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keeptrying

At a corporate job, starting projects will catapult you more than finishing them. Especially long multi year projects.

My mentor mentioned this to me and it took me a LONG time to understand it.

Starting an AI project for example will:

1. position you as the AI thought leader just becuase you were first to the idea

2. associate AI used anywhere with you

3. bring you up in any conversation about AI

It's really weird but this how all those useless executives operate. Start projects and leave :) . Highly recommend reading "Stealing the Corner Offfice" https://a.co/d/5dTRSNQ if you don't plan to do a startup.

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> this how all those useless executives operate

Being visible in a positive way to the right people is 100% necessary for career advancement inside companies. The fact that this is abused by otherwise incompetent people is unfortunate, but good people need to understand and use this knowledge to advance also.

I think incompetent people (Management above) get abused by other incompetent people. When the circle starts, is the slow decay of the Company.

Spot on. One look at LinkedIn posts tells you everything about this “paperclip” optimization.

Opposite view

“smart and gets things done”

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

When it’s time to interview, interviewers ask for results. That’s the entire “R” in answering interview questions in STAR format.

I’ve seen people spin Results in their favor within a company, where you can validate them, but for interviews it seems nearly impossible to validate.

Does anyone have techniques for that?

My job as a developer (until 2020) was to ensure the project or major feature I was over was done on time, on budget and meets requirements.

My job was not to go out and sale the product whether the product made $0 or $1 million dollars I had no control over.

The other thing I need to communicate is that I am capable of working at the level of scope, impact and ambiguity required for the job.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

I didn’t understand that myself until a decade ago. Before the gatekeeping starts (not by you), yes it got me through a 5 round behavioral loop at BigTech (AWS’s consulting department) and after leaving, now a “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company (both full time direct hires).

> ensure the project or major feature I was over was done on time, on budget and meets requirements.

The issue with this is that the bounds are drawn by someone else, the best you can do is 'meet them'. No one really cares if you save 90% of the budget, it was already allocated and will just get funnelled off somewhere else. It doesn't matter if it's early, because they probably didn't need it until they said they needed it, and 'meets requirements' is a given.

Compare this to a sales job or something more outward facing, a sales person might have targets but can blow them out of the water with some luck and skill (and get paid commission). They aren't operating within someone else's small framework, but a free variable against the open market.

It’s not that simple. It’s a negotiation up front if you are responsible for a feature/project. You talk to the stakeholders and let them prioritize what’s most important - budget, time, requirements - and you talk to them about the tradeoffs.

Your leverage comes from working on larger more impactful projects that have more impact and scope.

As a mid level employee I was responsible for smaller projects, now I’m responsible for larger projects with multiple “work streams”, more people under me and closer to the “business” and sales”

Also equally thankless when one team meets all goals/deadlines for their small product but the rest of the department is a dumpster fire — making the entire product suite unusable.

The other team is outside of my circle of influence and control.

But at the end of the day, did money get put in my account?

Course language:

https://youtu.be/3XGAmPRxV48?si=ibxkZ2_GYaITjiWt

I like to call that not being on the critical path of company success: whenever you can, push to get your team onto that path, and if management can buy into OKR as methodology, which can help achieve valuable alignment (as long as they don't misapply OKRs for a regular "these are features we want").

I don't, except for trying to contact people at the job applicant's former workplace and ask "is this really what happened"? (I wouldn't do)

I'm thinking that as long as someone finishes projects you start, it's easy to take credit for all of it from start to finish, when interviewing elsewhere?

I’m not saying lie and I never have. But when you change jobs, you control the narrative.

At your current job, your history of both successes and failures are well known, even if the failures happened early on and you learned from them. You never get a second chance to make a first impression

You can't practically validate it.

This is why it's important not just to ask about previous results. This is also why you see so many "solve this random programming problem" type interviews - they hope (wrongly) that it's less fakeable and somehow gives you an idea of how they will do in the future.

I don't find those particularly useful (like many), i instead try to understand how they think and approach things.

If this is a manager, for example, give them real organizational problems you've seen, and ask them how they would approach them, and walk you through their thought process, etc. You will often start to get "weird" answers with fakers or spinners, especially if you start to ask about anything related to performance or improving it (again, in my experience, YMMV, etc). One idle theory (IE i don't claim this is correct in any meaningful way) i had about this was that a lot of the didn't actually know how to help people or organizations, so if you force them to try to explain how they approach it for real, they start to fall apart. Instead of thinking about that stuff, they were thinking about how to progress or spin things for themselves. Meanwhile, good managers often spend lots of time thinking about how to help their people and organizations, and whether they are good or bad or whatever, it's not a topic that tends to trip them up.

For IC's, for example, you can get them to teach you something real they learned on the project they claim was a great success, ideally a thing that helped make the project successful. In my experience, this also will lead you fairly quickly to discover if they believe they are smarter than everyone else. The best people i ever found (in retrospect) were usually the ones who would teach me things they learned, but usually not things they came up with. They would teach me something they learned from someone else during the project, but was still critical to the success of the project.

Everything in an interview is, of course, fakeable with enough preparation. The above things for sure - but it is harder for people to fake approaches, fake teaching, and spin results successfully all at the same time, etc.

You start to get into the "this person is in the 99% percentile of all fakers" kind of thing that is probably not worth trying to solve ;)

> This is also why you see so many "solve this random programming problem" type interviews - they hope (wrongly) that it's less fakeable and somehow gives you an idea of how they will do in the future.

Whether they can code or not isn’t indicative of whether they can get things done. The last time I had an open req last year, the coding part was ChatGPT simple. It was for a green field initiative. I needed to be able to throw any random thing that came up - a complex deliverable - and know they could run with it - talk to the stakeholders, disambiguate the problem space, notice XYProblems, come back with a design and a proposal and learn what they needed to learn with a little direction. I needed a real “senior developer”. Not someone that “codez real gud”.

I actually turned down a “smart” candidate who was laid off from the AWS EC2 service team I think dealing with Elastic Block Storage (EC2 encompasses more than just VMs).

I knew he could code. But he didn’t show me any indication that he could deal with the ambiguity on the level I needed or the soft skills.

Agreed fully.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...

Eh? Not really a rebuttal, but more of a hopeless extension that

1. Smart and GTD is good enough hiring criteria

2. but for Unicorns™, you need to source and hire hyper-productive visionaries who nurture the right culture on top of having #1

And he says you get #2 by luck or polling friends for the alpha 10x developers they know.

Not very actionable, but hard to disagree that it seems to be a common denominator.

That’s for low level employees not thought leaders ;)

> useless executives

Thank you for saying it. After decades in software, I've developed the perspective the people at the top (of medium to large companies, not small ones) are actually bottom feeders and most software companies could function without having a c-suite.

In all the years of this profession, it's as if software engineers cannot be optimized enough. Yet, when has a company taken a look at middle to upper management and tried to optimize that? They don't, or do it in name only. Those people are the financial and emotional ticks of an organization.

I’ve been at several of the top tech companies and my observation is that most (though not all) the top executives do merit their positions. In terms of breadth of knowledge and perspective, depth on some number of key topics, and overall drive and impatience for inaction.

I could choose to be more cynical in order to feel better about myself, but I accept that if I was the quarterback at college, they’re the NFL.

I agree. I've known execs who wouldn't be out of place in a Dilbert cartoon or were otherwise painful (and heard stories about others). But, by and large, they're pretty savvy and often work hours/travel to customers, etc. to a degree that many people here would absolutely hate.

Google and read the "Gervais Principle" by my friend Vekat.

You're welcome and I'm sorry! :)

I've seen this so much... It's quite disheartening when you are the actual expert or most-experienced person in terms of that "thing", but that's not how office politics works.

What's worse is that when the "unapproved" person wants to start some sort of new project or initiative, they get constant push back in the form of "it's risky" or "where will we find the funding". Seen it 3 times in my 2 decade career where the "approved" person then X-amount of time later suggests the same thing and magically it's a good idea and funding appears out of thin air.

You know how it went - they mentioned it to the right person on the golf course (or these days, at a cycling run).

Same here. A closely related phenomenon is something I called the Information Week effect.

Information Week used to be a paper magazine. Managers who made decisions about technology projects but who didn't really know anything about technology loved IW and read it on the crapper regularly. In my career I would routinely pitch ideas for new projects that would get no traction until 5 years later when the same idea showed up in IW. After that happened it was always easy to get funding. But by that time I was usually bored with the idea and on to the next thing.

Was the idea sold the same way? You obviously need to get buy in across the org, which in itself can be a daunting task and requires you to create various pitch decks, project plans etc.

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