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Comment by ludston | Hacker News Reader

Instead of talking about skills, or personal efficiency, talk about technologies that you're going to introduce to your product, or some specific difficult problem that you're intending to solve.

Another next career step is to take ownership of things without needing to be asked or told, to create and execute plans, to raise and address problems pro-actively etc. And if your workspace doesn't give you opportunities to do it, and you want career progression, then go somewhere else.

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It really shows you're a team player when you take on more work for the same amount of money. Only a possibility of future reward, and _if_ you can spin your performance reviews correctly and _if_ management doesn't inexplicably dislike you.

That way, you can get promoted from Loser to Clueless. [1]

[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

You're offering the very common advice

This only works if your managers are actually invested and interested in having you grow.

If you start trying to take ownership of things without being asked you might also just be told to stay in your lane. If you start raising problems pro-actively you may be told to pipe down.

Yes, there's always "go somewhere else" except bad managers are more common than you think.

It's fine to prefer the comfort of familiar problems and obstacles, but you shouldn't pretend to yourself that you haven't chosen to embrace them over fear of the unknown.

Treat the answer like a game instead of treating the question like a logic puzzle. Optimizing the answer framing instead of the question framing opens up a lot of possibilities. This also works in personality conflicts affecting communication (like marriage).

I don't get it. Can you reformulate/elaborate?

Figure out something to say even though you are not yet very clear on the other person's communication. Common approaches: Ask for clarification, mirror what they say. Growing up autistic, I couldn't find a way to maintain/create a positive connection until I started to focus on the emotions, not the data. I then discovered that the emotion seemed to preceede the data for many people, and that if you stayed on the emotional wavelength, sometimes the data I thought I perceived would turn out to be irrelevant. A cliche is men attributing this to women wanting to share feelings, but it parallels another cliche, men wanting to share things that anger them.

Talk about technologies you want to introduce can go more than one way. It can make you sound informed or it can make you sound like someone, who is performing CV-driven development. I know the type. Like for example needlessly wanting to push GraphQL into things that are simple REST APIs.

And that demonstrates the difference between a developer that is ready for promotion vs one that isn't. You need to be able to make the correct choices for your employer (even if they are not the best choices, or most interesting choices), and being able to recognize these is a skill.

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