Three Ways to Get Paid (2018)

Nobody wants to hear "no". The way you say "no" without saying it is by turning "no" into an option, and attaching costs to options.

"no, I won't be able to make it in time" would be "I can confidently deliver in time if I have X, and we save Y and Z for later."

the corporate world is a lot of kayfabe and bullshit. Welcome. :)

Internally, it’s important to understand that every ask should have a business goal associated with it. The thing being asked for is rarely (never?) the only way to accomplish that goal.

Great engineers focus on the customer or business need and find/propose alternatives that are possible.

Aside: start getting that exposure to management people now. You can book regular skip levels with your bosses boss and the PMs boss. Better than waiting until you get promoted and having to learn how to do it with a weight of expectation.

It took me years to notice that folks who confidently made stuff up or provided incorrect info in meetings were looked upon favorably. No one ever knew or cared that the thing the person said was incorrect. Just the confident way they said it.

One trick I learned: If you have the type of manager who doesn't like "No", then say "Yes", but continually keep him in the loop as the project progresses to failure.

If you're up front honest, they'll think you're being lazy - even if you have good reasons.

If you say "Yes", and then fail for all those reasons while providing regular reports, the manager views you as "Someone who is willing to do things".

They often don't care about your actual success/failure rate, but instead use your attitude as a proxy for the actual success/failure rate.

Also, as the project is moving to failure, he'll usually intercept with "OK, how about we changed the requirements to ...?"

If you asked for that change in the beginning, the same rationale as the above applies.

> and I think it is somewhat similar to say that you have to "lie a bit on your CV". [...] For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE)

Please consider this input from my YOE battle scars:

1. Don't contradict your team while in a meeting with outsiders, but then you're obligated to follow up with your team offline, to try to mitigate any damage, and try to make sure it doesn't keep happening. For one example of why, I've seen one person consciously "mis-promise" things to customer, and when I talked with them offline about we couldn't be saying that, because it wasn't true, their response was "they won't remember". Narrator: "They did remember." And that's possibly why that person and a few others aren't very wealthy today.

2. Not everyone believes in "lie a bit on your CV" nor similar dishonesty. You'll probably meet colleagues, who you respect, who react to that with surprise and disappointment. You could also get fired for it, with cause. Especially if you're calling yourself an engineer, since determining and telling the truth is much of your job.

3. Though, on the other side of CV honesty, be careful about always using team-speak/think when in an interview context. Out of habit, you might naturally say "we" when talking about something you were instrumental in. But some people who think lots of people lie on their CV are going to hear that "we" as you generously including yourself in the accomplishments of others. I've started switching modes a little more for interviews, expressly claiming more credit, such as by saying unambiguously when I was the sole designer and implementer of something.

When everyone in a game is cheating, you will lose by playing fairly. And like other commenters have suggested - everyone expects similar behavior.

> For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE) and I don't deal with management that much yet (I'm still shielded by my tech lead and PM), so I'm always looking for advice on how to navigate these things. I really can't just say "YES, YES, YES" when I know very well that something won't be possible.

It depends on a lot of things, like how big the company is, how critical the project, culture, management style, etc. - but you'd be surprised at what is actually possible that may sound impossible. I've had those "this is impossible" thoughts a lot early in my career and more often than not I was wrong. The few times I wasn't wrong, I made sure to highlight risks I saw at the outset, and when the risks materialized, point them out at the retrospective or whatever for CYA purposes.

The things you do want to avoid at all costs are death marches, impossible deadlines with consequences at the end of it, maintenance slogs which will tie you to a very annoying treadmill for your entire tenure - it's hard without experience to know where these things lie, but if all else fails, you can do what everyone else does, try the impossible thing, and either surprise yourself, or when it becomes clear it won't happen, toss it to some overly ambitious sucker (I don't condone this, I just have seen it happen far too often).

That's what I experienced early in my career, and then I independently discovered Rule 3: "Tell the truth to people who want to be lied to, and you'll go broke."

The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it. Deliver the lies that will make them happy and only those lies. The lies themselves are usually reasonably realistic; it's only when you combine them with your common-sense notions of truth that they become stressfully unrealistic. So give up your common sense and just deliver the lies the customer is asking for.

A less cynical way of putting this is to adopt the customer's frame of mind. The stress comes from the tension of your internal beliefs vs. the customer's internal beliefs; because they are coming from two different people, they are frequently incompatible. When you are working for a customer, you are working for a customer.

What? Me worry?

Only if you actually try to achieve them

The "fake it 'till you make it" is prevalent in consultancies, because effectively all of them do it, and their clients know it, and if they don't do it they get pushed out of deals. I too started my career at one of such consultancies, and failed faking it once or twice until I managed to "make it" (that is, getting close enough to my peers so the client tolerated me). It felt dishonest, but was invaluable for a fresh programmer without any formal experience, at all.

IMO sweatshops are a necessary part of the ecosystem, but only until you grow out of them.

I can't help but remember that dilbert...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230302211534im_/https://assets...

It’s a pretty old quote

Some might argue that lying to those who want to be lied to is still usually dishonest.

It pays to be suspicious of those who tell you you can’t make an honest living.

Yeah on the contrary, it’s been my experience that finding other truth tellers tends to lead to a supportive community, where everyone is relieved they don’t have to put up with bullshitters.

The missing quadrant on that one is interesting too:

> "there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."

The fourth corner is unknown knowns, things that we don't know that we know. Bureaucracies have that one in spades.

It depends on who is paying you. Sometimes, people pay you to tell OTHER people things they know but don't want to hear.

That implies the existence of reports 3 through N, so we should probably automate the process...

This would have been 2019. Even then, I feel like anyone who had been in the industry long enough should have developed some level of cynicism.

I find it kind of sadly amusing how many conspiracy theories exist about rich elites exist and then they go off about Jews or lizard people or something else ridiculous.

Because there is a conspiracy of rich elites who are trying keep you down. They don't even hide it, and they've been so successful at it that they have bought their way into the highest levels of government. They actively campaign to ensure regular peoples' taxes subsidize their lavish lifestyles and then actively try and turn us against each other instead of us collectively realizing that we need the people who actually do the work much more than we need the people who leach off of it.

I've also been baffled by this for a long time, but I think I understand this:

1. Our society is a complex system of independent actors, most of which are willing to lie for their personal benefit. It's not hard to argue that given enough time, there will emerge lies that most people do believe.

2. Most people aren't capable of holding a thought in their mind without being emotionally affected by it. This means that if some problem isn't immediately actionable, they don't want to discuss it, because that makes them feel bad.

3. Most people are simply stupid and do not think logically.

Not sure. I think the candidate took another offer.

I don't dispute that they probably had a beef with me; my manager's manager wasn't completely wrong to say I had an attitude problem at the time. I'm going to blame undiagnosed sleep apnea a bit, but I think there was a lack of maturity on my end as well.

The reason I blame the sleep apnea is that multiple people have commented how much nicer I see to be after I got treatment for it. I've also probably just grown up a bit since then as well.

I think it was supposed to be an "off the record" thing from the hiring manager to other engineers, and I happened to be part of that group. I don't remember the exact circumstances.

What little content is in that one is a quote by a fraudster.

So the author lied and they are trying to get rich?

I appreciate brief and to the point. It's a world that's rapidly going away thanks to LLMs' love of over-explaining everything.

That's only two ways to get paid, so it's either title is wrong or there's a missing part.

Heh, well I was kind of thinking, this sounds like something someone in sales or content management or marketing might think is pithy and thoughtful. And we are (or just were) in the "Information Age", so that's what has value. But also, there are lots of other ways to um... make money. Unless you try to twist your brain around "well selling kids' toys to parents is selling lies to someone who wants lied to" or something perverse like that. shrug Maybe the big article does a great job of exploring these ideas, but I don't think they stand up to much scrutiny.

And Brave

Can you please spell out the spell out? You're linking 1300 words.

Fruit picker.

Day trader Garbage collector Zoo keeper Tennis player Lifeguard

>These are "ways to get paid"

The link literally says "There are three ways to make a living."