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Comment by tcbawo | Hacker News Reader

Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value. Is that work something that anyone else could do? Does it reduce costs or increase revenue? Reducing costs has a limited upside. For a lot of work, the difference in productivity between two workers might be 10%, 50%, even 100% you can still be a commodity. From my experience, doing something that only you can do that results in enduring, increased revenue is the best way to make real money. Learning the business, becoming indispensable, and help to grow the business takes time and experience, but will be rewarded. And if it isn’t, move on!

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> Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value.

Ok.

> Is that work something that anyone else could do?

Maybe not anyone else, but someone else, sure.

But here is the real point. In order to get promoted you have to be selfish. You have to shirk doing the work that isn't perceived as creating the highest value, and leave it to some other sucker. If no-one did that work, what then? It's not like plumbing fields around SBE messages is difficult, or writing some additional business logic is difficult. And the same goes for running some performance tuning, and shaving a few micros here and there. Any developer on our teams can do either task. But the person who can prove that they shaved a few micros off tick to trade latency and made us a bunch of money is going to get noticed a lot more than the poor sucker who plumbed in a few fields to allow risk team to monitor things more carefully.

Almost all work that moves the company forward is valuable. Some just has greater perceivable value, and results in the higher reward.

We've all been through this, we know how it works.

I don’t think your point disagrees with my point. The better aligned your perception is with management on where/how value is getting delivered, the better you will judge how to invest your time. You might be right and they might be wrong. But if you know the business better than your bosses, then you might be working for the wrong people.

And I think you're missing my point. If everyone is perfectly aligned and recognised what will be rewarded, no-one wants to do any other task.

I work in finance. We have a lot of regulatory requirements. Assume some boring regulatory requirement comes in that all of your agorithmic trading on electronic venues needs to stamp an algorithm id on each message to the venue (this was a real thing). Someone has to do a huge amount of boring work aligning everything to do this, and in the end, there is little visible value creation from this work, and you're not going to be rewarded for doing it (people weren't). But without it, your business will cease to function entirely.

The problem is the stakeholders controlling reward are far from perfect. They will judge this project against a project that tweaked the algorithms for better performance (as I already alluded to) and reward the latter, because it made dollar sign go up.

So basically you end up in a shark tank where developers are acting selfishly, desperately trying to get their name attached to the correct projects, and the loudest voices win.

The value of a quiet, but excellent developer, who writes correct code, doesn't introduce stupid complexity, makes the right decisions for the future, even if it takes longer, is very high. But that value isn't easily visible and I'd argue this is rife across the every industry that employs developers, not just big finance.

I think your assumption that everyone gets to select the tasks they want to work on is probably inaccurate for most organizations. Any reasonable manager will ensure that important but unglamorous work is getting done. They might assign this work fairly or not. It probably depends on the org. I was speaking to how a developer should try to maximize their career potential and income. You are assigning a personal value on several factors (simplicity, functional correctness, future maintainability) that may or not be shared by an organization. My stance is, unless you have equity, it’s not your company. Deliver what your company wants. If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business, find somewhere else or start a competitor.

> If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business

This is an uncharitable response, no need for that.

My implication is that if you think the company doesn't understand the business value of something you think is valuable, you should try to see it from their perspective or at least verify your assumptions. Most of the time they are right.

Still being uncharitable and assuming that an employee doesn't see that.

I am not seeing how charitable applies here and to whom. But, I am not interested in a back and forth. Have a good day.

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