Building personal and organizational prestige | Hacker News Reader

Building personal and organizational prestige

lethain.com

103 pointsjger1520 comments

I can check off the boxes in the "Is building prestige worthwhile for you?" list for the segment of companies that I care about. (Not huge ones.)

I've done a lot of "public prestige building." But the things that actually got me to this point, quickly, were:

1. Being close to the money within the companies I worked at

2. Keeping up a habit of meeting and talking to people 1-1

I realized about five years ago that I enjoy meeting people 1-1 much more than publicly writing and speaking. You can say things a lot more honestly 1-1 without worrying about who might see it one day, and it makes me feel better than trying to turn myself into a public spectacle.

With folks getting much more comfortable meeting remotely, this has become even easier. I've met some great folks who I now have outside-of-work relationships with as well. Usually all it takes is asking someone if they'd like to meet again in three months or so; and, after a couple of these, asking them if there's someone they wouldn't mind introducing on a no-agenda basis.

I also genuinely don't have an agenda for this, other than that I like meeting people.

However, I also find this opening statement telling:

> Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known.

Most of us are bad at self-introspecting about our careers. I suspect a lot of the folks thinking this way need more than brand recognition, because this perspective (to me) would be a potential sign of lack of maturity that I would want in a senior leader. (This is a complex topic, and one that I think needs to be handled on case-by-case basis rather than recommending general approaches.)

Agree and in addition to enjoying meeting and working with people 1-1 I found that the single most effective thing I've done in my career is trying to help people solve their problems. This may appear counterintuitive in early career but it pays off massive dividends. Especially if you're not job-hopping anymore and have maybe settled down in a longer-term position.

A lot of the people I've helped or cooperated with are now managers that remember working with me and even though I've stayed an individual contributor I have a lot of leverage.

Definitely. It can help a lot to get to know the details of what's going on and try to make things happen that improve the situation, rather than taking sides. There's a lot of knee-jerk fear reactions that people have to things that have never even happened to them, and they miss the details because of it.

And sometimes, the people around the problems just refuse to collaborate. In those situations, I try my best for a bit, and then go look for something else. We only have so much time and energy, and we already inherit enough intractable problems that "must" be solved to go looking for more.

This is really a question of depth vs. breadth. Focusing on cultivating individual relationships is building depth of connections and experience, as any one of them will happily assist or recommend you. Focusing on prestige is building breadth because your brands can open doors to external people who haven't met you but see the brand as a proxy for some metric they're evaluating.

While balancing the two of them is important, personally I'd prioritize building depth over breadth whenever I have the choice. You can only trade off your brand for so long. Shallow connections are good for bouncing between networks and climbing ladders, but eventually you'll need depth. Also, I'd rather work with people who value depth over those who treat shallow brand associations as a reliable proxy for qualities they find important in people with whom they work.

Also IMO, in general, thinking about this kind of stuff is revelatory of a transactional attitude that many will find offputting.

"The best way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want." - provenance forgotten

I think this is the primary key to all the success I've ever had, both professionally and personally. I usually say it a bit differently, though: "You get what you give", which has the advantage of also capturing the flip side of that coin.

Definitely agree. In my mid-20s I was at a startup. Without any exaggeration, every job I've had since then links directly back to that first company. Somebody I worked with then has a problem now that needs solving, and remembers how I helped with their problems at the time.

> 1. Being close to the money within the companies I worked at

This is the #1 bit of advice I give to people if they ask for it about jobs at companies.

Could you elaborate a bit on what this means?

There's usually a team that is directly responsible for the part of the product that generates revenue, and management loves them. Every other team is basically just support and may be necessary but they don't get as much attention.

'coz companies are not good at estimating and attributing added value. It's genuinely hard.

Work on revenue-generating projects/products. When push comes to shove, cost centers are cut first. If you work on search ads at Google, you have a lot of job security. I wouldn’t want to work on customer support tools there…

That's a valid approach. Another valid approach is to make sure that you're eminently hireable instead of worrying about corporate politics or job security. If you're that, then leaving a company (voluntarily or otherwise) is no big deal because you can always get job elsewhere.

During a significant economic downturn, with lots of layoffs, there are no shortage of eminently hireable people who are still not hired.

I used to work in vendor professional services. After the salespeople closed a deal that hit the sweet spot between your needs, how much money you were willing to spend, and the sales guy’s quota, I’d come in to explain what you really bought, how much it could do, and figure out a plan to use what they bought to get them at least part of the way to their goal.

Customers hated me because I was always telling the something less than the salesperson did. They also were not crazy about paying me to give them bad news. Salespeople couldn’t handle me because they couldn’t hide their sales puffery during my implementation efforts. The rest of the company was perennially tired by my team asking for one-offs or advanced techniques to make impossible things out of what our customers bought. This is what it’s like when you’re not near the money: the rest of the rig feels like it’s working at cross-purposes and you’re a cost center.

Meanwhile my sister is a commercial lender at a bank. She writes loans. That’s a pretty good example of a person who cannot help being in line with the money: not only is she selling the company’s product, but the product is actually money. Whereas when you’re out of line with the money you’re constantly forced to justify your working existence, the guy in line with the money can just take a slice of the deal.

Make things that people use happily. That's the only thing matter. Microservices, K8s, noSQL, chat GPT integration, SPA, all are secondary. Don't make a hammer that no one uses. Think about how people use it, how people sell it, how people manufacture it, how people fix it. Don't silo yourself into whatever specification the world scoped you in.

People love to work on “projects” (myself included). But when it comes to businesses, projects are only interesting in terms of the revenue they generate. Either you are building revenue or you are building shit.

(Yes, even in a post-ZIRP environment, revenue is king. Cost cutters eventually get cut).

The article uses the terms "brand" and "prestige" in a way that I personally found confusing. To me a brand is an identity, and prestige is whether that brand/identity is seen in a positive way. But here's how the article defines them:

> Brand as a deliberately crafted, sustained narrative that is actively known about you. You don’t have to research Google engineering to have an opinion about Google engineering. In your career and as an engineering leader, you will likely be given the advice that it’s very important to build a brand.

> Prestige is the passive-awareness counterpart to brand. Rather than being what someone actively knows about you, it’s what someone can easily discover about you if they look for it. Many interviewers won’t know anything about me, but a few minutes of research will find my writing, conference talks, and work history.

This is more about whether whether one has built an identity that is "actively" or just "passively" known, and they're arguing that being passively known is just as good as actively known. Which I tend to agree with, not everyone can be a household name, nor needs to be. And it's overkill to market yourself to an extent that everyone actively knows who you are, even as an executive.

But it's a weird way to define the terms.

An alternate approach is to focus on building credibility, and prestige will naturally follow. And you‘ll seem less artful and more authentic about it as well.

This. Prestige is a thing that I don't value, either for myself or others, at all. Credibility, though, is everything.

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