Being good isn't enough | Hacker News Reader

Being good isn't enough

joshs.bearblog.dev

207 pointsprotagonist_hn79 comments

"Being good isn’t enough"

I agree with that. I've seen people get frustrated with this where they and their employer (as embodied by their manager or colleges) are talking past each other, in a sense.

Employee is very good at X, and wants their job to be about X and be judged on X. But to their manager and colleges, the job they want them to do is only partially about X; they'd also like a lot of Y and some Z in there as well.

Anyway, I generally agree with sentiment of the article, though it's too self-helpy for me.

Also: A lot of stuff happens in life that has no regard for your hard work, skill and diligence. Learning to roll with the punches is one of those soft skills everyone tends to need sooner or later, sometimes too frequently.

If I focus on Y & Z until the result is passable, do I then do the same for X? Or do I try hard with X (time which I would enjoy), even though it won't be appreciated? At that point why not work on a personal project which would give me satisfaction, instead of working.

That's a million dollar question. Going by triathlon rules, train to where you can be competitive on your two weakest legs, and then hammer home your strength.

In MBA circles they talk about how organizational effectiveness enables competitive advantage. I.e be operationally good in all areas of your business but align your goals behind being great at one that differentiates you.

> Everyone around you is technically strong too

If this is true, you’ve hit the jackpot. Competence is usually rewarded by spreading the competent people thin enough that they rarely get to collaborate.

I was about to say. Technical competence is rare in even the most selective tech companies.

It sounds like you might be setting the bar for competence much higher than the average capability of a tech worker?

It's all relative at the end of the day. My peers in undergrad had more curiosity and capacity for understanding concepts. Maybe people just get burnt out, or maybe the interview process is broken. Idk.

Sure? Your average 3 years of experience “senior” developer has mastered some tools but failed to abstract from them in a useful way, has a ton of growing to do, and hasn’t even considered some fundamental concepts. From there about 20% walk the hard path, 70% turn into expert beginners, and 10% fully stagnate. Of the 20% with the potential for competence, attrition knocks out a big fraction, and specialization means that you may never work with a peer in your area of expertise.

So yeah, I’m implying a pretty high bar. I guess an operational definition for me would be, “can adapt to an environment where most of their concrete skills don’t transfer.” A competent person will rise to the challenge, maybe even enjoy it if the reasons for the weird environment aren’t too stupid. The truth is, the rules change on us all the time, and if you don’t get the fundamentals, you’re a technician who needs to retrain from zero wherever that happens.

Your worldview seems incredibly harsh to me. You’re equating competence with excellence which maybe only 20% of people reach. So you’re calling 80% of software developers incompetent.

I don’t think that’s harsh at all. With the low barrier to entry and the high potential earnings, a lot of people joined for the paycheck and are profoundly uninterested in digging deeper. If anything, it’s surprising there’s as much competence as there is.

Excellence is something quite different. I’ve been in the presence of excellence. Excellence makes everybody in the room act smarter and smooths the path to competence. It shows you the way and gives you new ways of understanding the world. It’s truly rare, not 20%, maybe 0.2%.

I think I agree ( with some asterisks ). On this very forum, at one point someone suggested that lspci is some sort of higher level of command that is some sort of sign that the person is competent. They were not even arguing proxy for something else, but suggested that just knowing it somehow indicates a person that knows that area.

Obviously, knowing one command is not mastery. It is not even competence for that matter. It is just one piece of information and how you use it determines whether you are considered competent or not.

I work in heavily regulated corporate and I sometimes yearn for a fintech or other startup, but, honestly, after all those years, I am not sure if I even would make it. My mind has not been built for competent. It was built for compliance and CYA.

I've interacted with a lot of reasonably randomly selected companies after starting a consultancy last year, and honestly yes, 80% of software developers are incompetent.

It's honestly a stretch to say they're software developers as you're probably imagining, but if you walk into a random office, most people with that title won't use version control, won't ever ship, and are generally a bit concussed.

It can be hard to imagine because many times, when we find competent teams, many of the members have never directly experienced a truly average team, as the culture one acquires on those teams makes it hard to ever be accepted on a good team (frequently the weaker developers don't even understand there's anything lacking in their skillset).

I'm more sympathetic now than I was a year ago, but it's also pretty unacceptable when you remember they work at hospitals and the government!

Oh hey, love your blog! Glad I’m not alone in my assessment.

I guess i'm incredibly fortunate. I've never even heard of a team not using version control (for example) in any company i've worked in let alone experienced it myself

The "fullstack 1 week bootcamp", "learn TypeScript in 6 hours", overpayed generation was bound to breed incompetence. When people began openly embracing overemployment at a senior level it should have become clear how easy those jobs were

What “most selective companies” have you worked for to justify this belief?

Agency is a great observation. But also bring up these conversations with your direct management so they recognize the work you do. Employees with less responsibilities outside of work (no kids, no families, etc) might appear to be high-agency while in reality being less effective. When a senior eng with perceived "low-agency" suddenly takes a leave, those effects are felt way more than if a "high-agency" junior does. All's this to say, make your impact know with blunt discussions. Don't distract yourself with blog posts and dashboards solely to prove you have impact.

Having conversations with management is beneficial in other ways too. You might think effort A or task B is really important, but your management can feel differently. They have a wider view of the company and might think that project C is really critical.

That's good info to know. If you know, you can advocate for A and B, or shift focus to C.

Unfortunately, It cannot apply to what I experienced. I would love though.

Being far above good isn't enough either. Being highly productive and effective result in work done faster.. and more work given !

Better to use your skill at your service rather seek/hope for promote.

> Being highly productive and effective result in work done faster.. and more work given !

I love this quote from Jason Lengstorf[0]: "A career is a pie-eating contest & the prize for winning is more pie"

It's weird to think about and do, but you have to be strategic about what you are good at.

0: https://jason.energy/more-pie/

I like to say to juniors that they need to be loudly active. If you do a good thing, ask a random question about it somewhere your manager can see, especially if he didn’t explicitly instruct you to do the thing.

They’re not mind readers, and most of them are pleasantly surprised when you do things that make them look good.

A simpler lesson I learnt the hard way, software/program is to enhance business revenue. People matter everywhere at every level.

Yep, this was a lesson that took me a bit to learn as well. Perfect code that doesn't get used because it doesn't solve the right problem is useless to a company, so no one is going to want to pay someone for it (much less promote them).

> Giving good career advice...

> That’s how you increase your impact.

> High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait.

> ...the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.

It's unclear what problem(s) this advice is meant to address but perhaps TFA means obstacles to promotion, although TFA seems to assume a strong correlation between "impact" or feature/product delivery and promotion/career-advancement.

The fastest way to get promoted is:

1. don't get fired/let go

2. frequently interview for higher positions with other companies and become good at interviewing

There are exceptions but, on average, it is much harder to advance via internal promotion than by getting hired somewhere else with a higher title/compensation.

The reason for this is multi-faceted:

1. It's difficult to measure employee value, so companies rarely have a good handle on it. This incentivizes set rates of advancement ("employees" perceive "fairness") and creates a fear of promoting someone unready or unreliable for a new position.

2. Employees want to "advance" by being promoted to positions with higher responsibility and higher compensation. The ability to allow for this advancement requires a higher level employee to leave or a business case for creating the position out of thin air. Thus, companies don't always have a position available.

3. (etc.)

This is true in the lower rungs, but you'll hit a glass ceiling where this starts to work against you. At a certain point your reputation with those whom you have worked closely matters much more than interviewing skills.

I think the most important skill after the actual engineering is ability to write well (and inclination to do it early and often).

pg and tptacek and patio11 really drove that home to me - they are as well known and well regarded as they are because they tell people about it, well and often.

Even if it’s just on an internal wiki - get the stuff in your head out there.

In principle I strongly agree. But this won't work in all orgs. It's very useful for figuring out yourself, for internally building a plan! But there's lots of orgs out there that work by human influence, that have oral-primary or oral-only systems.

Sometimes there's great good to be had awakening these slumbering cultures, bringing them writing. But it's hard and you need allies that can bring their own enthusiasm for the change, and the old ways die hard.

Good writing is helpful for your peers, and I wish people would document more, but I'm not convinced it's useful for getting ahead or demonstrating impact -- only insofar as you're producing artifacts which can be used as evidence.

Communication in general is helpful. Many incredibly skilled technicians are severely held back by the fact that nobody understands what they are doing and how impressive it is.

On the other end of the spectrum, most truly famous people are not just good at what they do, but also good at creating a sort of myth about themselves, or else has had a friend who loved talking them up. Learning to take what you've done or learned and spin a compelling story around it is an amazing life skill that absolutely will get you ahead.

You can absolutely take this too far and become a narcissistic charlatan -- all talk and self esteem -- but this is extremely far away from the personality of many engineers so I don't think that's an immediate concern.

I'd say being a good communicator, an "effective communicator" has the most impact. Not only writing well, but being able to enter and participate in C-Suite strategy conversations as a peer. Not dominating, not "telling them the truth", but being a peer-wise political player in the political theater that actually runs the company. That is what comes after staff engineer, it's VP of technology, CTO and so forth. That game is all communications, but as a former developer your role is getting them to understand the realities of the tech teams' efforts and successes, and the required maintenance to see it continue.

I just dont see it around me. Nobody cares much about how you write or ia inclined to read unless they really have to.

Fully agree, also the ability to concise stuffs. Sometimes you just need to make the wiki shorter, as we humans prefer short reads.

> And in the long run, the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.

Love this quote.

And just a comment on agency: it's not necessarily rewarded or even acknowledged in all environments. Some expect that you're literally a worker-robot and just need someone to carry out menial tasks from up top. You don't want to end up at one of these places, regardless of what your life situation is.

Nice quote, sadly not true at all.

Currently, statistics show that changing jobs rapidly pays much more than staying one place, no matter whether you deserve it or not.

Whether or not you deserve it is not a metric that is often applied in this field.

I mean this is well-intentioned, but with all career advice I've seen it's mostly a bunch of hocus-pocus.

For example maybe your company gets bought by private equity and 0 people get promoted for years on end.

Or maybe you have a speech impediment and you never get promoted beyond a certain point.

The only career advice is - if you want to get promoted understand the motivations of those who can promote and try to make it in their self-interest to promote you.

I didn't read this as a "how to get promoted" post at all...

How did you read it?

Quoting directly: «It depends entirely on the person receiving it. For some people it means finding work they love. For others it’s about meaning. For many it’s just getting promoted.»

That is, getting promoted is partly it, and partly explicitly not.

It mostly is, but the author asserts that the advice is also applicable to (the minority of?) people with other goals.

The author deals with the question of the advice recipient's goals near the start of the piece:

> For some people it means finding work they love. For others it’s about meaning. For many it’s just getting promoted. Still, here’s what I usually say.

The rest of the piece does sound like corporate ladder-climber advice. For example:

> [...] and people notice. That’s enough for a while. But eventually it’s not. Everyone around you is technically strong too. So for most of us, you won’t stand out anymore. You need to increase your impact in other ways. [...]

Where, to a ladder-climber, "impact" is corporate euphemism for recognition and promotion ("people notice" and "stand[ing] out").

And common corporate getting-recognition advice:

> And do it in the open. A common mistake is assuming work speaks for itself. It rarely does.

And even the closing words could be constructive advice for ladder-climbers:

> And in the long run, the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.

But it could also be applicable to the rare/mythical unicorns who just want to do good work within a corporate environment.

I don't think those points have to be interpreted as promotion-seeking advice. Even once you have attained a position of where you are doing work with impact, that you find meaningful, work that you love, or whatever else it is that motivates you, you still have to maintain that position. In some ways, that is harder to do than seeking out a promotion since the person who replaces your boss may not understand your role or may not even understand why you are not seeking a promotion. Even if the people around you remain the same, they may take you for granted.

True, it also applies to people who want to maintain their position, not climb higher. (At least in orgs that don't have "up or out" culture.)

> The only career advice is - if you want to get promoted understand the motivations of those who can promote and try to make it in their self-interest to promote you.

It's true that you need to understand the motivations of people in charge and align your output with that.

However, these overly reductive approaches to the workplace can easily backfire. A lot of the go-getter juniors I've had to work with in my career approached the workplace like a game of 4D chess to unlock, where they just need to identify what matters to their skip level boss and hyperfocus on that. Some times it works for a little while, but in my experience many employees underestimate how blatantly obvious these games are to any experienced manager.

From a management perspective, you can notice when someone is a hyper-responder to perceived incentives and trying to people-please you into rewarding them. Good managers learn to be careful about what's said, even in passing, and to carefully call out the behaviors they want to see to keep them on track.

Evil managers see this incentive-reward hyper response and use it against the employee. I've worked with some managers who will spot these go-getters early and then dangle carrots in front of them every time they want to get something done. The employee will chase every carrot aggressively, thinking it's their ticket to getting ahead. In reality, the manager isn't interested in promoting them out of that role because they can so reliably extract extra work by dangling another carrot.

The problem is of course that there isn’t that many good managers.

> dangle carrots

When my coworker was leaving, I learned that he was earning 2x my salary. I went to my manager and asked for a raise. He told me he'd promote me if I do some project. I went above and beyond, but my manager simply set me up for failure. I don't think it was intentional, but rather that he's incompetent, because it's a pattern that I tell him to do X, he says that X doesn't make sense, one year later we go back to X.

Now my strategy is to slack off as much as I can. The company is comically dysfunctional, so the end result is that I have a livable wage for effectively two hours of work a day. The rest of the time I'm at home.

I have a go-getter in my team but they also got disillusioned when they fulfilled the promotion requirements but then the requirements changed. This means we're slowly building a team of lazy fucks, contributing to the overall rot in the company. Which honestly isn't a bad deal from my perspective when you think about it.

If you are looking for the response that I think you are wasting your life, then here have it. You only have one life, and for many people life isn't so great. Help someone out, and do something useful with your life.

I guess they figured out they could do something more useful with their life than work hard for that company?

How does this relate to what I said?

This happened to me after an acquisition. I was on my way to becoming a director before our company was acquired and they ended up firing my boss and keeping me in place, with no more room to grow (and stringing me along about starting a new department that I would lead, which was never going to happen).

I used the extra time to start a consulting business and 3X my salary. When I was finally laid off a few years later, I just laughed and continued with my already successful consulting career.

The company was so dysfunctional, nobody really knew what I was doing. When asked, I would just say I was "really busy"/mention some technical stuff I was working on and I would always answer questions immediately from co-workers and management on Teams, to give everyone the idea that I Was still working hard.

What got me in the end was a new VP was hired and looked at the yearly budget. He started questioning why he really needed me and I was gone.

"When my coworker was leaving, I learned that he was earning 2x my salary."

Why would you assume you are worth 2X to the company or any more? Your co-worker might have had more experience than you.

One time, an excel spreadsheet with salaries was leaked at work and I learned I was paid 50% higher than a co-worker in the same position. Multiple things determined this: I had more experience/education and I was better at negotiating my salary when I was hired.

"He told me he'd promote me if I do some project. I went above and beyond,"

I'm not sure how much you were expecting as a raise, but it would have never been even close to 100%. Companies just don't do this.

I use this time to play video games and watch porn because honestly, I'm tired of the whole hustle culture where you're expected to perform at 110% all the time and just get more work as a reward. We'll see how long before I get fired, and when that happens, the whole economy will probably be different from what it is today anyway, so whatever skills I pick up, they'll be obsolete.

> Why would you assume you are worth 2X to the company or any more?

I'm not. But the company isn't worth to me much either. So we're stuck in a situation where I do shit job and they pay me shit money, and that's their business model.

> I'm not sure how much you were expecting as a raise, but it would have never been even close to 100%. Companies just don't do this.

This is why employees who aren't lazy fucks like me jump ship every two years in order to maximize their income, because getting any raise whatsoever requires disproportionate amount of effort, which means that the whole model promotes keeping shit developers instead of good ones.

I'm not claiming I'm a good developer. Maybe I don't deserve to earn 2x. I'm just claiming that the company is dysfunctional because there's a self-correcting mechanism in place that promotes incompetence and laziness, and I'm acting as designed per the mechanism.

I have a speech impediment and currently a junior engineer.

Will this actually prevent me from getting promoted? :(

Maybe I should look into some speech therapy but not exactly sure how effective that is past a certain age.

I hate to say it but it might negatively impact your career. I hope it doesn't, but it might

People in charge of promotions often have more than one choice for a given promotion and they will use any criteria they can to weigh for or against you

A speech impediment is more likely to weigh against you than for you, unfortunately

That's the sort of thing that anti discrimination laws and guidelines are supposed to remedy but I suspect they mostly don't actually fix

Personally, if speech therapy is an option I think I would try it? It can't hurt you any

I'm going deaf, and looking into fixes for that. I don't think you should be ashamed of your speech impediment, but I also don't think you should be ashamed for looking into help fixing your impediment either

This is good advice.

Their is also an effect that I have seen many times and experienced myself. Where it’s evident that someone has an idiosyncratic challenge, but you can tell they have put effort into overcoming or mitigating it. And they just work through it, not letting it get in their way.

It demonstrates life competence, and is a real positive.

Whatever you do, whatever you can do, don’t let “it” get in your way.

Absolutely, this. I see this all the time with colleagues that don't speak English too well (I'm not in an English speaking country, but development offices often use English)

I'm not talking about people who can't express themselves or can't understand, merely that they haven't mastered it - use clumsy wording, or have a thick accent. These are often some of the most technically capable and talented people I've worked with, but also typically are not perceived as such by others, and im ashamed to say, working together with them would often result on the credit being placed unduly on myself.

My data point: I have a severe stutter. I might have been lucky (and also no two stutters are the same), but I don't think it has even mattered at work.

I don't know if you have a stutter as well, but I've had stuttering therapy again recently, it's not very age related. Happy to send you resources. Feel free to email me.

No, I got multiple cases of managers with speech impediment, I also saw a blind tech lead and a deaf one (who also happened to have a small speech impediment).

I also saw a bunch of C-levels being total sociopaths but that's another story :)

I've worked with multiple blind coworkers and they were all amazing. They weren't amazing because they were blind, but they sure didn't let it slow them down.

Joe Biden was president of the US. There's your answer.

Nah, just own it. I know the rising star in a FANG team of 40 can barely speak one sentence without breaking into a stutter.

Add "sales" to the list. Even if you don't have strong "product thinking, project execution, nor people skills" you can reach out to sales and offer technical advice, or offer to write the tech portion of proposals. This will get you promoted. Eventually, you will learn the sales pipeline, BD, capture, execution, deal closing etc. You will even learn deal qualification, so you can help leadership focus on the winners. Tech Skills + Sales will pay dividends.

it references a The Staff Engineers Path, i think staff is a new senior and it's easy to get to it and hard to jump over when joining a new company. I don't really care abount one more level raise from being engineer X3 to X4, I want to get to X7 or be self employed, getting raise at a job is super easy you just kinda work there

Enough, but for what? Enough implies some satisfied state on which this advice intends to be on the trajectory of.

these are the types who made the toxic hiring processes

This is true. It's complicated. Also, if you're too good, some people above you may feel threatened and they can absolutely destroy your career. It's total bullshit that people at the top want to pay it forward. They don't necessarily. They want to help people who remind them of themselves or a lesser version. They often don't want to help someone who might be better than them in any way.

If the incentives are wrong, ya. At the lower levels of big tech, I don't think this is an issue. Or maybe I've been fortunate but all my managers and skip managers seem aligned on helping progress my career. Maybe because we're not competing for the same position and there's room for growth. If slots are limited and you're competing.. I can see this though.

Everything seems to be easier inside big tech.

In most tech companies, it's dog-eat-dog, people are even using the code they produce as a tool for lock-in, negotiation and manipulation... It's like they believe they will never get another similar opportunity in their lives and are trying to hang on to power like a dictator or sometimes a mafia boss. It's not even about money or growth. I've seen this same dog-eat-dog behavior in a crypto company which grew from $0 to $4 billion in a couple of years. It was like everyone was trying to backstab each other and the machinations behind the scenes were incomprehensible.

In big tech, it sounds like people are holding the door for each other like "you go first, no, you go first."

Loved this piece, it resonates with my desire for "professional development" that puts technical skill at its core and moves on from there.

Think of bands, that are together for like 40 or 50 years. 40-50 years of studios, tour buses, airports, soundcheks, press etc. together. It is not enough to be an excellent musician for this to be possible.

This analogy doesn't work for me. That length of time signifies mediocrity to me, and holds true for my palette.

This sounds like for you a grate musician(s) only play music that you personally like and they stop playing music when they earn enough to live of it. Louis Armstrong seems to be a mediocre musician by your definition. I'd say that that is a piss poor definition of what makes a grate musician.

Not what I said or implied.

On another hand, I'm observing that most goods purchased and sold are of lesser quality compared to 15-20 years ago. Even on comparable price tags.

It's become easier to make "good enough" products that are of subpar quality. Just an example that's relevant for me recently: faucet heads. My local supermarket sells one that is identical—but 3 times the price—of one sold on AliExpress. The faucet head breaks after a few months.

If I start looking for them, I could make a whole post on goods and services like that.

So, while I agree that you must be excellent to stand out among your peers, that is certainly not what companies are recruiting or fostering. I didn't want to talk about LLMs, but one can easily imagine how that will impact product quality.

It's getting easier to be "good enough". Or at least fake it.

> Or maybe it’s that “good advice” itself is fuzzy. It depends entirely on the person receiving it.

Slate Star Codex agrees https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any...

> The biggest gains come from combining disciplines.

Someone else said it's a good trick to be good at two things, because there are N things but there are N-squared pairs of things, so it allows you to specialize in a smaller niche without spending a lot of effort on gaining new skills. Can't remember who.

Sometimes advice is like this:

In Zion National Park, there's a hike called Angel's Landing. You wind up going along a ridge, with a dropoff of 1000 feet on one side, and a dropoff of 500 feet on the other side. And the ridge isn't very wide - sometimes only a couple of feet.

Mistakes in life often come in pairs. "Don't fall off that cliff!" That's good advice. But the problem is, there's more than one cliff. And if you move too far away from the cliff you're worried about, you may fall off the other cliff.

And the biggest danger is that we come in with our own bent, our own bias. Therefore the advice that most resonates with us may not be the advice that we actually need.

That is an excellent metaphor, thank you for sharing.

Which like, if only there was a computer program slurping up my entire digital footprint and could give me the advice I actually need and not just what I want. Hmm...

It's Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert

https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...

Honestly, being medium-good + personable and easy to work with is more than enough for most jobs in most fields.

Only a certain tiny subset of SV engineers have this hypercompetitive mindset. If you think you're LeBron, good luck to you.

I would have agreed to that but I'm corporate it's just bullshit fuckery. Politics and Sycophancy triumphs over everything. It's just too much bullshit fuckery.

To repeat what I've heard said to victims of abuse: enough is enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com