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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

"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. 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.

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