You're crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do

Yeah, OK, that's one way of making all your peers feel really awkward and uncomfortable. And wondering what the little suckup is up to.

Larger events can be harder to coordinate, but I've often used food in various ways at work. Usually, bringing in a cake or something like that to celebrate something, and often something small ("hey, the build server works!" or "hey, 3 people had a birthday in December!")

It can certainly be overdone, but can also make you memorable to people. I brought cookies and milk (for up to, say, 6 people) to a job interview 7 years ago. The day I did, it happened to be the company owner's birthday, which was quite a coincidence. The owner called me up a few weeks ago asking if I was available for some work.

He remembered me all those years later because of the $7 I spent before a job interview. Not because of the paper my resume was on, or how cleverly it was worded, or the color of the tie I wore, or what I drove, or what my code looked like, or how I used vim instead of emacs, or what certifications I had, or what color my hair was.

Blow your trumpet and blow it louder. That always helps.

Your accomplishments are nothing until you successfully explain it to others and let them know you did it.

Keeping things to yourself and telling no one appreciates your genius never works.

Such evidence also provides a basis for many explanations (appealing to the financial products being to complex) of the 2008 global financial crisis.

I've once played with the idea of a career in quantitative finance, but subsequently fled for my life. Yet, attesting to the wonders of biodiversity, many kinds of life have evolved to thrive in the harshest of conditions.

They are super inefficient because they have incompetents in place that can't measure the real value created by their workers but also because as a company grows bigger and bigger you forget who is your customer and start playing the Soviet Russia central planning trick of "looking like you work is more important than working".

When those big companies like banks show looses, we join them together creating bigger monsters that parasites real economy even more. They then use tricks and more tricks to hide the reality(GM or Enron) so the party continues one more day.

But one day the party will be over for them.

From my experience I think the issue stems for looking at management as the next rung on a ladder. A good developer might never gain or want the experience needed to make her a good manager. A manager might never learn what it takes to be a developer. But the idea of moving up to management ignores the real issue.

Management relates to handling people and handling projects. If you can't deal with people enough to understand how they fit into your project you manage poorly. If you can't manage a project well enough to use the people you have, then you manage poorly.

The skills to manage, and the skills to be a developer/engineer/designer/widgeteer seem, to me, orthogonal. I could write code for ten more years and never learn a thing about management.

The best run tech project I ever worked on involved a PM who could still remember the Great Depression. She had the ability to ask the right questions and had a clear picture of how to move the project forward. The worst managed projects came from the PM who used to code.

I know people that are really good at both, they exist and I personally know some of them. It is a pleasure to work with them and they create good teams. They group in clusters, they want to work with people like them.

People like Elon Musk(he was a was programmer, studied physics and business degrees) or Mark Shuterworth are famous and rich but there is also a lot of them around if you know where to search, people that understand technology and people. Try to deceive them with BS!

A lot of people are not so lucky though to work with them. A company have a soul and a culture. Once your living environment is stale you start to believe that is THE world, and your survival skills make you to adapt and become part of the problem yourself, like this man cynic strategy(he uses it because it works in his contaminated environment).

because there is the opposite fallacy which is also derided: the one where the best engineer in the team is promoted to be a manager and in turn no longer does much/any development work.

The bottom line is that while there are great people out there, most people are average or worse (bell curve 101, sorry) and they end up progressing up the career ladder too.

So, there is already a large opportunity cost due to the flat time and effort invested plus loss of corporate experience which has the many significant side effects such as skill, social/business contact and guaranteed compensation accrual.

It also seem to be more aimed at general IT/tech/MCSE type guys rather than developers who are probably in less demand for startups.

It was extremely frustrating when he asking me to do graphic design work and he didn't understand why it wasn't part of my job (I was hired as a developer, I wrote their entire e-commerce system which ran their business for 4 years).

Markets are most efficient when there is full transparency. Unfortunately you don't know the salaries of the people you work with, or the budgets of the people you work for. We have to accept this information asymmetry as a fact of life, because your colleagues probably feel uncomfortable discussing their compensation packages, and your managers don't reveal their budgets to you specifically so they can save money. They may have been willing to pay you $100k, but if you settle for $80k they aren't going to argue, and you've just put $20k back into their budget that they were planning on giving you anyway. That doesn't mean a lot to them, but to you that could have been a new car and a luxury holiday.

The fact that you don't understand the importance of leverage in negotiations (that is, making yourself seem extremely valuable to the organisation) is precisely why you aren't on $200k or more at the moment.

And please don't kid yourself that you'll get to avoid all of this stuff by joining a startup. A founder or CEO of a small company is going to be even more aggressive in getting you to sign on the dotted line for a low price, since the company may be funded out of their own pocket (as opposed to a manager controlling a budget).

And what about founding a startup? Well, you'll have to decide on a price to set your customers. Again, you need those unique selling points and some great marketing to make your customers feel like they can't function without you. If you decide to go down the VC route, you'll be wrapped up in negotiations and due diligence for weeks or months, and if you don't bring the full force of your negotiating abilities, you'll be signing away a large share of equity at a low price that you may regret for the rest of your life.

No-one, absolutely no-one gets to skip the negotiations and still come out the other end with a 'fair' price or salary. These are facts of life, and whilst I don't think they're particularly unpleasant, if you decide to ignore them you'll be left behind as the rest of us shoot up the career ladder.

Your final exhortation about pies is just baffling, "don't compromise the size of the pie" is something I might just put on a T shirt.

I don't think so. More likely, we're playing a massively multiplayer Prisoner's Dilemma, where too few of us collaborate. Sure, if a sufficient proportion of humanity worked at making the world a better place instead of trying to get richer, even they would be better off. I doubt however that we're even close to that critical mass.

Also, don't forget that grounbreaking discoveries are science fiction until they're not. No one plans for science fiction. Heck, even the eventual obsolescence of drivers (truck, taxi, bus) is widely perceived as science fiction, even though self-driving exist today. Because, you know, "there always will be the need for human intervention". (Even then, it wouldn't mean a human is needed in the damn truck all the freaking time. The truck can make a phone call when it has a problem.)

Regarding the pie picture, people care too much about the relative size of the piece they get and not about getting a ton or a mere 10 gramm...

Very cynical view. If this is what's happening across companies, than the market system wasn't efficient enough or was impeded to make a change.

It is a cynical view, but another way the author could have stated it would be to say that in order to have people know who you are, you should do projects that matter to people and make sure they know you are doing them.

The worst people I have worked with, on teams, as employees etc. are the ones who decide to do things like optimize the backup process by 50% when no one needs that done. They miss the big picture which is easy to see if you follow the author's (while I admit cynical) strategy.