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Comment by fsk | Hacker News Reader

I had a completely different interpretation of the incident at Facebook.

He had developed some key features that were now important. Instead of mentoring him to work better with others, his boss demoted him.

The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.

The OP probably had big $$$ in unvested options, so he had to play along and play nice, instead of quitting on the spot.

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I'm going to write a follow up about how I wasn't mad about the feedback as much as I was mad nobody had told me sooner. We were a young company and didn't really have a management or mentorship skillset yet. We would all develop that together in the ensuing years and this was a major part of my motivation for pushing for it.

I still say that someone gave you a shit sandwich, and tricked you into believing that it tasted good.

I'm a lot happier. If that's a trick, I'm not mad about it.

Are they making you say this? Blink once for yes, two for no.

Sounds like there weren't any grownups around, honestly. I'm also getting the feeling that it's a fire-happy kind of place, maybe I'm wrong but that could explain the note-passing childishness. Maybe they were afraid of getting canned if they talked back to you.

I don't know if this is a lesson about being nice or a lesson about dealing with different personality types, I guess it depends on how much of an asshole you actually were. Personally I'd prefer an environment where you call my work "shit" and I say you have your head up your ass, it saves time and it's better than passive-aggressive weirdness and underhandedness but not everybody is like that.

Any place where people are arbitrarily fired is going to be toxic though, the reaction from the CTO and a few other things I've heard about Facebook kind of makes me think that's what's going on.

> The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.

so, basically someone who was competent and agreeable was favored by his boss to get a promotion, and the person who acted like a know-it-all dickhead 24/7 got sent to the basement.

that's a real shocker.

You're confused about how the dickhead non-dickhead spectrum works.

From the viewpoint of a dickhead, an honest and intelligent person is a dickhead. The honest and intelligent person has the potential to expose the dickhead as a dickhead, so the dickhead will do everything he can to convince everyone else that the honest and intelligent person is a dickhead.

A dickhead would see an honest and intelligent person as a dickhead, and be able to lie convincingly enough to establish it as fact in the eyes of others.

In fact, a highly skilled dickhead can convince an honest person that "standing up for yourself" is a dickhead behavior.

I have no way of telling if the OP is a dickhead or not, because I haven't met him. My guess is "not a dickhead, he was just convinced by dickheads the he actually was the dickhead".

So, he learned to act in a manner least likely to offend dickheads. I don't want to work with dickheads, so I don't bother with that skill.

seeing as how there are, in this very thead, people that consider OP to have been a dickhead, i think i'm going to go with the primary source on this one.

Considering how the OP is the mythical 10x-100x programmer, I'd lean towards him not being a dickhead. He singlehandedly implemented several key features for FaceBook.

If FaceBook had an average employee instead of the OP, they might not have been as successful.

It's possible to be highly skilled in one area and very weak in another, and the median is almost always more important to the long-term success of a business. Look at it from the perspective of a CEO: is a hot-shot programmer nobody wants to work with more or less likely to be productive than a well-integrated team with a dozen people? Would you want to bet your company on that one person staying healthy, employed by you, never making a mistake, etc. or do you want to bet on a long-term model more sustainable than “Make sure this person never leaves”?

This is why the 10x mythologizing is so annoying. There are a few people who are 10x in specific areas or who might have periods of intense productivity but it's never true across the board for significant periods of time, and it's used to excuse a lot of bad behaviour by 1.2x programmers — not to mention the larger mistake of assuming that the limiting factor on projects is rarely absolute programming ability. In most cases, you see far better results from someone who might be maligned as a .8x programmer who communicates well with the team & users and relies on solid tools and practice rather than assuming sheer skill will save the day.

On the one hand, I've been in situations where dickheads would undermine me behind my back to management, tell me other people were undermining me, act like I was I a dickhead if I responded to a direct question from management directly instead of clearing it through them.

On the other hand, the dickhead always thinks he's a non-dickhead.

If everyone you meet is a dickhead, you're the dickhead.

So be kind to everybody, dickhead or non-dickhead.

Indeed. We should be under no illusion -- employment is a popularity contest. In non-startups, the only thing that matters is how much the people around you, especially the high-ranking people, like you. Other things matter only in the most extreme circumstances -- every normal value can be hand-waved away if the boss likes you enough.

If you want to be a successful employee, view yourself as a politician and run a successful campaign: minimize anything that will be viewed negatively, blatantly exploit peoples' biases to emphasize a positive image. Don't talk about divisive subjects, regardless of their relevance to your job. Anyone smart enough to see what's going on but naive enough to call you out will immediately be viewed badly, the only real threat to your power is someone who is smart enough to see the manipulation and experienced enough to respond to it through his own counter-manipulations.

Why bother learning how to write software? I should have focused on sales if that's the only skill that matters.

Welcome to Life 101. It's all about sales + skill. Skill is one part of the equation, necessary but not sufficient. Sales is the other part - unfortunately a great salesman can go very far without hard skills (to be fair, a great salesman has unique skills).

This is a hard fact about life and something a lot of talented people realize way too late. Now you know. Focus on your pitch - ABC - always be closing. Every interaction in life is a transaction of some sort - your sales strategy will determine if you get a good deal or a raw deal.

"Every interaction in life is a transaction of some sort."

What about when a mother kisses her baby's head? What about when a friend offers a hug to someone who has just lost a loved one? What about when a kid gives a friendly smile to the kid who always gets bullied?

Are those transactions? Did those people get "good deals"?

Now I'm just some hyperbole-prone kid who isn't qualified to give advice to a Life Veteran like yourself, but I find myself wondering what you might learn if you stopped keeping score for awhile. In my experience, treating every interaction as a little game to maximize profit is a great way to scare away anyone who is interested in anything more worthwhile than profiting off of you.

Of course those are all transactions. The helping hand, the caring kiss from the depths of motherly love, etc - they are win-win transactions. The baby gets comfort and love and the mother gets a dose of oxytocin to encourage further bonding. The friend offering a hug provides comfort and gets the good feelings of helping/offering comfort. Win-wins, but still a transaction, an exchange of value. Time, attention, love, care - these are all benefits that can be given and received.

Same with business - win-win transactions are best. When you provide something that others find valuable and you receive something valuable in return (loyalty, money, hype, etc) it's a good thing.

Surely you would agree that the amount of oxytocin the mother gets is not determined by the quality of her "sales strategy."

Thank you for clarifying that you were not advocating the rather shallow, exploitative, and depressing approach to life that I misinterpreted from your previous comment.

> What about when a mother kisses her baby's head? What about when a friend offers a hug to someone who has just lost a loved one? What about when a kid gives a friendly smile to the kid who always gets bullied?

Well, there are the obvious ones: evolutionarily beneficial responses. Still transactions, unconsciously working for the benefit of the species.

The others are more selfish. Obviously not angry or malicious, but they convey certain clear benefits for little to no effort. Definitely transactional.

Just because they are transactions, however, doesn't mean you have to weigh them in terms of some sort of emotional "profit", or they're in any way unwanted. It's just a way of talking about them, even modelling them for study.

chances are you're not nearly good enough to warrant being a torvalds-esque dickhead.

Nobody is good enough to warrant being a torvalds-esque dickhead.

"get away with" is entirely different.

I think the world would be a better place if Torvalds took a couple martial arts classes and 1) got his ass handed to him a couple of times and 2) felt physically self confident enough that he no longer felt the need to verbally beat every body else up before they got a chance to do it to him.

There are a lot of successful sales people who'd agree with you. Choosing a non-sales field makes it so you don't have to focus on this as much since much of your work is non-social and you have a good excuse to be in a corner staring at the screen, but the social element is still the most important part of maintaining and improving your employment status. Your social status is much more important than the quality of your actual work product.

I'm a lifelong techie, and your remark resonates.

An old and dear friend, who started out as a brilliant civil engineer but moved to marketing where she has spent most of her professional life, would completely ratify your second sentence.

Unfortunately, I find it harder and harder to refute her assertion that in the end, it all comes down to marketing.

If your goal is to have a glorifying career and make lots of money, you should have focused on sales skills.

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