Comment by zeroth32 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeroth32 | Hacker News Reader

Really bad advice! Hard work does not pay, corporations are not meritocracy.

About 15 years ago, our corporation had orphaned project. Entire team of 5 developers quit without notice (found other job). Horrible code, no documentation, no tests, no spec, not even build system (was on one of the developers laptop). There was important deadline 6 months away.

I stepped up, worked 16 hours a day four couple of months, eventually got project back on track, and trained new team. As reward I got put on PIP (performance improvement plan) and eventually got fired.

Problem was:

- I worked for other division, for my manager I was dead weight. It was sort of emergency reassignment and paper work never got ironed out.

- I mostly worked from home, come to office barely. Some coworkers thought I left. Not keeping appearances was main excuse for getting me PIPed.

- My project was 1 month behind the schedule. I missed the important deadline.

- Senior manager who initiated my work quit, leaving me behind.

I am not sure what is the lesson here. But now I work in remote job, where I can do all my weekly work in about two hours. Way happier now.

Edit: this was official assignment from very senior manager within company. I saved them a lot of money on fines!

What you describe above is not what the article is describing.

To be honest the author doesn't do a great job at explaining the difference between meaningful dirty work, eg work that needs to get done in order to actually move the company forward, but nobody at the current company can do it, and trying to resurrect abandonware with no coherent vision or power.

The latter will almost always lose (I've been in similar positions) whereas you can indeed build a serious career around the former.

But this was the first case! Very important project for legal compliance, not some sort of abandonware nobody cared about. I had enough skills to put it on track, on official assignment from higher management.

Fair enough! My apologies for assuming too much.

Sometimes you just get hosed

> on official assignment from higher management.

Unless your line manager authorised the secondment (in which case, why PIP?), it wasn't on official assignment, it was just a personal request from someone who happened to be in a higher management position.

Telling the VP to get stuffed, you're only going to do what comes through the proper chain of command, is just going to get you fired immediately rather than PIPed.

Not saying there wasn't a way through this that could have led to a positive outcome, but the key takeaway isn't "do the dirty work", it's "make sure what you're doing has an impact, and has visibility from the people in charge of personnel decisions affecting you". Less work but greater visibility > more work and worse visibility. Part of your job is ensuring visibility or you will get shafted.

I dont want to argue about this specific case.

But if direct manager promises pay increase or promotion, it is not binding or "official" as well.

The lesson is : watch your own back. Communicate to people about what you do and (more importantly) what you are not doing and last, never take double assignments. Seems like you trusted your company a lot more than you should have.

>Hard work does not pay, corporations are not meritocracy.

The former is true, but the latter does not follow. The lesson of your story is that corporations are a meritocracy, but you need you need to work on stuff that helps your management directly.

If you’re working on something unofficially, you’re basically moonlighting so you’re taking a big gamble that it pays off into something better because you’re not doing your actual job.

Are they meritocracy? How does it go with diversity and other noble goals? The only way for highly productive individual to get fair salary is to start their own business and do consulting. Or do shady stuff like over-employment!

That was official work, very senior manager pulled me out of project, and temporarily assigned me to different division. Not my fault paper work and finances between divisions never got sorted out, I did not even had access to that stuff!

That is, companies are a meritocracy as long as "merit" means "making your bosses happy".

You say that like it’s bad thing.

It's a horrible thing and makes your job merely about pleasing the whims of some random C-suite instead of doing something productive for society. I'd rather work on an assembly line, at least the machine is consistent about what it wants and doesn't change its mind because it just read an article about NFTs.

On an assembly line you answer to a boss, not a machine. They can change the requirements on a whim there as well or change methodology.

This is really it right here. I actually find it amazing that such a significant percentage of people don’t actually understand what their job even is.

Your job is to work on what your manager wants done. It’s that simple.

Now if you have a bad mananger they may not be effective at communicating that to you. If that’s the case than it’s even easier to get ahead. You can be one of the few people that actually asks!

Your job is to be (continuously) profitable. In a way that upper management can see.

You can do everything your manager wants, but if you aren't profitable, you're going to be let go as soon as a recession rolls around (possibly with your manager as well).

It's possible to get fired if you're profitable, but much harder. And if you're profitable enough, your manager will get overruled (the exact bounds of what is profitable enough vary a bit by company).

> Your job is to be (continuously) profitable. In a way that upper management can see.

This is incorrect. Unless upper management is writing your reviews or you are extremely exceptional so you stand out, this is terrible advice. This is even worse if you’re ignoring your own manager’s requests in an attempt to do what you think “is right for the company”.

> you aren't profitable, you're going to be let go as soon as a recession rolls around

Not how it works at medium to large companies. When things aren’t profitable, they rank employees by ratings and then cut the bottom X%. When it comes to SWEs it’s much better to keep the good ones in unprofitable departments and cut underperforming people across the board. SWEs are not responsible for profit and their performance is going to be heavily based on manager reviews.

> It's possible to get fired if you're profitable, but much harder

It’s very rare to tie a specific SWE to profit. A department yet, a SWE not so much.

Your advice might apply to sales but it’s terrible for SWEs.

Actually the author was very careful to qualify their advice as applying to work at high growth companies, rather than corporations or very early state startups, where this approach is much less likely to be effective.

Also, the example you describe, which I'm sure has left a strong impression on you, doesn't contradict the advice on offer. Again, the author explains what kind of dirty work they are referring to - problems that have enough reputation to make it obvious to everyone that solving them is extremely valuable.

Bad management/company, not bad 'hard work'

thats like 69% of all companies

69% is notably far less than 100%. Stop chasing the wrong things.

"half of my advertising is wasted money. Trhouble is, I don't know which half"

Wanamaker didn't. That's correct.

Others did. That's why we don't shop at Wanamaker's.

Am I reading this right? You worked double time for months, and in that time you neglected your own job, without it being authorised by your line manager?

All so that a manager in a different department wouldn't look bad for losing an entire team in one go?

That's the lesson. Don't do that. Pick up extra work if you want to, but always do your own job first.

I don’t read it the same way; I read that he got reassigned, as he was “dead weight” to his manager.

Still bad, but probably means that all this was inevitable, and his manager already made up their mind before the project even started.

If you are reassigned, you are not dead weight to your original division, because you aren't working for them, you are on the books of the other division.

Also if you are reassigned, you don't have your original projects to get behind on, they are someone else's problem now.

Similarly, if reassigned, and you do the work of the new assignment there's no grounds for a PIP, and even if there were, your original manager wouldn't be the one putting you on it.

Appearances are soo important in jobs, much more than quality of work. This is why fully remote jobs are so great, people are on a more even playing ground.

I'm trying to find books about strategics and tactics used in work groups.

Sounds like -yet another day at Amazon :)

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