[HN Gopher] Building Personal and Organizational Prestige
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Building Personal and Organizational Prestige
Author : jger15
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-10-03 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lethain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lethain.com)
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| An alternate approach is to focus on building credibility, and
| prestige will naturally follow. And you'll seem less artful and
| more authentic about it as well.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This. Prestige is a thing that I don't value, either for myself
| or others, at all. Credibility, though, is everything.
| throwaway_08932 wrote:
| I can check off the boxes in the "Is building prestige worthwhile
| for you?" list for the segment of companies that I care about.
| (Not huge ones.)
|
| I've done a lot of "public prestige building." But the things
| that actually got me to this point, quickly, were:
|
| 1. Being close to the money within the companies I worked at
|
| 2. Keeping up a habit of meeting and talking to people 1-1
|
| I realized about five years ago that I enjoy meeting people 1-1
| much more than publicly writing and speaking. You can say things
| a lot more honestly 1-1 without worrying about who might see it
| one day, and it makes me feel better than trying to turn myself
| into a public spectacle.
|
| With folks getting much more comfortable meeting remotely, this
| has become even easier. I've met some great folks who I now have
| outside-of-work relationships with as well. Usually all it takes
| is asking someone if they'd like to meet again in three months or
| so; and, after a couple of these, asking them if there's someone
| they wouldn't mind introducing on a no-agenda basis.
|
| I also genuinely don't have an agenda for this, other than that I
| like meeting people.
|
| However, I also find this opening statement telling:
|
| > Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader
| who believes they'd be a candidate for significantly more
| desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known.
|
| Most of us are bad at self-introspecting about our careers. I
| suspect a lot of the folks thinking this way need more than brand
| recognition, because this perspective (to me) would be a
| potential sign of lack of maturity that I would want in a senior
| leader. (This is a complex topic, and one that I think needs to
| be handled on case-by-case basis rather than recommending general
| approaches.)
| Yhippa wrote:
| > 1. Being close to the money within the companies I worked at
|
| This is the #1 bit of advice I give to people if they ask for
| it about jobs at companies.
| cas2325 wrote:
| Could you elaborate a bit on what this means?
| scottshamus wrote:
| Work on revenue-generating projects/products. When push
| comes to shove, cost centers are cut first. If you work on
| search ads at Google, you have a lot of job security. I
| wouldn't want to work on customer support tools there...
| singleshot_ wrote:
| I used to work in vendor professional services. After the
| salespeople closed a deal that hit the sweet spot between
| your needs, how much money you were willing to spend, and
| the sales guy's quota, I'd come in to explain what you
| really bought, how much it could do, and figure out a plan
| to use what they bought to get them at least part of the
| way to their goal.
|
| Customers hated me because I was always telling the
| something less than the salesperson did. They also were not
| crazy about paying me to give them bad news. Salespeople
| couldn't handle me because they couldn't hide their sales
| puffery during my implementation efforts. The rest of the
| company was perennially tired by my team asking for one-
| offs or advanced techniques to make impossible things out
| of what our customers bought. This is what it's like when
| you're not near the money: the rest of the rig feels like
| it's working at cross-purposes and you're a cost center.
|
| Meanwhile my sister is a commercial lender at a bank. She
| writes loans. That's a pretty good example of a person who
| cannot help being in line with the money: not only is she
| selling the company's product, but the product is actually
| money. Whereas when you're out of line with the money
| you're constantly forced to justify your working existence,
| the guy in line with the money can just take a slice of the
| deal.
| cbau wrote:
| There's usually a team that is directly responsible for the
| part of the product that generates revenue, and management
| loves them. Every other team is basically just support and
| may be necessary but they don't get as much attention.
| esafak wrote:
| 'coz companies are not good at estimating and attributing
| added value. It's genuinely hard.
| zwieback wrote:
| Agree and in addition to enjoying meeting and working with
| people 1-1 I found that the single most effective thing I've
| done in my career is trying to help people solve their
| problems. This may appear counterintuitive in early career but
| it pays off massive dividends. Especially if you're not job-
| hopping anymore and have maybe settled down in a longer-term
| position.
|
| A lot of the people I've helped or cooperated with are now
| managers that remember working with me and even though I've
| stayed an individual contributor I have a lot of leverage.
| throwaway_08932 wrote:
| Definitely. It can help a lot to get to know the details of
| what's going on and try to make things happen that improve
| the situation, rather than taking sides. There's a lot of
| knee-jerk fear reactions that people have to things that have
| never even happened to them, and they miss the details
| because of it.
|
| And sometimes, the people around the problems just refuse to
| collaborate. In those situations, I try my best for a bit,
| and then go look for something else. We only have so much
| time and energy, and we already inherit enough intractable
| problems that "must" be solved to go looking for more.
| makr17 wrote:
| Definitely agree. In my mid-20s I was at a startup. Without
| any exaggeration, every job I've had since then links
| directly back to that first company. Somebody I worked with
| then has a problem now that needs solving, and remembers how
| I helped with their problems at the time.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "The best way to get what you want is to help other people
| get what they want." - provenance forgotten
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think this is the primary key to all the success I've
| ever had, both professionally and personally. I usually say
| it a bit differently, though: "You get what you give",
| which has the advantage of also capturing the flip side of
| that coin.
| chatmasta wrote:
| This is really a question of depth vs. breadth. Focusing on
| cultivating individual relationships is building depth of
| connections and experience, as any one of them will happily
| assist or recommend you. Focusing on prestige is building
| breadth because your brands can open doors to external people
| who haven't met you but see the brand as a proxy for some
| metric they're evaluating.
|
| While balancing the two of them is important, personally I'd
| prioritize building depth over breadth whenever I have the
| choice. You can only trade off your brand for so long.
| Shallow connections are good for bouncing between networks
| and climbing ladders, but eventually you'll need depth. Also,
| I'd rather work with people who value depth over those who
| treat shallow brand associations as a reliable proxy for
| qualities they find important in people with whom they work.
|
| Also IMO, in general, thinking about this kind of stuff is
| revelatory of a transactional attitude that many will find
| offputting.
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