The 7 Habits of Highly Overrated People | Hacker News Reader

The 7 Habits of Highly Overrated People

daedtech.com

466 pointsedandersen124 comments

For me, what's frightening about this is how often I used to reflect on my own life, and at times, couldn't actually be sure whether I was useful or just overrated. People would tell me what a great job I did and praise the amount of time it must have taken, and while I'd smile nervously and modestly reject their attribution, I'd often be left silently thinking, "I don't think this was as difficult or took as long as you think it did." It took a while to just accept that I did my part.

While there is danger in exaggeration, I also warn that there is arguably more danger in being too modest, and understating your own importance and value of your work. I've met extremely talented individuals who were being paid less than a third of what they deserved because they believed that their "work will speak for itself" or because they "don't believe in self-promotion". There is a healthy balance to be struck; remember that just as marketing is essential to a successful product, promotion is important for the self.

There are better ways to do that than the ways listed here, though. For example, taking credit where credit is deserved is extremely useful, but ONLY when you're speaking to someone far removed, such as at a job interview. On a team, you'll get further by promoting and pushing through other peoples' accomplishments when they are too timid to do so. You'll earn respect from both parties, and you'll breed a more productive atmosphere which can only benefit you in the long term.

remember that just as marketing is essential to a successful product, promotion is important for the self.

I agree that a little self-promotion is necessary in corporate America. But I find this to be due to a flaw in American character rather than a virtue. Self-promotion in any context apart from interviews is a little unbecoming in my opinion.

AFAIK neither the problem, nor the solution is specific to America. Link bonus, salary or promotion to the amount of noise a guy makes and you can have an army of self-promoting assholes overnight anywhere in the world. The baby that cries the most, gets the milk etc. etc...

> anywhere in the world

Not to the same degree. A common belief is that the Americans are especially good at self-promoting in comparison to their European counterparts.

Maybe this can be partially explained by the size and nature of the US labour market. The more often one changes jobs and the less likely it is that the new employers knows the previous one (and thus can rely on their testimonial), the less necessary it is for an employee to be able to promote themselves in job interviews.

Indeed, self-promotion is an obvious byproduct of democracy and bottom-up economy, where the population at large chooses winners (through voting or market force$) , instead a top-down command economy where everyine is rated by fixed measures, or a caste society where privilege is hereditary and no one gets promoted or demoted, so no one needs to impress anyone else.

Self-promotion is an obvious byproduct of a highly competitive society in which actors need to struggle against each other in order to survive, rather than a more cooperative society where there's less pressure to survive and less pressure to get as far ahead as possible.

Would love to see such a cooperative society in this universe. I guess ants and bees have that?

Societal competitiveness vs. cooperation can be observed in the differences between human cultures, even similar ones. http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm does a good job contrasting cultures in this regard, iirc. Moving to New York from Canada, I was quite surprised how much more competitive people were, even about things that don't matter. It's just there.

This is the most commonly quoted reason for negotiated pay disparity at senior levels: in many cultures, women are conditioned to underrate themselves, men the opposite.

You may find it a flaw but remember this belongs to the bigger cultural environment. So for example, in another country you might see people being shy about self promoting, but you'll also have difficulties engaging them in small talk, or even making new friends. Also, people may get the same reluctancy over new technologies than they have about new behaviors.

Anyway, alpha people exist everywhere, they just tend to display it differently in another cultures so you don't notice at first.

Also - it's not corporate America only. The world isn't that different.

>Also, people may get the same reluctancy over new technologies than they have about new behaviors.

That doesn't sound bad. Why shouldn't they be reluctant to adopt new technologies and new behaviors?

What they already use is "tried and tested", the other has what going for it? The novelty aspect?

I pretty much agree - as long as this is healthy untrust. Why redo something running for little benefit? But I know many people who dismissed smart phones at the beginning, or other pretty big things like AJAX. Their decision wasn't much based on a sound analysis. Also often they failed to identify the new realm. Rather when someone say "with that technology you can do that and that which is new, and in the future you may be able to do this, but it is limiting on that and this aspect", I take the person much more seriously for their analysis. The tried and tested may be what you know to use, but something better might come along as well, or establish a different new playground which you cannot imagine of as possible in your current framework of thoughts.

It's nice to distinguish flaws in the national character, but it's very hard to change one thing (and that one thing only) about any system.

Have you considered the reasons behind self-promotion? What purpose does it serve? What circumstances allow self-promotion to exist, and what makes it necessary? How would the world look without this flaw, once the changes have propagated? Why is it a flaw?

Have you considered the reasons behind self-promotion?

All good questions. I don't know for sure what it's rooted in and what it serves. I've lived abroad, and modesty is the norm for the most part, rather than selling oneself, and there's something refreshing in that. (But self-promotion isn't just an American thing, so one can't overgeneralize here.)

A corporate environment in which self-promotion was no longer necessary would look very different. For one, people with responsibility for decisions about promotions would be more observant.

Right. Managers would have to be not just more observant across the board, but especially good at noticing those who don't promote themselves, to compensate for those who do.

This becomes a high bar for managers. They must effectively cancel the effects of self promotion, so that rational employees move away from it. Then, assuming managers are at least ideally rational, something would have to motivate them to behave this way in turn.

If we were serious about removing this flaw in the system, we'd have to change a lot of other things to make room for it. It's easy to evaluate any one aspect of a system, but be careful not to abandon deeper analysis once the flaws have been found.

Could you explain this a bit more and what you mean by 'self-promotion'?

1) If you are defining self-promotion as 'falsely giving the impression of ability or productivity' then it seems hurtful to any company (I hate seeing undeserving people praised).

2) If you are defining self-promotion as 'giving the impression of ability or productivity' then I do not see any inherent negative value in it.

3) If you are defining self-promotion as 'giving the impression of ability or productivity in order to receive some gain' then I do not know if this negative or positive.

My only experience is as a software engineer and not as a manger, but is there not a problem of little time versus the need to judge?

That is, as a manger do you not need to understand the ability of your employees while at the same time having limited time. In small companies a CTO etc... has little time because there is SO MUCH WORK to get done. I imagine that in larger companies there are too many people (and investment in oversight) to understand the value of each person's ability.

So it seems that self-promotion has served as a solution to this difficulty 'as a leader I need a hand on the pulse of my employees but have little time to do so'. Thus when an employee says 'hey I am good at this', it saves everyone time if they have an accurate understanding of their own ability. The problem in this solution is that it opens the doorway to these 'unsuccessful people.' The real solution is problem not to hire them in the first place (I know, I know, this is not an easy solution). Unless you want to turn your company into the worst place to work ever, will there not always be an opportunity for shitty people to game the system?

My only solace (and this is motivated by my recent reading of Plato's Republic) is that these people cannot possibly, truly be happy. I would think a lot of people who pretend are lazy (which means the rest of their life sucks) or untalented. The only person I have ran into that does this consistently is actually unable to code (not lazy). I hated him until I felt sorry for him. Again, I am drawing a lot of these conclusions from a small sample size.

By self-promotion, I'm thinking of the following kinds of thing:

- I say something subtle or not-so-subtle that I perceive will impress other people concerning my (real) abilities, for the sake of impressing them.

- I intentionally say something that will make me look better than a peer.

Self-promotion is not so easy to define, but it's something you can recognize when you see it. This is behavior that in a previous time we would have thought of as immodest. Americans (I'm one) and others with similar cultural tendencies don't have a sense of how self-promotion comes across to people. Avoiding it is as much a matter of good taste as anything else.

is there not a problem of little time versus the need to judge?

It seems to me that a necessary qualification of a manager is that he or she take the time to understand the strengths and weaknesses of his or her reports at a level sufficient to have an opinion about their contribution, one that is not dependent upon them needing to be flashy in various ways. My sense is that anyone who cannot do this is either too busy or perhaps otherwise not in a good position to supervise a team.

Self-promotion, as I would describe it in this context, is simply selling yourself at all. This is highly frowned upon in cultures in the opposite end of the continuum as it comes out phony: "if he's so good then why does he have to underline it himself?" If you really are good, then it's something that's known and you'll hear others (your coworkers, peers, ...) saying the good things about yourself.

yes yes yesss. the biggest headache in tech america is that the recruiters and hiring managers dont know who or what they are hiring.

there are so many people at my job who i look at and think "why were they exempt from a rigorous tech interview... because of seniority? they're completely in over their head"

yet those people are valued above actual competent employees!! because they run their mouths 24/7.

the BEST thing that could ever happen to the tech sector is for recruiters and hiring managers to actually develop metrics for judging candidates that equate to success -- some mix of syntax knowledge, creativity, ideas about efficiency in terms of work processes/philosophy

the reason so many of these goobers are out there is because the tech world is largely just "how many buzzwords do you know" and "can you fake your way through a tech exam" (which, as i've mentioned, a lot of the older folks are exempt from for some reason anyway). odd. very odd.

Thanks for that comment. I had very similar experiences in regards to myself and coworkers. I used to, and to some extent still do, think that stuff I've done is overrated/easy. While some people are seemingly naturals at striking that balance, some have to constantly be aware of that situation and not always default to being too timid. Especially true for interviews as that highly impacts starting salary and so forth. The team-part you mentioned highly depends on the communication culture of the team and the company, wouldn't really work in a "dysfunctional" team.

On the other hand I think that it might be an unconscious defense mechanism for fear of taking on too much responsibility or fear of too high expectations from others.

I, too, have struggled with what you describe.

I find a real dichotomy between modesty, which works in interacting with co-workers -- and with which I am much more comfortable -- and rampant self-promotion, which often seems to produce the most positive-feedback at the corporate level.

I think I can generalize this to social settings, overall. Confident self-promoters seem to have more dates and to "be out there" more. Whether they are happier and more satisfied in life? I don't know.

I find more that a bit of enjoyment in my peace and quiet. But I'm kind of lonely.

Sometimes it feels that way in the corporate setting, too. Perhaps not the ideal setting for people like me.

I'm also not sure i entirely agree with any of the examples in this post, but self promotion really does work. As illustrated really well in "All Is Fair in Love and Twitter" article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/all-is-fair-in-lo.... Creating lots of self buzz can mean a difference in millions if not billions.

in corporate culture, sometimes there is a staggering divide between actual delivery and perception. I've seen people do nothing for 3 years, and later get a director level position at another company after claims of big accomplishments and general "good rap".

personally i believe in doing both. instead of being the guy claiming the credit, be the guy finding the time to contribute to other teams.. so when it comes to performance evaluations, yours will be pages long and everyone will know you're not just a parasite.

I would laugh, but I've seen this up close and personal and people like this are more dangerous than they might look.

You have to remember if the person is thoroughly incompetent, none of this will work, but imagine if the person is actually pretty smart and good enough to get by, then make them personable and friendly ... and throw in a manager who doesn't really know shit about what you do ... then its a whole new ball game. In fact someone like this could wind up getting promoted over you into a "architect" role or some quasi-dev manager role (bosses who don't really know what developers do, love over communicators). I've seen it happen.

Often times, they can gather a mob (depending on their social skills) and push out other engineers they don't like, or completely comandeer the engineering organization into ill-fated directions.

What I'd like to hear from the OP is ways to counteract this kind of behavior, I suspect there might not be a way to do it if you're a peer, only if you're that person's boss.

The author seems to be blaming these employees too much, rather than the work environment. Perhaps they don't have enough incentives to be productive.

In my experience, productive people don't need an incentive to be productive - they like work. They just need people to get out of their way.

Well that's certainly true, but for the other side of the bell curve I think the environment makes a difference.

I have to agree with you on this. The places I've seen people like this thrive are big-company-cya-all-the-time kinds of setups.

Work environment, or work 'culture', are a net result of the behaviors of the employees.

Well, no. They're a net result of the behaviours of the management.

If your company is a fucked-up hellhole, there are people whose responsibility this actually is.

To be clear, when I say 'employees', I actually meant every person who works there - including both management and subordinates. It's tempting to assume that only the management is responsible for dictating what the working environment should be like, but ultimately, it's the people who you work with that determines whether the company is a fucked-up hellhole, or a productive nirvana.

> I would laugh, but I've seen this up close and personal and people like this are more dangerous than they might look.

A way in which those people are extremely dangerous if the organization allows them to thrive with such a behavior is that smart, productive employees will realize early on what's happening, and will follow suit in order to not fall behind. Entire teams can get poisoned in 6-12 months just like that.

I'd like to contrast that with current HR practices. Why is it that HR departments (as far as I can tell) focus on hiring "the best" or "the best available", while it would be more important, easier and cheaper to simply avoid "the worst" (aka this guy).

They usually looks like a "best". Or they are early employees. Anyway, they are not stupid.

I've seen this phenomenon too, and have seen entire engineering teams descend into mediocrity because the companies and their leaders tolerated such behavior and/or had no effective tools against it. I'm curious, too, what tips the HN community has to get such people exposed, mentored or fired, as the case may be.

This is a difficult problem with too many complex human factors. The guilty actor may have a conscience, but without suitable creative channels, opts instead for basic survival in the organization by whatever means necessary. Or they might just be an asshole whose crowning meta output is exposing a broken organization.

An idea I have thought about is having a culture of individual demos. Being put on the spot sucks, but taking responsibility and pride in your work is an important step to encouraging those who do to grow and shine, and forcing those who don't out of the shadows. Demos do not necessarily have to be presentations on stage under a spotlight - they can be of any format including videos, drawings, research papers, or distributed software.

For this to work though, the demos cannot just be some adjunct ritual to the organization's "real work", with the sole purpose of name and shame. The demos must be the byproduct of your entire work in the organization. What sprouts from the individual demos, may lead to improvised teams for larger projects, but the demos are always the driving force, there to empower the individual and their ideas.

I kinda like this idea. But I wonder if it overly penalizes people who are bad at or fearful of public speaking.

Have you heard of any organizations that implement something like this?

No public speaking required - demos can be code, writing, or whatever mediums you are comfortable with.

The idea is influenced by various stories I have heard over the years about Valve, Pixar, and Apple. Not sure if any company currently implements such a system.

I work at a company using something to this effect--when engineers get assigned projects they "own" them completely--from design and implementation to testing, deployment, verification, and bugs. We have a semi-formal tracking app with names attached to projects. There is never more than one person working on something. I think this instills a great culture of responsibility and accountability. It makes it very hard for someone to ride on others' coattails or not pull their weight, as you might get in a forced pair programming team, or a larger group.

Very interesting. Sounds like DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) at Apple. Are there any manager type roles (who does the assigning of projects to engineers)?

How do you handle bus factor and what not? Or are you just saying... they're responsible, but other people are helping them?

Maybe it's not an issue because it's a web company, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to ramp up on any given module or system in the codebase.

Typical flow handled by one person is about 3 weeks from start of coding to live code, and then a couple more weeks on followup, stats, bugs, etc. After that it's just part of the codebase and others can end up working on it; but they'd probably talk to the original author to get up to speed.

I worked with this guy for quite a while who I used to supervise as a developer, being a bit tired of his incompetence but seeing that he still had an interest in helping out, he and I suggested to my bosses that he be reassigned to a position that might fit his profile a bit better. Shortly after, the guy was made systems architect, without my prior knowledge (I was still in charge of devs). I pointed out that while a less hands-on position might be better suited, what he was doing clearly had nothing to do with being a systems architect (in no small part because I was the one taking care of that, if given the time).

My bosses and said guy agreed and decided to make him a "business systems analyst". As of today I'm still not completely sure what that position entails. The basic idea, I was told, was that he would discuss and gather requirements from clients, then turn them into a useful set of documents and clear explanations. And this is where this article particularly hit the nail.

Not once did this "business systems analyst" produce a valuable document. While he was attending meeting after meeting, going to conferences around the globe to supposedly learn about products he had literally no technical knowledge of, I wondered more and more what his value to the company might have been. He essentially created, with my bosses' blessing and encouragement, a whole confusing layer in the development process.

He made a lot of noise, produced extremely confusing (and poorly written) documents turning basic client requirements into any developer's worst nightmare, readily passing the blame around without ever putting his position in the balance. Missed deadlines would be the PM's fault, an incorrect feature would be a developer's mistake, a misunderstood requirement would be the client's fault, and the list goes on. Each and every single project he touches simply becomes an absolute bane, but the amount of fuss generated through useless emails, delayed replies and inconsequential yet time-consuming nitpicking, has my bosses falling head over heels for him.

Long story short, four valuable people (including myself) have left the company, and the guy is now "business systems director" (I did not make this up) and is on the board. This is both a sad and terrifying state of affairs...

I frequently hear this and have experienced it myself.

The immediate solution is that this guy should have been sent to the sales department instead of given authority.

Counterpoint: we had a whole team of people seeming to fit your description, and I thought they were one of the most useful parts of our process. They mostly did sales support and product management, while also supporting and working closely with project managers. I suspect a lot of developers thought they were useless and over-promoted, but they weren't, their value was just not obvious to the developers. Now, you seem like you were in a good position to judge whether or not the guy you're talking about was actually useful, so it's likely that I just worked with a team that was good at this job, and you worked with one that wasn't, but (IMO) technical people are often too quick to judge the non- and only-partially- technical roles in the organization as being less useful than they really are.

Oh, also, if anybody's job is "produce documents", rather than "gain knowledge that can be communicated synchronously through conversation or asynchronously through text" then that's probably a smell. All those meetings after meetings are about the information, not the documentation.

My current boss fits this mold, he has a development background, and I don't know if he can code or not, but when it comes to technical and/or architectural concerns, he 'gets' it, and he's a presenting, selling, webinar fiend. He frequently impresses the hell out of me by simplifying complex requirements down to the basics and saying 'if you guys can get me this subset, that will satisfy most of the costomers/prospects' or 'all I need is this simple subset for most of the reporting requirements'. This dude is Gold.

Thanks so much for posting this.

I am similar to the guy you describe. Background in development but been in analysis for a while now... I kept seeing myself in the descriptions of cretins in this thread while looking for a post like yours.

It's not just about functions and classes. A lot of what happens around actual code is also very important. Specifically where it reduces the amount of code that needs to be written which directly impacts quality.

What a fantastic article. I think the most frustrating thing about this kind of person isn't that they don't do work, but that they'll go out of their way to derail actual work with constant"questions" and "concerns", which always require various meetings, because they need to put their stamp on things. Why write a feature when you can spend a week talking about how to write it instead? Ugh. Bonus points in that now the engineers that are actually productive have to slow down to constantly explain/justify their work, making them look equally mediocre.

This!

I mean, I don't what to say other than punch that person.

I have had the first hand experience with this.

The author starts by claiming he was surprised that he couldn't come up with positive things about a coworker, but then goes on to describe a list of grievances about someone who was clearly intolerable. He even mentions this later:

> If you’re currently doing them, stop. I’m not saying this because you’ll be insufferable (though you will be)

His initial "mistaken" judgment ("how did I get this so wrong? Am I just an idiot?") of the person in question just doesn't seem genuine in retrospect.

I read that as him starting to truly pay attention and notice these behaviors in other people after the original guy had left (and not in the original guy himself).

Honestly I don't think any part of the question is genuine. It's all basically a setup for complaining about his coworkers.

This article is spot on, I've seen all of it play out in the office environment. I used to work with a guy who had little technical chops but managed to become a department manager through a series of such manipulations.

When he first started out as a dev, he would endlessly call useless meetings where he would talk for hours on end about marginal and tangentially relevant things and try to project authority by looking important by hijacking these meetings. No one could tell him to stop calling these meetings because no one wanted to look like they were avoiding work.

Then the upper management mistook his behavior for proactivness and competence and he got promoted to a "tech lead". That made the situation worse because not only did he not back down, but he progressively got even more aggressive and would actively micromanage and derail technical decisions made by the architect simply to exercise authority and to let people know that he was THE decision maker there. Everything he did was based on scoring social points and not doing the thing that had the most merit. Furthermore, he would often have these arguments with people in front of the entire office in a very loud/aggressive tone, which made a lot of people reluctant to disagree, because honestly, what normal person wants to have a huge argument in front of the entire cube farm. He knew this very well and used it to his advantage.

I remember a number of occasions where he would actively overrule other's (very sound) technical decisions with his half baked nonfunctional crap simply to be "right" and to make other people "wrong". Again, all to score points and buy even more authority.

Long story short, he has done a lot of damage and made a number of people quit because of stress and humiliation. He is now one of the higher ups in the company. Mind you, this is a very corrupt old-school company I'm talking about and is barely staying afloat these days. People like this get found out and filtered out very fast in smaller companies run by hackers instead of old socipathic farts with no understanding of technology.

I had a similar experience in a startup founded by ex-googlers.

This is a pretty insightful (and funny and depressing) article. That said, using these approaches can be quite dangerous because you can end up annoying someone with clout. A simpler and safer way to be overrated is simply to do the following:

1) Attend all meetings, ideally be slightly early OR slightly late (and apologetic) but not on-time. One creates the impression you're punctual and eager, the other that you're super busy and important -- so mix it up. If you're always early then you clearly have nothing to do. If you're always late then you're simply disorganized.

2) Reply to all emails within 30-60 minutes (NOT immediately because that increases the probability of an immediate reply). 30 minutes is plenty of time for the sender to get bored and work on something else, e.g. updating Facebook. Ideally if you're being asked to do something you should either request more information or somehow hand it off to a colleague (or, if it's really easy, just do it -- unless you actually enjoy screwing with people). This will create the impression that you are totally on top of things and never the bottleneck.

3) There's no third thing. You're done. You can now rise to the top of virtually any organization. Obviously, it helps to have some clue as to what's going on (e.g. what project you're on and what your role is supposed to be -- your emails should at least make sense in context).

All the other stuff mentioned in the article is great if it works, but potentially lethal if you screw the wrong person. E.g. claiming credit may work great in the short term, but it will make you enemies. Remember, some people in the organization may give a damn or know something. Why take the risk? Just show up to meetings and answer emails. People will assign you credit for modesty if nothing else.

I might add that if you do this stuff, and -- if only to avoid boredom -- pay some attention during meetings, actually read the emails you respond to, and try to be reasonable when you say or write something, you'll actually be a way-above-average contributor to many bureaucracies.

This is good advice, from a straight shooter who has upper management written all over him.

Ouch!

Manipulative people succeed in life, and in business.

Unfortunately, this is a skillset orthogonal to focuses of STEM majors: hence the drama generated by this post.

As the Marines say: improvise, adapt, and overcome.

If you consider the miserable schmuck who barely gets by in his job by playing games to be "successful in life," you're... well, you shouldn't.

Find something you ENJOY doing with your time 40+ hours a week, and do THAT. That is the person who has won at life.

What value does the cheater actually gain? Almost nothing.

I mean, if that job is the only job he can possibly do to survive, and he is genuinely incapable of doing it properly (because doing it properly would, in practice, give him much more actual job security), he has gained a value... but that is a very false hypothetical.

"Success" is such a nebulous term that it's silly to consider the manipulator who enjoys "gaming the system" to be less successful than a worker who enjoys being productive. To assume the person playing games is struggling to stay afloat is to misread the entire workplace environment that allows and rewards manipulating behavior.

It's pretty common for these 'cheaters' to become promoted and get positions with higher pay and power, while people that are technically competent but are not good at self-promotion don't and have to deal with being managed by these incompetent people.

On other discussion boards, I'd assume you were trolling. There is enough good faith on HN that I'll reply honestly.

> miserable schmuck > barely gets by in his job

People who are miserable schmucks barely getting by in their jobs are the very antithesis of the manipulative human I described above. A manipulative person is usually the director of sales. A manipulative person is someone who spends 20-30 hours in the office at the most, and the rest of it with his/her family or vacationing.

You need to understand that manipulation of human beings isn't a character flaw, or something done for its own sake. It is done with a laser-focus on the results. Either you have manipulated the dev/ops team to work unreasonable hours to meet a promise to a major client that will net you alone a 20k benefit at the end of the month or ... you are going to be "just" the sales guy.

People like "us" here on HN are cannon fodder for people who operate at this level. Manipulation, persuasion, sales, negotiation - people who excel at this eat people who "ENJOY" their 40hr jobs.

I - I'm writing honestly here. It's difficult for me to believe you are not trolling. It's a very thin line for me to believe you are writing honestly here.

> cheater actually gain? Almost nothing.

The ability to demand a salary equivalent and easily surpassing that of a 20+ year engineer for ... the ability to sell things? Do you realize this human has no academic expertise whatsoever? They are PAID to manipulate and persuade.

You can call that "cheating". You can find it detestable. You can cry about it in eloquent and persuasive language as you have attempted to do above.

I sincerely do not mean this as an insult but: either you will adapt to the fact that 'success = manipulation' in life, or you will become one of the deluded schmucks in a dead end job because your skills with rails/js are obsolete in 20 years. The ability to manipulate people has infinite job security, and infinite earning potential.

As the Marines say: adapt, and overcome.

The sales folks I know are all very hard workers who often get yelled at for flaws in the software that the engineers didn't care much about. They have an overall view of the product that many engineers should but don't have. They travel a lot additionally to their actual work time which is much bigger than 20 or 30 hours. Also, I have seen engineers being as much guilty of feature creep, if not more than sales. Sales usually want the feature they need for their current customer - fair game (product management must prioritize for the greater good), and they would like the features to be implemented well. Of course their job doesn't scale that well, but they are still very important for major contracts.

Maybe if your sales team is not working this way, you should consider a new employer, the same way many are advocating when the engineering team is broken. Product management, engineering, marketing and sales should work together.

Yep. Geeks really need to appreciate that sales, marketing, etc. are special skills, every bit as much as understanding computers is, and you need these people every bit as much as they need you.

They are actually much more difficult, as are all soft skills that are poorly codifiable. Learning to code is much easier than learning to sell, if only because you can do it alone in a basement with a PC and a book. The reason we engineers often don't get this is because under "natural conditions" more people without special training possess these skills (which means they're widely applicable in everyday life) and almost nobody has to reinvent computer science to survive.

"People who are miserable schmucks barely getting by in their jobs are the very antithesis of the manipulative human I described above" In three sentences following a several screens of article? Perhaps we will be discussing that?

Manipulative (and skilled) director of sales is good for him. But that wasn't the point.

Manipulative (while skilless) software developer is miserable unless he is able to move into management and do it quick, before he is uncovered and booted. That's what we learned from the article.

> Either you have manipulated the dev/ops team to work unreasonable hours to meet a promise to a major client that will net you alone a 20k benefit at the end of the month or ... you are going to be "just" the sales guy.

That is a failure on the dev/ops teamlead though, in my book. Outside of a technical emergency, teams shouldn't do overtime and their leads should make that happen.

If the work is too much, additional people are required. Otherwise or if no other people are acquired, the work gets done as fast as it gets done and that's apparently sufficient.

(And yes, I am aware of the abhorrent 'culture' of startups that engineers and workers are hired for N hours and expected to work for 2*N hours at least to be 'loyal' to the company)

Sadly, middle management in large companies is full of miserable schmucks like this. They tend to get promoted, have pretty good salaries and rather small work-time.

It is sad, because good middle management tend to make huge difference. It is exactly the position where these do the most damage.

Remember these days cheating is called 'Smart Work'! People who work hard are considered fools, who inevitably do all the work for some one who can exploit their work to his/her benefit. In our society financial worth is the sole measure of success, and unless you get caught doing something illegal the more manipulative you are, the more you are considered smart.

Unfortunately if you take a real hard look at it, much of that is true. I know great programmers who do great work, only to find some one at the top levels take all the credit, and make the programmer look like a replaceable cog in the wheel. Fat bonuses, promotions, foreign travel, big pay slips et al are taken for things like 'nurturing innovation', 'demonstration of leadership' which is basically making somebody else to the job, while not moving a finger towards the goal yourself, then just blanket claiming the credit for the all work and in the meanwhile making it look like it would have been impossible for anything to get done in their absence.

There is an entire mass populace of people that makes fortunes doing things this way. And such people as I said are considered 'smart'.

In many ways I feel Ayn Rand said was very right. The progress of the world depends on a select few prime movers, then there is always a crowd which makes it big by merely begging, cheating, leeching, stealing and sycophancy.

Some of these habits may indeed be true of overrated people, although some may just be true of successful people. (Overcommunicating versus undercommunicating, for instance.)

But I think that one of the characteristics of genuinely successful, contributing, people, which I hope we all strive to be, is that they focus on their job and goals, rather than fall into the trap of gossiping about or being distracted by how others are getting ahead.

How does this kind of stuff get voted up? He's clever, but ultimately just doing a lot of complaining about his co-workers.

I agree.

what is being said closely resembles corporate/government structure and it's people (successful) ones at least by my experience. Mostly doing fiercely mediocre job and doing the social part they advance themselves for sole benefit of themselves. Where this goes against the grain of hn community is that people who gather here are self starter types and have started or looking up to who did start their own gig to avoid being in the same environment where people like that strive - corporate ladder climbers etc..

Because it helps us see patterns that we might not be aware of otherwise.

I'm glad this guy is complaining because having a few people who are political or manipulative, especially if they are unproductive or incompetent, can kill projects or startups. And oftentimes those people are there and aren't recognized, or they have some slight competency but are manipulative and hurt the more productive team members.

Obviously in the most elite teams this usually isn't an issue because people are too competent to admit or tolerate incompetence or the type of BS described in the article. But there are plenty of otherwise decent teams affected by this.

+1 on this comment. We have someone like this. Slight competency and unproductive. His political manipulation (good competency there) damages the team's overall productivity and cohesion. Thankfully the people on top seem to have woken up to this - we are not in the US though, so no easy way to get rid of him.

I'd like to add another to the list:

X) Point out massive, widespread architectural flaws, then kick off your boots till someone else fixes them. When asked to do something you don't like, point to that as a blocker.

While useful to know the weaknesses of a system, the otherwise incredibly useful skill of being able to see such flaws can definitely be squandered if not used judiciously.

I showed this Fedex commercial to my team as an example of what not to do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNCrMEOqHpc

I think the most important thing (just as important as hiring) as a manager is creating a culture of giving credit to others and deflecting credit from oneself. Let others speak for your work because if it's good, someone will say something (and if they don't you should bring it up in a 1:1), because that's the expectation and the culture.

Once you do that, everything else takes care of itself in terms of department drama. People who are naturally well mannered will fit in perfectly and people who would have been problems in other environments understand that this is the type of behavior that's expected if they hope to progress, so they will follow suit.

Besides that, correctly evaluating performance is important. For engineering managers, one thing I noticed is that code doesn't lie. It's the most objective metric you can use. All other metrics are subjective, and should be weighed less in comparison. If you have no way to easily look up someone's code contributions, it is nearly impossible to evaluate talent correctly.

Still trying to figure things out but those are just some of the things I noticed.

Covey would probably encourage you to understand the insecurities of these people and address them in a more positive way. Your mileage from his advice may vary.

If you need a quick Covey review, take a 3 minute break and watch this: http://www.brevedy.com/7-habits-3-minutes-video/

>What I'd like to hear from the OP is ways to counteract this kind of behavior, I suspect there might not be a way to do it if you're a peer, only if you're that person's boss.

I think the article misses an important point - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance (Hanlon's Razor). Many of these behaviours are not malicious, but are borne out of lack of experience, fear of failure, shyness or just plain misunderstanding. As a peer, you can certainly assist with these issues. It should always be your first assumption when appraoching the situation.

However, if you are dealing with a verified malicious/manipulative/lazy person I think its management's responsibility to do something about these behaviours. As a peer I think you can be proactive to expose some of these behaviours and the impact they have on productivity and team morale.

The key word is transparency.

Transparency to these people is like sunlight to a vampire. They will do anything to avoid it. The tightrope act is highlighting these problematic behaviours to management or other peers without being a dick about it. A key part of this is challenging the behaviour rather than the person. Tackle issues as if they are shared problems you need to solve rather than 'you versus me'.

Here are some approaches that have worked for me:

>Be Bossy and Critical

This is easy. If someone tries to palm off their work to me, or give I simply ask them to run it past management first as it may impact the deadline for other tasks. 90% of the time they never ask. The 'Oh my god, whats up with the reports? Am I going to have to do this myself??' attack is even easier to handle if you can exercise a bit of self-control and avoid getting defensive. Just reply via email (and CC the project manager) 'Yes, thankyou for offering! I'm snowed under with my allocated tasks so we'll have a better result if you're able to finish these reports'.

By thanking them for their generous offer, you turn the whole situation on its head. What a team player!

> Shamelessly Self Promote

Line up the self-promoted activities with the goals of the project. If they match, well, thats ok. If they dont, ask how we as a team can ensure we hit our deadlines. Remember that we're all a team, and we all (management included) want to hit our deadlines. As a team, will we have to cut back on any low priority tasks? What should the team be prioritising? Team Team Team.

> Distract with Arguments about Minutiae

Acknowledge the minutiae, do not dismiss it. Then ask how they see this impacting the project deliverables. Remember with project teams (and particularly software teams) each individual is focussed on their part of the puzzle....and that small piece becomes their whole world. I dont see this behaviour as malicious. Just a side effect of the tunnel vision required for difficult programming tasks. It helps to 'come up for air' every now and then and see the big picture. That puts these minutiae issues into perspective. Ask them to raise it as a discussion item post-deadline. Share your own little minutiae problem and how much it annoys you, but describe how you live with it because ultimately there are more important things to worry about. In my experience, this minutiae thing is not about laziness, its about team empathy and acknowledgement of effort.

> Time It So You Look Good (Or Everyone Else Looks Bad)

This is one of my pet hates. I work with an international team and some people really abuse the time difference with this scam. When two people on the opposite sides of the globe do this, its a thing of beauty. 4 days of non-work to restore a SQL .bak file. To be honest I dont know how to deal with this aside from daily progress reports which expose how little work is getting done. Explicity stating 'if you encounter a problem that stops you, just put it aside as we dont have the time to lose' sometimes helps.

> Plan Excuses Ahead of Time

I've noticed that sometimes this is not about excuses, its about a lack of confidence. Perhaps bad time syncing in linux can cause big problems? Who knows? Many people are scared of breaking things they do not understand. This is a reasonable attitude. Just need to encourage pro-active thinking. Ask them what they did instead? Perhaps set up a couple of VMs that people can play with and not worry about breaking? We've had alot of success with this approach. We had a support team who couldnt solve any customer tickets because they were terrified of 'messing with the system' and hadnt received proper training. After a couple of months active encouragement, a no-blame approach to problems, and a few short training sessions focussing on how to diagnose issues rather than following a script....they became incredibly effective. Now they'll jump right in, have a go, if they cant fix it, they'll describe what they did and where they got stuck. Ticket turnaround time dropped by about 75%.

> Take Credit in Non-Disprovable Ways

I dont really know how to handle this. It used to worry me but I dont really care any more. I've had the most indivual success when I remain team focussed instead of expending mental energy worrying about my personal brand. Granted, I now work in a large organisation. I've seen this behaviour in a small company (ie a manager/owner 'king of the castle' egomaniac) and it was terminal. Time to polish up the CV.

> The key word is transparency.

> Transparency to these people is like sunlight to a vampire. They will do anything to avoid it.

I think it's the opposite. People like that - I think michaelochurch calls them psychopaths - like, in my experience, be transparent (or at least, appear to be transparent, but in any case they will openly promote transparency). They will always have something to say. "I did this and that to make the system better and to share better information between us." They will be able to talk at length about what they are doing and how it will make everybody's life better.

Certainly these people are communicative, but that doesnt make them transparent. In my mind transparency implies an outsider having a reasonably accurate picture of the true state of affairs. These people (some of them psychopaths) will go to extraordinary lengths to convince as many people as possible that they are doing the great thing.

>They will be able to talk at length about what they are doing and how it will make everybody's life better

There is no crime in this. Everyone should think about these things. But I would argue that the malicious people need to spend more time communicating with many people to manage their perception - its almost like a propaganda war.

>openly promote transparency

This is vital information. If they openly promote transparency, you can use this attitude to suggest and implement real transparency in systems and workflows. Most of these people will recoil in horror at the idea of being exposed.

You are correct in that transparency is to those people like light is to vampires. If you (or anyone else) is interested in the academic treatment of these 'games' (that is what they are called), read Eric Berne's short book "Games People Play". In the book it is explained how what you called "transparency" can be achieved by giving the player the "antithesis" to his game.

Brilliant, i'll check it out.

Can you recommend further academic publications or research on this type of toxic behaviour in the workplace? What is the term for these people? Some of them are psychopaths but that seems a bit extreme for this range of behavioural traits.

Sociopaths, not psychopaths. Psychopaths lack planning ability and often exhibit poor impulse control. They're often pretty easy to spot since their behavior is generally obvious.

Sociopaths, on the other hand, are very much worse. They are clever enough to "pass" and to create and pursue long term plans.

I have unfortunately worked with one guy that seemed to me to be pretty far along on that continuum of sociopathy. He was constantly backstabbing and manipulating and really fucked me over hard, all because he saw it as a way to get ahead. He lied, dissembled, and only in a truly transparent group setting was I able to call his actions out.

I went on Christmas vacation with everything "good" with my team and came back to my manager asking me why my module was "completely fubared," according to my colleague. So I sat down with my manager and my accuser and went through the code line-by-line to explain the function and reasoning behind the code, then showed it working in our codebase repo. My accuser, with nothing else to throw at me said that he "had been confused by the names of the classes."

He still managed to convince management that I didn't deserve a bonus and he did, despite his poor track record. THAT is the danger of these sorts of people, and a hard lesson learned that I _have_ to play politics enough that I am sure I am not being thrown under the bus rather than just focusing on being a creative and productive member of the team.

While my manager and the accuser were good buddies through most of the project, the accuser's true nature began to shine through and now he's moved across the country, presumably with new bridges to burn.

I created an account just to upvote this, I think this is brilliantly put :) When I started my career in software at a large corp, it took me four years to figure why passive behavior was pervasive in my team and how I could counter it. I can humbly attest to a lot of the ideas in your post as they did work for me as well. I also feel that most people do not feel very comfortable in interfering with team dynamics in a peer role as they mostly consider it a job for the managers. But in my opinion, one is entitled to work towards fostering an environment he/she would like to be in. Whether that is benefiting or hurting the team is a judgement the management can make and act on it.

Thank you for your kind words. I strongly agree with you about fostering a positive work environment at the peer level. I think it compliments rather than interferes with the responsibilities of management. I've found that simply maintaining a strong team focus and a generous attitude to knowledge sharing makes a big difference. I'm glad to see some research that backs this up:

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/givers_take_al...

http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/isb/analytic.pdf

Nicely written. I met way too many folks like that during my time at Google, it was very frustrating when someone would say "Oh be like so-an-so, he is very successful." and I would say "But he doesn't actually do anything." and they would say, but he is successful at it. :-)

I don't know about the Slackware anecdote, in a similar situation if I was the manager I would just let them go. But that brings me to the real point of this, which is managing such people is pretty surreal. Especially if they are in full on misdirection mode. I suppose if you can get to some concrete deliverables for them, that they are not allowed to bother anyone else for, you can test their ability to complete some task or not.

This article is a great Impostor Syndrome trigger.

Thanks for making me look up [1] that term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

This is exactly what I was thinking. How does one go about deciding whether he has impostor syndrome or is highly overrated because of his "7 habits"?

I found this article particularly amusing because I think we all see these behaviours in ourselves some of the time. The real trouble comes if you're working in this way most or even all the time.

A follow up post on resume/interviewing would be equally illuminating. Every organization needs its team players and people who are 'useful' rather than merely 'pruducutive' in the sense of objective talent. But the bozo-factor is more what this essay is getting at, and it seems for the most part these are the folks best left in place at their current gigs.

Anyone notice that this reads more-or-less like a description of Steve Jobs?

Ha, no.

I don't even know the guy

I've found that over time bullshitters who produce only noise are weeded out eventually, but there's also the opposite problem of actual producers stay so quiet that upper management has no idea who they are what they do, in which case it's good to demo your work to upper management whenever possible, even if not asked to, ask the top brass for time to show them something then give a quick demo explaining the business case of why that thing you created will change how the business operates for the better. This is especially joyful if you have a bullshit supervisor and you have to go around them to demo up, it makes clear to upper management that you create and maybe your supervisor just creates noise.

It happened to me once but the upper management couldn't really care because it's a startup with no real business yet.

Also, later I found that although the upper management criticise about X privately but claims their support to X in public. I guess that the upper management could not admit that they made such a mistake, the whole company would lose their faith if it's officially confirmed that they have been wasting time for years.

I wonder how should one behave if such person is your colleague or team member. The article concludes "don't be that guy" but that doesn't help if that guy is your colleague. Any thoughts from HN?

This is pretty much the selection criteria for "The Apprentice".

For the panel or the fantasists that appear on the show?

Justified, because they are very amusing to watch.

There is a fine line. Sometimes these habits are required to fend off being underrated. I've been on projects where the attempts to make people look bad are brutal and relentless.

Another scenario I experienced was where I took a contract at a company where my cousin is CIO. It wasn't pleasant, there was a constant assumption that I was just there through nepotism, and that I was overrated.

I work with someone like this and he has 6 out of 7 of these habits/attributes. No speculation. I completely agree with this article in terms of perceived vs actual productivity. Coupled with that are perceived super skills, but which are actually quite novice. Just another framework jockey.

For the 7th, he is not an over-communicator - but has these hazy / fuzzy communications at stand up.

Well put. But I think this is only half the picture. What happens when you do NOT have these habits, and are on the verge of being labelled the most incompetent/lazy team member, even though it might be you doing the actual work. Won't such a person, seeing that his work isn't being appreciated, get down to actually following these habits to be appreciated?

8. Protect your job: Write code that only you can maintain. Always have a "backlog" in dev that needs you to promote it. Cultivate customers who want only you.

9. Bring up the same fundamental company flaws every staff meeting. This is very easy to do because there are so many and they hardly ever get fixed. "Testing is broken because..."

10. Provide vivid postmortems of problems in meetings and emails. Again, this is so easy to do (and, oddly, greatly appreciated by management).

11. Block out tons of time in Outlook for "faux meetings". You must be important to be so hard to schedule.

12. Leave complex voice mail instructions: "If this is for ORP, contact Joe. If this is for Europe, ping me at...". Makes you look way more important than you really are.

13. Always have lots of complex diagrams on your white board. Change them often.

14. Always have lots of paper plastered to your wall. Change it often.

15. Publish & email explicit status reports often. Make it look like you're the only one who really knows what's going on. "I talked to Mary and she said we have to..."

16. Write & deploy lots of "generating" software that writes other software and runs cron jobs. Make sure your initials are perpetuated on logs everywhere.

17. Always walk quickly. Never have enough time to talk. "How's it going, John? Catch up with you later. Late for a meeting in dev..." (Bonus: always carry important looking papers/folder)

18. Always be on your cell phone. (Not texting or surfing; that make you look like a slacker. Always talking loudly and urgently: "No! The other log program!")

19. Always leave food on your desk. Only busy people never have time to finish what they're eating.

20. Always have treats to share with others. They may not realize it, but they'll probably never allow themselves to notice any of your possible apparent faults.

21. Get your name/initials on as many tickets and documents as possible, even those with only one line of code of just a quick comment on some little thing. People subconcisouly measure in quantity as much as quality. ("Wow, Ed's really been busy lately!")

22. Never use the words "but" or "can't". Put others down (thus elevating yourself) without offending them.

23. Always say things like "Yes, of course," "I am at your service," or "If you ever need help, let me know," You don't actually have to do anything. Just say that you will. People will remember it as if you actually did something.

24. Never chit chat in the break room, hallway, or social get-togethers. Don't accidently destroy your carefully cultivated "too busy" persona.

I once saw a technical manager forced his team to use a poor language he developed to rewrite the company's product to secure his position.

It's a few year ugly process. But it worked for him. His position is very secure now.

So, stop me if I'm crazy, but I thought vivid postmortems were actually valuable?

Vivid post-mortems are valuable if they serve their purpose: Motivating action that prevents future post-mortems.

But post-mortems themselves are not valuable at all. Quite the opposite: Every post-mortem signifies that something has died. Resurrecting the dead has probably consumed a lot of time and resources that could have been better spent on something else.

An organization should never write the same post-mortem twice, and should see the rate of post-mortems diminish over time, to the point where they are incredibly rare. But that doesn't always happen.

Instead, fetishizing post-mortems can be a real problem. It is easy to accidentally build an engineering culture that glorifies firefighting. Every day an expensive team of trained technicians comes to work and dives into the usual series of daily emergencies. Each emergency winds up with a glowing after-action report that gets filed with the other reports. People compete to tell the most entertaining tales of command-line heroics in the face of hilariously broken systems. It can actually be kind of fun, like a game. Everyone feels very productive and important, because without constant vigilance the software would die dozens of times every day. And the post-mortems may be of the highest quality, because every employee has ample opportunity to practice writing them.

In such an environment it's astonishingly easy to lose the plot: It is better to be the organization whose software consistently works, and which never writes post-mortems because nothing ever dies. A boring report is a quality report!

I think it's good to build a culture where having to write a postmortem is a mark of shame. It seems incredibly perverse to do otherwise, and while I appreciate the thrill of a good crisis, any professional should endeavor to do no more and no less than sleep soundly knowing that nothing will break and page them at night. (Developers aren't in the on-call rotation? That's your first problem.)

You know, you are right, this all seems wrong on paper. But that fact remains that it works. It works in impressing your boss and others. It helps in promotion. It's like marketing. I don't believe in doing so personally, because I lack this skill. But I am working on developing it.

I'd heartily recommend the book version of The Peter Principle. A lot of people are probably familiar with its namesake principle, but the book goes into a lot more detail about what the implications of it are and wider concepts of useless and destructive employee patterns.

How do management not spot these behaviours? I've worked at places where habits would be a sure-fire recipe for a stellar performance review--heck, some line managers even suggested that I adopt a couple!

Having made some poor choices and ending up with overrated people for the last several years over and over; I narrowed it down to two things.

1. Ego - Low Self Esteem and Narcisstic behaviour

2. Finding excuses not to get things done.

Sounds like Patty McCord's been following this guide to a T.

Funny article, but don't people see through this very quickly? Folks that don't play well with others get found out very quickly.

The trick is to be subtle and nice while doing it, especially around important people. You're not coming off as bossy but over-helpful. You're not being critical to be mean, but you're sharing your expertise and giving advice about the right way to do things. You always pick a level where you're aggressive enough that people move around you as you wish, but not so much as to cause issues.

OP's advice (and if you get to the end, he points out that this will not work except in a dysfunctional environment) is great for people who are looking to inject themselves into power vacuums. If the boss is never there and you start asking for status reports, people start treating you as if you were the boss-- and being passively deferential in the hope that you'll go away and let them get back to work-- and soon enough you've made yourself #2. Then you just need to get the real boss promoted or demoted or fired or disinterested enough to vacate.

OMG..damn accurate as I experienced the same by one of the teammate.But as a contract employee I can't do much

People who behave this way are generally too self-absorbed to realize that they are behaving this way.

> 4. Distract with Arguments about Minutiae

Aka, pg's "middlebrow dismisal".

I could write a book on these types of tactics. For instance, in a meeting that involves your boss, command your coworkers to do what they were all already going to do. "Commit that change and send out an email describing what you changed." They can't not do their job, so it appears to your boss that everyone else is taking orders from you. If someone challenges you, passive-aggressively suggest a time they can get help from you.

I have seen this, too. But all those tactics can and will backfire. Soon the 'overrated' will be cut off from information and support.

>I could write a book on these types of tactics.

It's called the 48 laws of power. Specifically your example is Rules 6,7 and arguably 34.

If Moses was the most modest man in the world; would he even make a statement claiming he was the most modest man in the world?

I can handle a little self promotion, but it's always from the wrong guy. Too many of those wrong guys had wealthy fathers who financed every thing. I guess in order to get laid, or promoted they need to let people know what "talents" they have? Some of you computer guru's are the worst offenders.

This is some terrific advice on how to hold on to a paying job while finding some time (and mindspace) to work on my startup idea -- great!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com