Hacker News Reader

> Lots of fresh grads and junior staff focus 99% on being useful, but career advancement beyond the first one or two promotions depends MUCH more on being valued.

Yeah. I've seen a lot of ICs get stuck at the "senior developer" level rather than progressing to team lead, staff/principal eng, etc because they were too focused on being useful, by cranking through Jira tickets and features, rather than thinking strategic and higher level. This is a totally fine career choice, but there's only so far that "coding better and faster" can take you.

The counterintuitive part is increasing your valuableness often reduces your usefulness. As a mundane example, in early stage startups there may be one engineer who handles production deployments, schema migrations, and on-call duties. This is extremely useful! For this engineer to increase their value, however, they'll want to automate production deployments, teach others how to run schema migrations, and set up on-call alerting and schedules. By doing this, they become less useful, since others can now do their work, but more valuable, since they've been able to delegate responsibilities.

I think you're twisting the original article's meaning of "useful" and "valuable." Useful means you are able to contribute meaningfully. Valuable means you are perceived as being able to provide value to the company (in this case by being useful), and are treated accordingly.

An engineer who does their job so well that they reduce everyone's workload by automating things and showing others how to do some of their tasks doesn't become less useful; in fact just the opposite, since presumably they will continue to need to do this as the landscape changes and not everybody will have their advanced knowledge of how to efficiently organize things at a high level.

I didn't interpret the article that way.

> Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler, someone who delivers on tasks that have to be done but are not necessarily a core component of the company strategy.

I take this to mean "usefulness" is: you have a tactical role in the company, where you are able to perform necessary tasks. If you can perform them with little supervision, you are very useful.

However, "value" is eliminating those gaps entirely. Instead of being the on-call person who fixes every issue, which is undeniably useful, you fix the root causes so those issues don't happen. This does make you less useful, by definition, because fewer on-call issues means there's fewer reasons to keep you around. But assuming you also do an ok job of communicating what you've done, and your bosses aren't totally clueless, people will recognize this as valuable. The fact that you were able to identify a systemic issue and address it is what makes you valuable, and it will get you invited into broader technically strategic discussions. In theory, at least.

Again these are just my interpretation of useful vs valuable as far as the article's definition. I don't agree with the terms in a broader sense.

As another commenter mentioned, what you are describing is simply strategic vs tactical thinking, and IMO those are much more accurate, standardized, and less judgmental terms for the situation than "useful" vs "valued".

Yeah the article using "useful" and "valuable" isn't ideal, but I was sticking with those terms for discussion. I agree it's largely about strategic vs tactical thinking.

Perception is reality. In my experience, if you're a "useful" employee to your management you are boxed into tactical. If you're "valued" then you are invited into strategic decision making.

It really doesn't matter how much strategic thinking you do if nobody cares.

I feel stuck because my industry keeps laying me off. I feel useful, but it's clear that the powers that be don't value any of the studio, let alone a mere 5-10 year nameless fledgling.

Yet, while these more valuable team players that think strategically may be inherently more “valuable”, they aren’t necessarily more “valued” either.

Who I have I seen that is more valued? H1B hires (QA > SW developer) and middle management. Even break room legal notices prove the former.

> Lots of fresh grads and junior staff focus 99% on being useful, but career advancement beyond the first one or two promotions depends MUCH more on being valued.

“People don’t remember who went to grab drinks on a Tuesday, but they’ll remember who helped them close a million dollar deal and get a huge bonus”

Give your coworkers superpowers and opportunities will flow.

I think both of these things can be true at the same time - the issue with a lot of utility-based value is that it often comes in the form of unsustainable heroism. My capacity to feed back interesting thoughts about product and strategy in domains I'm familiar with is probably greater than your capacity or desire to consume them, but my capacity to do various forms of high-precision grunt work (set up configurations for clients, misc. project work, ship XYZ feature into the product) is much easier to consume and ultimately overload.

Closing that million dollar deal as a sprint might be memorable, but being the go-to configurator for Azure cloud services isn't, and the difference between heroic level systems management and mediocre button clicker requires hard squinting if you're non-technical. Hell, I'm technical and would struggle to tell the difference just because IT isn't usually my domain.

And if the person you're working with has no appreciation of what an average performance is, any mistake will be seen as a defect even if what you're doing is otherwise heroic.

"People don’t remember who went to grab drinks on a Tuesday, but they’ll remember who helped them close a million dollar deal and get a huge bonus”

Outside of sales and senior leadership I don't agree with this statement. Maybe it is just because I've reached a time in my life where I could care less about the hustle and just want a job where it can solve interesting problems for no more than 8 hours a day. And then get home to my family.

For ladder climbers sure, but at some point relationships are more important than dollars. (As long as you have a enough to live of course).

And if you are struggling to make ends meet and you get a pat on a back for deal support, that feels more exploitive than anything else. Yay, I helped make someone else money.

Being a highly productive, easy to work with, solution oriented coworker is a super power in it's own right.

> but at some point relationships are more important than dollars

Sure. Who do you have a better relationship with: That engineer who drops everything they're doing to come help you with a gnarly bug when asked, or the dude who's always at happy hour but nowhere to be seen when you need something?

but who are you gonna go to first when there's a gnarly bug? the guy you had drinks with last night, or anybody else?

That can be the same person in a few of my cases. The outgoing ones tend to also be outgoing with helping others.

On the other end, there can be helpful but quiet people who makes me feel like I invaded their space when I ask a question.

I think the point is going for drinks gets you a pat on the back at bonus time but deal support gets you a more sizable bump.

Businesses may remember that. I'm not sure if people will. That million dollar deal probably isn't making you money directly in this time and age. At best it keeps you from being laid off.

Meanwhile, I still do remeber the coworkers I viewed as helpful, or even just generous and friendly.

It seems the difference is just the degree of usefulness / value. Rather than being different terms, I think they're just different spots on the spectrum. What's the difference between someone being "useful" vs "valuable", one is 6/10 the other is 8+/10 (made up numbers).

A sales person that consistently hits quota is useful. A rainmaker that keeps bringing in million dollar deals is valuable.

An Ops contributor who saves the company millions in operating costs, however, might be extremely valuable, but may or may not be valued.

Definitely, it's up to the contributor to also demonstrate their value if it's overlooked for whatever reason. Demonstration of value is almost never the same thing as value.

I think you have missed the subtle difference between "valuable" (which you introduced) and "valued" (which is the subject of the article)

I understand with what you're saying, and I agree for the most part. I just think describing this as "value" vs. "usefulness" is the wrong framing and unhelpful, and I can think of specific examples from my past that show this.

First, what you are describing in this comment sounds very much to me like following the adage "be loyal to people, not companies", and to that I totally agree. It's definitely critical in your career to build trust and relationships with folks you work with, and be dependable.

But for an example of why I think this "useful" vs. "valued" framing is wrong, I can think of a colleague at a previous company who I think was great at her role - she was a relatively junior (i.e. a couple years of experience) front end developer. She was responsive, implemented features well, and always demoed her work well and was extremely prepared. People also loved working with her - she was friendly, had very little ego, and had an almost disarming way of interacting with folks that would instantly defuse tensions on her team. I would work with her again in a heartbeat, and she was a great addition to her team.

At the same time, after working with her a while it became clear that her developer skills were limited. She was a great taskmaster, but the didn't have a great "systems-wide" way of thinking. She would implement features as requested, but when she would give demos I remember there were a bunch of times that there were semi-obvious questions ("Wait, how would the user get to screen A if they click button B first?") that she didn't bring up beforehand and did't consider in her implementations. I could trust her to implement individual components and screens, but I couldn't really say "Here's a description of the user problem, and the general direction we want to go in - how would you solve this?"

So if you asked me, I would say this person was a very valued person on her team. In her role, I think she was great. But I also don't think I'd expect her to perform well if she was asked to go in more "strategic and ambitious directions", as taken from the article.