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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend the "glue" worker path. The catch phrase I use is "a rising tide raises all ships." When I was a young buck I took the "shooting star" path where I'd knock out user stories at 10x or more compared to the team average. Basically everyone hated me. Then I chose the "rising tide" path and most people loved me. All of my greatest $ opportunities came from people I raised up. Even little behaviors like instead of speaking up in meetings I DM people to offer suggestions/corrections to things they've said in meetings. And then they can seamlessly take credit for my ideas by incorporating them as they continue to talk. If you care about promotions, it's important to also do this for leadership.

If you measure my work by lines of code or user stories completed, etc. I will come up short for sure. But teams love having me around and I never lack for opportunity.

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I appreciate you sharing your experience. Mine has been essentially the opposite, but I suspect the root cause being working for a company with a terrible culture.

Any tips out rooting out the companies that actually reward this virtuous behavior?

You do it in a way where you're helping the careers of people, not doing it because you think is abstractly best. Where having you around is good for them, and not having your around is bad for them. Where if you're gone, it's fuck, now my life is going to be harder. Some might call it 'relationships', but maybe it's more about choosing what has more effective impact?

Also a lot of glue people are missing the marketing aspect, and I think that is why it is unappreciated. If you never made a sound, do you exist? Glue people exist outside of the typical marketing machine for most employees, which in lies its power too, because the opportunity set is also richer.

The parallels to business and sales is very apt. You can't just make a product and expect adoption with no marketing, and the same applies when you're doing a job too. If you think you shouldn't do it, your essentially saying someone should do it for you, and they can, to a point, but you are your own best marketer, because you work with your work 24/7, while your manager has 5 to 25 other people to also think about.

In addition to what novok said, I would say keeping score is a detriment. Most of the people I "raised" provided absolutely nothing tangible in return and I don't feel any negative emotion about that. I'm glad they are better off in some capacity because I was in their life and that is its own reward. Keeping score is the path to bitterness and negative attitude which people will see through.

Can you speak more specifically about what you experienced that you found so terrible? That might help me offer a more useful response.

Same here, always thrived for the team and stick with the motto to make yourself replaceable. In this way i felt always free that i can move on if needed, had cheerful mates around me, and was the most appreciated person around as well. Even at amazon where people competing even with teammates, we have competed together helping each other. It was an amazing experience compared with what i saw in other teams.

I'm aiming at trying to make myself useless by automating everything I can and teaching others to do what I do so I don't have to. One day I may succeed but so far when I've been on the brink of success I've been offered more and more interesting work and I don't think the world will run out of work to be done anytime soon :-)

+1 on this. If someone is as smart as they think they are, building up the team is always the best option. If you’re always going to be ahead of the curve hours out how you can make everyone perform better as a force multiplier rather than just your own performance.

I will say, I think this is a negative aspect of performance culture though: if you’re average are you going to help someone who is going to be pipped instead of you? Probably not.

I helped one of the worst programmers I've ever known become an average programmer and he was so thankful that a few years later when a crazy opportunity came along to make a few million bucks he called me up because there was no one else he trusted with what would become his life's work. Now we hire abuse victims and other people who had a rough time but are amazing and get them set up on an accelerated path to six figure income careers as PMs, sysadmins, and developers. And we make great money in the process. I'm an above average programmer it would be a disservice to deny it, but you don't have to be the best programmer in the room to help the worst programmer in the room.

I worked with another guy and a few years after we had been working together he called me up and asked me if I would mind if he named me in his will. He had started a solo company and made good money and if he died he wanted me to help make sure his wife didn't get taken in by vultures. Of course I offered to do it without hesitation.

Fuck performance culture. Make your own culture. Be the kind of person that others want to trust their life's work and fortunes with.

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