made my hobby my job but that means now I have other hobbies that are not coding. I give everything at work but I take my time very seriously. You're paying me for 40 nominal hours (yes we're not paid hourly, we're 'paid to do a job' but that definition is so wishy washy and ripe for abuse that I very literally apply the nominal hours) so I do my very best inside of 40 hours and will feel bad if I even think about doing something else within those hours. I.e. I won't "do the very minimum not to get fired". On the flip side of me giving my best during those hours and being present, I take this very seriously the other way around as well. Outside of actual emergencies, you better not expect me to answer, be online, do overtime or take abuse of the "this just came in, we need this by Monday" message on a Friday afternoon sort.

EDIT: for the down voters, I get it, I mentioned Elon, which on HN is bad. FWIW I know one of those guys and the newborn thing is real, not generic 'Elon hate'.

Why does it have to be corporate? I would venture 10xers don’t necessarily care about who they work for, only that they’re putting out the best of their craft.

I always struggle sending that link to people, because only a certain kind of analytical brain can ignore the emotional weight of labels like "Sociopath" and "Loser" for 20k words. It is one of the most profound essays I've read about business. All models are wrong, but this one has been particularly useful to my career progression.

Apparently we needed to wait a decade to rename "Losers" as "Quiet Quitters."

Here's a decent spin on it from Daedtech: https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/

Sociopaths -> Opportunists

Clueless -> Idealists

Losers -> Pragmatists

There’s also the language of Michael O. Church, our fallen hero:

Losers: subordinate and strategic, not dedicated.

Clueless: subordinate and dedicated, not strategic.

Sociopaths: dedicated and strategic, not subordinate.

The unicorn of all three doesn’t exist because it’s never strategic to be both dedicated and subordinate: you always get better results if you pick one or the other and stay in that lane.

All of these models assume the following two things:

1. nobody likes their job

2. nobody thinks their work has any value besides what they are paid

In swe plenty of people like their job, everybody's paid like 200k now, and unless you're working on crud internal tools you get to work on something relatively important.

But yeah if you have a shit job then you can browse HN at work and philosophize about sociopaths and losers.

#1 is not assumed. Clueless like their jobs because they believe their roles (usually in middle management) are more important and respected than they actually are.

And, sure, SWE is full of Clueless (you don’t have to be a manager to be clueless) who think they’re going to be millionaire CEOs inside five years because they were promised “meritocracy”.

I do agree that those models are specific (and therefore limited) to the private-sector corporation, and don’t really hold in mission-focused organizations where there is an actual reason for it to exist. Thing is, most of the highest-paid tech jobs are in pointless work done solely for rich people, with zero or negative net social value, so that’s where most HN posters are going to end up.

>most of the highest-paid tech jobs are in pointless work done solely for rich people

Sorry what companies/jobs are you talking about specifically?

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