[HN Gopher] I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer
___________________________________________________________________
I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 381 points
Date : 2025-12-04 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lalitm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lalitm.com)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Beautifully-written post, full of insights. Thanks for sharing!
| beernet wrote:
| >> instead of execs telling us "you should do X", we figure out
| what we think will have the most impact to our customers and work
| on building those features and tools
|
| What could possibly go wrong here?
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| The same things that go wrong anyway?
| sd9 wrote:
| What do you mean? The quoted text is the exact strategy I
| always use.
|
| I don't want or need to be told top down what to do, it's
| better to think for myself and propose that upward. Execs
| appreciate it because it makes their jobs easier; users get the
| features they actually want; I get to work on what I think is
| important.
|
| What am I missing that makes this a bad strategy?
| wordpad wrote:
| If your proposal doesn't align with leadership vision or the
| product they want to grow...
| sd9 wrote:
| Well you factor that in too? And be willing to change focus
| if that's the feedback.
| bluGill wrote:
| This can still be okay - but you have to be correct in a
| way that the company values. This of course needs to be
| without doing something against the rest of the company -
| either legally or sabotaging some other product are both
| out. Values is most commonly money, but there are other
| things the company values at times..
| orwin wrote:
| In my experience (I make tools for the network and security
| guys): that's why you don't propose only one thing. We
| often have one new project every year, we propose multiple
| ways to go about it, the leadership ask us to explore 2-3
| solutions, we come back with data and propose our preferred
| solution, the leadership say 'ok' (after a very technical
| two-hour meeting) and propose minor alterations (or
| sometimes they want to alter our database design to make it
| 'closer' to the user experience...)
| qznc wrote:
| I think this is the most efficient approach. Decisions
| _should_ be made at the lowest possible level of the org
| chart.
|
| However, it has an important assumption: You are sufficiently
| aware of higher level things. If you have a decent
| communication culture in your company or if you are around
| long enough to know someone everywhere, it should be fine
| though.
| beernet wrote:
| More often than not, things don't turn out too well if
| engineers decide what to build without tight steering from
| customers and/or upper management. This is exactly what it
| sounds like here. Tech for the purpose of tech. I understand
| this is HN and we have a pro-engineering bias here, at the
| same time, engineers don't tend to be the greatest
| strategists.
| sd9 wrote:
| Customers and management should always be part of the loop.
| This is reflected in the original quote and my comment.
|
| I just think that having to be micromanaged from the top
| down is completely miserable, is worse for the customer,
| and is time consuming for execs. It's not a way to live.
|
| You as an engineer should be familiar with users' needs. I
| got into this field because I love automating solutions
| that help users solve their problems. So of course I want
| to know what they're doing, and have a good idea of what
| would improve their lives further.
| tayo42 wrote:
| The article was about how he doesn't work on a product team
| and only builds internal tools for other coworkers and
| doesn't need all of that overhead
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Nothing, except maybe an asteroid hitting the building and
| wiping out the entire team?
| zdragnar wrote:
| That's the dream at a big company for sure. The last mega tech
| company I worked for had the familiar trap of not knowing how to
| rate higher level engineers. Things basically turned into a
| popularity contest, with grading criteria like your "impact on or
| leadership in the tech community" and other such nonsense.
|
| Quietly making good things and enabling good people to be better
| is where it is at.
| zwnow wrote:
| As long as quietly making stuff pays off, sure. If I get a
| bigger paycheck just from being known by the higher ups I'll go
| for the popularity contest. People work to feed themselves and
| their families after all and considering how unethical big tech
| is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better
| the world. So yeah, popularity contest and doing as little work
| as possible it is.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > People work to feed themselves and their families after all
| and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think
| anything u work on could do anything to better the world.
|
| A little hyperbolic. Members of my family have found great
| utility in accessibility improvements, language translation,
| video calling, navigation assistance, etc.
| zwnow wrote:
| Yea all that is neat if all that data wouldn't be collected
| and sold by all these big tech companies.
| ownagefool wrote:
| The thing about your bigco, the OPs and the post he's talking
| about, is it's all so abstract from money.
|
| You have two poles here.
|
| 1. The VC route, strikes gold, and never really needs to live
| with the reality of asking what an ROI is, it's all talk about
| spotlight, impact and value, without any articulation about
| cash money.
|
| 2. The MBA route where you effectively can't brush your teeth
| without a cost/benefit analysis that itself often cost multiple
| times your initiative, resulting in nothing getting done until
| you're in some tech debt armageddon.
|
| The reality is if you're still making bank on the abstract
| without being able to articulate revenue or costs, you're
| probably still in the good times.
| cm2012 wrote:
| This description of the poles is so true from my experience
| beauzero wrote:
| That was painful to read and acknowledge. Succinct.
| verelo wrote:
| Couldn't agree more (but frustratingly due to HN' shitty mobile
| experience i downvoted this, sorry!)
|
| In a past life i used to complain that people only praised my
| work after i fucked up and subsequently fixed it. I'd go month
| on month of great execution and all I'd hear would be
| complaints, but as soon as i "fixed" a major issue, i was a
| hero.
|
| I've learn that setting appropriate incentives is the hardest
| part of building an effective organization.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Click the "undown" button to undo a down vote.
| ericd wrote:
| You can hit the undown link that shows up?
| neilv wrote:
| I had to mention this in an early startup, when I did some
| firefighting, and the biz people were praising that. I said I
| wanted to set a culture in which engineering was rewarded for
| making things just happen and work, not for firefighting.
|
| A nice thing about early startups is that it's the easiest
| time to try to set engineering culture like this on a good
| track. Once you start hiring people, they will either cement
| elements of whatever culture you're setting, or they'll bring
| a poor culture with them.
|
| (My current understanding, if you find your culture has been
| corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG
| people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre
| seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate
| everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck
| with a shit culture forever.)
| hylaride wrote:
| > (My current understanding, if you find your culture has
| been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG
| people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre
| seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate
| everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're
| stuck with a shit culture forever.)
|
| You just described my last job. It went from one of the
| most productive (and I mean we fucking SHIPPED - quality
| work, usually the first time around), engaging, and fun
| places I've ever worked to a place where a new VP would sit
| in every single group's sprint planing, retros, and
| standups and interject if we deviated one iota from a very
| orthodox scrum framework. The engineering turnover was
| pretty much 95% within a year, with only the most junior
| people remaining because they didn't really know better to
| move on. Work slowed, tech debt ballooned, but OMFG were
| the product managers happy because they were also allowed
| in every step of the way.
|
| Work slowed to a crawl, too. Eventually a private equity
| firm swooped in and made things even worse...
| neilv wrote:
| Condolences.
|
| That sounds like there was some top-down, or mid-down,
| culture changing (which can easily happen as a company
| tries to build a hierarchy, drawing from outside).
|
| Another risk is bottom-up culture. You could have your
| existing leadership the same, but you start hiring ICs
| who bring their culture with them, and you fail to
| nurture the desired culture.
|
| I think one of the concerns with early startups is if the
| early engineering leadership hasn't gotten respect and
| buy-in from the CEO, as the company grows. If the early
| engineering leadership was doing unusually solid work and
| culture, but the CEO thinks they are just random fungible
| commodities, and that now it's time for a different mode,
| then CEO will probably urinate away all that corporate
| strength very quickly.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| You can downvote submissions?
| marssaxman wrote:
| After your karma gets high enough, yes.
| chanux wrote:
| Deep work that's important but does not appear shiny carries an
| elevated risk of being completely messed up by someone.
|
| "Oh this thing here looks steady and boring. This sure does not
| need a team of six."
|
| Next thing you know, the thing falls apart, destabilizing
| everything that stood on it's stability.
| avhception wrote:
| Basically the Sysadmin's dilemma.
|
| Everything working fine: "What are we paying you for?"
|
| Something broken: "What are we paying you for?"
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Yeah, a couple years ago I built a system that undergirded
| what was at the time a new product but which now generates
| significant revenue for the company. That system is
| _shockingly_ reliable to the extent that few at the company
| know it exists and those who do take its reliability for
| granted. It 's not involved in any cost or reliability
| fires, so people never really have to think about how
| impressive this little piece of software really is--the
| things they don't need to worry about because this software
| is chugging along, doing its job, silently recovering from
| connectivity issues, database maintenance, etc without any
| real issue or maintenance.
|
| It's a little bit of a tragic irony that the better a job
| you do, the less likely it is to be noticed. (:
| bakul wrote:
| May be you need to have "scheduled downtime" when your
| undergirding system is down for "maintenance" and they
| will notice! [Half joking... Probably not possible but
| better to have scheduled maintenance than have to do
| firefighting under extreme time pressure]
| LPisGood wrote:
| Note the projects that use that software, also note
| metrics like API calls received, failure recoveries,
| uptime, etc and put that in a promo packet
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Thanks, I genuinely appreciate the advice!
| MyHonestOpinon wrote:
| Unfortunately, in this profession we are being lead by managers
| that do not longer have deep knowledge of how to build good
| software systems. They can't evaluate contributions in code, so
| they resort to evaluate participation, and popularity.
|
| As an engineer you are left with a dilema. Either you focus on
| writing solid code and making your projects move forward or you
| focus on selling your self to the leadership class.
| LPisGood wrote:
| It's so much easier to sell yourself when you write solid
| code
| snoman wrote:
| If you don't write solid code, it's so much more important
| to be better at selling yourself than those who do.
| etothepii wrote:
| An observation here that wasn't quite made but in my opinion is
| supported by the narrative.
|
| If you raise enough capital (whether social or financial) to run
| for 3 years then you can run for 3 years. If your bets are paying
| off 2 years in you can stick with the plan - no one will care how
| you used the capital in year 1 and 2 if there is a payoff in year
| 3.
|
| The risk comes from being wrong.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| > The risk comes from being wrong.
|
| It's definitely a high risk high reward strategy but if you
| have the context from being the space for years _and_ you 've
| done your due diligence by speaking to your customers before
| you build things, you reduce the risk significantly.
|
| Of course the risk can never be zero though and luck definitely
| played a role in past successes.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is another risk: you run for 2 years and prevent a major
| problem that would bite the company in year 3 or 4. However
| because the problem never happened nobody knows how much you
| saved everyone and so you don't replace all that capital you
| used up.
|
| Every company I've worked for has regular meetings where they
| honor the people who stayed late to get the release out the
| door (I work in embedded systems where upgrades often mean
| flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without
| cell service - thus bug free releases are important since
| upgrades are expensive). I can't help thinking every time that
| if the rewarded person had just done their job 6 months ago
| they wouldn't have had the bug in the first place.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Everyone says the thing they're working on is critically
| important. Who's right?
|
| More work gets done for less if you wait until the 11th hour
| and fix the real problems last minute rather than fix
| everything ahead of time, much of which will turn out to not
| have needed fixing.
|
| Yeah there's risks involved but at the limit it makes some
| sense.
| bluGill wrote:
| Who is right is the wrong question here (not that your
| point is wrong - it is correct in some situations but not
| the one I'm talking about). This is a case where the
| features we need for the release were planned in advance
| and management signed off on them - by definition getting
| the feature done is right (even if it turns out customers
| don't want it, at this point we have committed as a
| company). However there are always a few bugs that become
| last minute stop ship issues that should have been
| prevented long ago.
| thijson wrote:
| I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the
| value of disasters that were prevented.
|
| Who is worth more? The person that quietly removes scrub
| brush and other fuel on the ground in the years before the
| forest fire starts, or the person that comes in once the fire
| starts and using lots of equipment and effort puts the fire
| out. Often the latter person gets the accolades, the former
| is a thankless task.
|
| If a company lacks visionary leaders like that, then one must
| wonder if the company has much of a future anyway.
| moregrist wrote:
| > I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the
| value of disasters that were prevented.
|
| I think you should change "visionary" with "competent"
| here.
|
| This industry has been talking about how bad it is to have
| "hero devs" for decades, maybe since it's ENIAC beginnings.
| After a few decades, you'd think this would filter up to
| management.
|
| If you change your example from brush clearing to garbage
| removal it becomes pretty clear: who should get more
| accolades, the guy who takes out the trash or the guy who
| stays up all night treating the infections? Both. It's
| management that fired the custodial staff who should be
| canned.
| bluGill wrote:
| Management knows in the abstract. However they also know
| the value of awards and shipping - both of which can be
| in conflict. They do not know how to resolve this
| conflict.
| dwa3592 wrote:
| That's sounds very Shakespearean.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I forget the exact details, but we had a bug that prevented
| logging in to the app for a large subset of users.
|
| The engineer that caused the bug ended up staying late and
| fixing it. He was treated like an absolute hero by
| management, even though it was his fault in the first place.
| (Don't worry, we all fully understood it wasn't _just_ his
| fault. The whole system failed and he wouldn 't have been
| harshly judged for the problem.)
|
| From then on we joked about adding bugs on purpose so that we
| could all get similar treatment.
| LinuxAmbulance wrote:
| I get the sense that Lalit wants to do the work and get paid
| while avoiding the career meta game. The appeal of that is
| understandable, but having been in this situation in the past,
| it's not all its cracked up to be.
|
| The number of tech companies where you can stay employed for a
| solid decade without falling victim to layoffs or re-orgs are
| very rare in my experience, even more so ones that offer
| competitive pay.
|
| If you find yourself looking for a new job and want to move up in
| title and pay, doing the same sort of unglamorous work for years
| can be a detriment to that.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| It's not that I want to avoid the career metagame (I would
| argue I haven't so far) but that the career metagame is
| different depending on your environment.
| class3shock wrote:
| I know this is off topic but if you ever have the inclination
| to write about it, I would be really interested in reading
| about any books, people, experiences, professional lessons
| learned, etc. that have been helpful to you on progressing
| along a non-spotlight technical focused engineering path.
|
| I'm in a different domain (aerospace) but am trying to carve
| out a similar career path and am always looking for more to
| learn about just being a good engineer.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| > if you ever have the inclination to write about it
|
| I definitely plan on writing a lot more about this in the
| coming months :) After seeing Sean's own posts and the fact
| this post resonated, it feels like there are people out
| there who might be interested in this sort of thing :)
|
| > books, people, experiences, professional lessons learned
|
| Books not so much but one thing i've been very fortunate to
| have is very good mentors I can learn off. I've had the
| same manager from when I first joined Google and honestly
| I've learned _so_ much just from watching him work and
| interact with people. Also a couple of senior directors
| /engineers in other teams as well who I always make a habit
| to catch up with.
|
| If you're interested, stay tuned to the blog :)
| tanepiper wrote:
| This - I've been very honest with my manager that I won't
| play "the game" in this organisation - I don't really have
| to, there is plenty for staff engineers to tackle to have a
| long career without the yoke of management.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| It's easy to write that blogpost when you are in a position of a
| lot of privilege, in arguably the best software engineering
| company in the world, and got where you are surely for your
| competence, but also a high degree of luck.
|
| Some other people has to grind harder and even be better than you
| to get half of your success, that doesn't mean that they are
| wrong, or that the book is wrong.
|
| I believe a lot, if not all advice there in the book is
| necessary. Other people might not work at Google, but as I've
| said before, might need to grind different gears in order to be
| successful, if you don't -- good for you!
|
| A lot of your suggestions would get you fired very quickly on
| many companies, it's good that it all works for you.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| My goal with this post was not to claim this is a universal
| template to success for everyone but simply sharing an approach
| that worked for me.
|
| I tried to point out several times that, yes there are places
| where a "move fast with leadership" approach works better. And
| yes this only works in the biggest companies capable of
| sustaining an infra team for a long period of time.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are staff level jobs like that in every company. However
| they are hard to get into. You have to prove yourself
| constantly and for long enough that the executives trust they
| can leave you alone and you will solve problems. You here means
| your team, as a staff engineer you likely have a lot of more
| junior engineers working under you.
| swaits wrote:
| It's not luck. To assume so, let alone say so, is uninformed
| and quite rude.
|
| Getting into these roles requires a ton of hard work. Yes, it's
| a grind.
|
| If you feel it's only achievable with luck, I suggest you're
| selling yourself short.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| It is a large amount of luck, obviously. You didn't hard-work
| your way out of brain damage at birth. You didn't hard-work
| your way into your geographic location which gave you access
| to the resources that lead you to where you are, which are
| unavailable most places in the world. You didn't hard-work
| your way out of avoiding a draft for a war where you got
| killed at age 18.
| swaits wrote:
| Mmmmkay then.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| Sure, if a butterfly flew past one of our parents on the
| day of our conception, causing them to spend a second
| glancing at it, then they may have had sex slightly
| differently that night and we wouldn't exist. We're all
| lottery winners in a billion different ways.
|
| What is the practical application of bringing that to mind
| when considering what actions to take for career
| advancement?
| palata wrote:
| > It's not luck. To assume so, let alone say so, is
| uninformed and quite rude.
|
| They did not say that. They said it included a high degree of
| luck. It's easier to get there when you grow up in a country
| where you have access to a computer, for instance.
|
| > If you feel it's only achievable with luck, I suggest
| you're selling yourself short.
|
| It most definitely is only achievable with enough luck: given
| the same "hard work", not everyone on Earth will get to the
| same point. I find it amazing how people don't understand
| that.
|
| It doesn't mean that there was no hard work. Just that "I am
| here because nobody on Earth would deserve it more and luck
| has nothing to do with it" is... I don't know...
| narcissistic?
| orwin wrote:
| My brother had an internship in a medium-sized company, and
| after 6 months, a new product (that he was hired for basically)
| and 3 new internal tools (including one for reading data trace,
| which, after reading this, is quite a propos), he was hired as
| a staff engineer.
|
| I do not have his proactivity for sure, nor I have his ease
| with other people, but I managed to land my job in an
| infra/tool for network and security without much difficulties.
| eutropia wrote:
| As a fellow infrastructure and tooling engineer with a long
| tenure on one team: this tracks.
|
| You do occasionally get to scoop up the rare low-hanging fruit to
| get a shiny win that all the engineers appreciate; but for the
| most part it's chill, professional, satisfying work at a pace
| that leaves you with enough sanity to raise a family.
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > If I had followed the advice to "optimize for fungibility"
| (i.e. if I had switched teams in 2023 to chase a new project)
| Bigtrace would not exist.
|
| Would a PM be responsible for this sort of broader thinking in a
| more typical team?
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| > Would a PM be responsible for this sort of broader thinking
| in a more typical team?
|
| Good PMs do exactly this in product teams yes. But
| unfortunately PMs are not immune to shifting priorities and
| moving around either, just like I describe for engineers. So
| it's very hard to make it work but the best PMs I know somehow
| manage anyway!
| mh2266 wrote:
| It's a little snarky and cynical but I've found little use for
| product managers in infra and devx teams because they typically
| don't have the technical background to have relevant product
| vision and anyone that can make L7+ as an engineer on this sort
| of team should be able to figure out what the product should
| be.
|
| This is different in a product team because engineers aren't
| the customers, although I'd still argue anyone senior in a
| product engineering team should still have at least some
| product sense.
| sebstefan wrote:
| Being left alone to build your cathedrals is the dream for me.
| This seems nice.
| bluGill wrote:
| You are only left alone if your cathedrals generate enough
| value while being ignored. The post is about a tools team, so
| long as the tools work and nobody comes selling a "cheaper tool
| that solves everything" management doesn't care and you get to
| work. However if you tools start causing problems for the
| engineers who use them and the complain to management you are
| in trouble. If someone else comes along with a "cheaper tool
| that solves everything" you are in trouble (such tool may or
| may not be cheaper/better, the point is they can sell
| management on the idea they are - you didn't successfully
| defend yours)
|
| Edit: there is one more danger: you do your job well and
| management thinks you do nothing and so gets rid of you (only
| to hire a new team in 3 months when everything collapses)
| spinity wrote:
| You almost shut down my computer,lol
| kccqzy wrote:
| I cannot agree more. That's also why personally I strongly prefer
| to work on infra rather than product teams. You get so much
| insulation from random whims of the leadership or PMs and you get
| simply pursue technical excellence. I don't want to contribute to
| "visible 'wins' of a product launch" at all. I'm happy that I
| currently work at a medium-sized company (head count between 1k
| and 10k) that has been around for 30+ years and my work involves
| quietly improving the infra used by other teams.
| notyourday wrote:
| I worked closely with a few during my career in a few companies.
| It is a retirement plan of people who neither can nor want to
| perform after they "put in time". These days as someone who gets
| to give my couple of cents to folks in the upper echelons of
| promising companies I tell the newly minted CTOs to either not
| hire them or if they are already hired, fire them.
|
| Staff engineer and above = 45 year old soccer player bench warmer
| getting the pay 22 year old striker.
| giuscri wrote:
| so what one should do after a certain age?
| notyourday wrote:
| Continue to perform or live off the savings.
| giuscri wrote:
| Well you said you'd fire them/not hire them at all. No
| benefit of doubt
| notyourday wrote:
| Correct. To get to the staff engineer level you probably
| spent at least 10 years in the industry making gobs of
| money. You did save some, right? Right?
| sakopov wrote:
| So you suggest firing people based on their title alone? Sounds
| pretty damn stupid.
| notyourday wrote:
| > So you suggest firing people based on their title alone?
| Sounds pretty damn stupid.
|
| You can look through the threads in this comment section and
| in other comment sections of threads that touched on Staff
| Engineers and Senior staff engineers. People perfectly
| illustrate why the companies would do well firing them -
| people describe that as their dream "retirement" job.
|
| Yes, I suggest firing every single one of them. They are non-
| performing group eating enormous compensation packages.
| dare944 wrote:
| I read it as saying you should fire someone because of their
| age. Not stupid, malicious.
| notyourday wrote:
| > I read it as saying you should fire someone because of
| their age. Not stupid, malicious.
|
| One does not get the title of "Staff Engineer" for age.
|
| One also does not get fired for age. One gets fired for
| sitting on their ass doing virtually nothing. The "Staff
| Engineers" and above tend to sit on their ass, doing
| virtually nothing. Any sane company would do well by firing
| them.
|
| When Google was a young company the idea of someone in
| engineering with a fat title sitting on his ass doing
| nothing was not tolerated. That's when Google was doing
| amazing things, was innovative and actually gave a s!it
| because every single person in that company _wanted to get
| s!it done_. Right now Google is a standard issue sh!t
| company because its upper echelons are full of people who
| are just warming their fancy chairs, talk about their
| amazing work life balance and count the days to their next
| options package vests so they can take yet another multi-
| months vacation.
| grimpy wrote:
| This works until your leadership changes.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >spotlight
|
| Literally, who?
| dasil003 wrote:
| This is a well articulated article and the OA makes some good
| observations about the differences in evaluation between a
| product engineering org and an infra engineering org. It's also
| clear he's got real technical chops to finish a masters degree
| and then make L7 at Google in just under 8 years, and clearly
| that doesn't happen without an ability to navigate some level of
| large org politics.
|
| I will say though, that there is still a good amount of naivete
| in the reasoning presented. The bottom line is that these
| generalizations and rationalizations are based on a single vary
| large company and implicitly dependent on the viewpoint and
| priorities of a bunch of VPs and executives whose mental model
| may or may not align with how you see the world in the infra
| trenches. Now Google is an engineering-driven culture, so the
| author is probably not too far off, but it also represents a
| particular time and place. Google has enjoyed one of the
| strongest and most profitable market positions that was cemented
| years before he entered the work force, and so there's a level of
| comfort and sheltered existence that infra teams at most
| companies do not enjoy. Make hay during the good times, but
| always be aware leaderships attitudes and priorities can change
| very quickly due to market or investor pressure, and at that
| point you need to be ready to adapt and articulate your value in
| a new environment of greater scrutiny, or to a new company (in
| the case of layoffs).
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Did you read the full post? The author addressed these points
| at the end. They're not naive.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| I'm very well aware of the privilege afforded to me by my
| company and the time I'm working in. I tried to emphasize in
| the post several times that this is not a "universal guide to
| success" and that in other companies or teams, a different
| approach and strategy might be needed.
|
| The whole reason I wrote this post at all was, with the success
| of Sean's work on HN recently, I felt people were leaning too
| far into the direction of "you need to constantly move around
| and go where the exec attention is". I just wanted to show
| that, from my singular experience, it is possible to carve out
| a different path in some positions while still being ambitious
| and "successful" (for some definition of success).
| postit wrote:
| One thing I've learned in my 25+ year career is that if you don't
| own your narrative and your work, someone else will claim it -
| especially in corporate America.
|
| I have lost count of the brilliant engineers who were passed over
| for credit simply because someone less technically capable, but
| extremely popular, pulled the strings to steal the spotlight.
|
| You don't necessarily need to be in the spotlight, but you do
| need to leave a paper trail. Claim your work and inventions both
| internally and externally. You don't need to be a 'LinkedIn
| thought leader' to do this, just submit talks to conferences and
| find peers at other companies who understand the difference
| between those who build and those who only talk about building.
| proc0 wrote:
| This is one of the main reasons I'm trying to pivot away from a
| career inside a corporate environment. There is too much
| politics. I wish it was just do the work and go home, and get
| rewarded for the work that was completed, but instead there is
| a huge self-promotion (as in marketing) component. If that's
| what it takes I might as well do something that I own and
| control. If I'm going to need to worry about how to market my
| own work then I might as well try and at least not have a boss.
| I always thought the point of being an employee and having a
| limited paycheck meant that you don't worry about this things.
| That's the fair tradeoff.
| jeffwass wrote:
| To be fair, this issue isn't endemic only to big companies.
| I've seen similar even in academia, some people just know how
| to "play the game" and play it very well.
|
| It really depends on the culture of where you are, which can
| even vary team by team in the same org.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Some people seem willfully ignorant of the game. When
| confronted with the reality of it, they turn away, complain
| that it exists, and act like a bullied middle schooler.
|
| You don't have to enthusiastically endorse the game. You
| can learn it, just like you learn Go or Rust or whatever.
| You can refuse to actively play it, but also be aware of it
| enough to avoid getting hurt by it.
|
| E.g. figure out the minimal effort for convincing game
| players that your work is important.
| goalieca wrote:
| There's too much emphasis on career growth into leadership. I
| know so many programmers who simply want to solve the
| trickiest of technical problems, do good work they can feel
| proud of, and go home to their families. They want stability
| more than anything.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| There are rare software companies where this is _exactly_
| what programmers do. The pay is lower than at FAANG &
| SV/LA/NYC startups, but work-life balance is great,
| stability is great, and most of all they get to just focus
| on doing great work. It's not about making quarterly goals,
| it's about stewarding (or perhaps gardening) a software
| project for many years. Engineers grow a lot from all the
| deep, focused feature work and problem solving.
|
| I worked at such a place for 15 years. The downsides for me
| were lower pay, no equity, and not getting broad industry
| experience. I ended up leaving, and I now make a lot more
| money, but I do miss it.
| tayo42 wrote:
| What interesting problems have you solved recently?
| LtWorf wrote:
| Most people are under NDAs
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| I'm pretty sure no one is going to be hunting down NDA
| infractions on HN unless the poster is silly enough to
| give specifics about the workplace and time at which they
| solved the problem. If it takes some kind of
| investigative work to piece together the most basic
| details, I think that's within the terms of most NDAs
| anyway.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Shipping the frontend for features in a core product area
| on a large team, just like a lot of other devs here :)
|
| To go into specifics of actual problems solved and do so
| intelligibly, I'd have to provide specific context, which
| I'm not comfortable doing here.
|
| It's a lot easier to describe "interesting problems
| solved" using less identifiable (and more generally
| interesting) details if one is in platform/infra and/or
| operating at a Staff+ level -- both of which I have been
| in the past (and loved it), but am not at the moment.
| zem wrote:
| the saddest thing is that it used to be possible to do it
| at at least some of the megacorps too. "senior engineer"
| (one level below staff) was widely accepted as an "I have
| reached as high as I want to in my career, and just want
| to work on interesting problems now", you would basically
| never get a raise other than cost-of-living but you could
| do your work and go home and live your life too. that's
| still doable to an extent but the recurring layoffs have
| added a measure of precarity to the whole situation so
| now you have to care more about all the self promotion
| and "being seen to be doing something" aspects of the job
| a lot more than you used to.
| Inityx wrote:
| Do they even do cost-of-living raises anymore? When I was
| at FAANG, my raises in the same role didn't even match
| inflation.
| zem wrote:
| good point, it was often less than inflation, so a very
| nominal sort of raise
| mh2266 wrote:
| Google lets people stay at L4 forever and Meta does at L5
| with no expectation of further growth.
|
| Yes the expectations are probably still higher, but these
| companies don't expect everyone to grow past "mostly
| self-sufficient engineer" as the parent comment suggests,
| and for people that do want to do that there's a full
| non-management path to director-equivalent IC levels. My
| impression is that small companies are more likely to
| treat management as a promotion rather than as a lateral
| move to a different track (whenever I hear "promoted to
| manager" I kinda shudder)
| cweld510 wrote:
| Depends on the team -- managing can be quite a bit more
| scope than being a senior IC, depending on expectations
| for that role. You have broader ownership of technical
| outcomes over time, even aside from the extra
| responsibility for growing a team. Managers have all the
| responsibility of a senior engineer plus more. In that
| way manager feels to me like a clear promotion to me.
| Manager vs staff eng, maybe not though.
| mh2266 wrote:
| Management not being a promotion doesn't mean that
| managers aren't (usually--I've both been at equal and
| higher levels than my managers at times) higher levels
| than their reports. It means that switching to a
| management role from IC is never a promotion itself (ie
| always L6 -> M1 in Google/Meta levels) and it never comes
| with any difference in compensation.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I think no equity isn't necessarily worse than equity
| followed by bankruptcy :D
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not in 2025, sadly. Those kinds of companies are the
| first to freeze hiring and some probably won't make it
| through the storm.
|
| It would be nice to have that, though. But my industry
| isn't known for stability to begin with.
| mh2266 wrote:
| Google's terminal level is one past new grad and it has a
| full parallel non-management IC track, I don't think that
| they're pushing people that hard into leadership roles.
| proc0 wrote:
| That's precisely why programmers become programmers. It
| baffles me that tech careers put most on a leadership track
| when people study CS for many years for a reason. Why would
| I want to throw those technical skills away.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| You mean if everyone works really hard, we can't all be
| CEOs? :(
| jebarker wrote:
| Anyone can be a CEO, just start a company.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| So we don't need anyone to teach or clean toilets? We can
| all work our way up and be fabulously rich?
| jebarker wrote:
| I'm not sure how you got that from my comment. CEO is a
| job title that is easy to get, that was my only point.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If everyone wanted that, sure. But many people don't (I
| sure don't), and many people that do will fail. Because
| "working hard" is relative.
|
| And that's ignoring the inherent inequality of
| birthright.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And then what happens when you are looking for your next
| job and you get a behavioral interview question and all you
| can say is "I pulled Jira tickets off the board for a
| decade"?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >meant that you don't worry about this things
|
| Not at all, that was a confused expectation.
|
| The problem here, at least I think, is you may be very
| unaware of the expectations of running ones own business.
| There are far more politics, more being cutthroat, tons of
| regulations you must be aware of that come with potential
| later penalties if you are not, legal threats, and more.
| proc0 wrote:
| I can see that, but then what's really broken is the
| education system. If what you say is true that means there
| is no such thing as being a specialist, at least not
| anymore, yet almost all universities train people to be
| specialists. Either industry should stop looking at
| academic degrees completely or schools should start
| teaching business first, and technical knowledge second,
| for most degrees (with exception of academia and research).
| smj-edison wrote:
| My brother is studying economics right now, and he said
| everyone could use some basic economics knowledge,
| because getting an intuition for how markets work really
| helps you as you're looking for jobs and navigating
| around companies. Maybe business knowledge is better, but
| I'm personally biased towards the empiricism of economics
| :) You're onto something though about the need for
| awareness of how companies think and work.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is somewhat correct, and somewhat not correct.
|
| The 'system' needs the following.
|
| People that are unaware of the system, that do the work,
| think it's a mediocrity, and don't play the game.
|
| Less people that play the game and reap all the rewards
| for doing the work without actually doing the work.
|
| The problem is once too many people play the game instead
| of doing the work the entire system falls apart.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| It's pretty demoralizing to realize that appearances matter
| more than merit in careers/politics/dating/business/etc. The
| pragmatic approach is to not give up on merit but not neglect
| appearances either.
|
| Still, the idealist in me hates this. It feels like quality
| should win out over advertising yet it rarely does in the grand
| scheme of things.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is because time and energy are limited resources, and
| measuring merit accurately is very costly. Measuring
| appearance is far less costly, and might serve as an
| acceptable proxy. And often times it might not.
| lumost wrote:
| this is the biggest benefit of 1:1's in my opinion.
|
| Often, individuals can claim credit simply by being first and
| loudest. For example, and individual can highlight a problem
| area that someone is already working on in the team and loudly
| talk about the flaws in the current approach and how they will
| solve it. The individual need not actually solve the task if
| the first person finishes - but now the success is
| subconsciously attributed to the thought leadership/approach of
| the new individual.
|
| Good managers/leadership teams have mechanisms to limit this
| type of strategy, but it requires them to talk to everyone on
| the team - listen for unsaid feedback and look at hard
| artifacts. Otherwise you quickly have a team of people who are
| great at nothing more than talking about problems and dreaming
| of solutions.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people
| being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work.
|
| What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a
| lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them
| the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the
| team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an
| important problem.
|
| There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or
| technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I
| search the internal company docs and often someone had
| mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten
| design doc or something.
|
| I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for
| a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the
| execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the
| idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or
| ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build
| things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount
| of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited
| if you don't pull the strings the right way.
|
| Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company
| is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases
| I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were
| people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the
| job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely
| recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next
| thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition
| for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really
| stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea
| would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit
| anyway.
| alephnerd wrote:
| You can own the narrative while also _not_ being in the
| spotlight.
|
| At the end of the day, only a handful of stakeholders matter in
| _any_ organization. So long as you can promote you and your
| team 's initiatives to your manager, your skip manager, and a
| couple key members of Product, Sales, Customer Success, and
| Leadership - your place is secure.
|
| In fact, in most cases I would say a mass spotlight is actually
| a net negative, because it only increases the risk that someone
| might view you as a potential competitor for either budget or
| responsibility.
|
| So long as you remain aligned to the business's stated goals
| for the year _and_ can communicate that to the relevant
| subsegment of stakeholders, a massive spotlight is unnecessary.
| nostrademons wrote:
| So I'm not sure about this, particularly in the context of this
| article. I think it definitely applies to the splashy,
| Spotlight, one-off projects that will make a career with one
| shot. But a lot of careers aren't made that way, and this
| article is specifically talking about the ones that aren't.
|
| I've found that _trust_ is a currency in a corporate
| environment, possibly the most important one. And trust is
| built over time. If you work behind the scenes to ensure the
| success of a project but don 't claim it, there's a decent
| chance somebody else will, and maybe it'll appear in their
| promo packet. But if you are in the vicinity of enough
| successful projects, over a long period of time, there's a good
| chance that leadership will notice that the common element is
| _you_. And in the process you 'll built up a good reputation
| and network, so even if leadership gets replaced there are lots
| of other people that want to work with you. Promotions come
| slower at first, but they eventually catch up since you don't
| need to suffer the resets of failed projects and new roles.
| rockinghigh wrote:
| As you suggested, promotions tend to come more slowly. You're
| also likely to hit a lower ceiling than someone who is better
| at promoting their work.
| 1dom wrote:
| > But if you are in the vicinity of enough successful
| projects, over a long period of time, there's a good chance
| that leadership will notice that the common element is you.
|
| This is only true if average tenure of leadership and
| management is more than a couple of years.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| That's how it works for every organization. Not just corporate
| America. Want to play on the varsity baseball team? Better be
| popular with the coaches and other players. Otherwise you're on
| the bench keeping score. Want to go to Harvard grad school?
| Better be the right kind of popular. Want to be celebrated in
| machine learning? Better be popular by doing shallow work on
| lots of projects. The whole world is a scam, and the scammers
| always win.
| TimByte wrote:
| But calling the whole world a scam feels like letting the
| worst parts define the whole yet it can feel like the game is
| rigged in favor of the loudest or most connected
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It _is_ a scam, it 's objective. If you live in ignorance
| of this you will eventually be taken advantage of. There is
| nowhere on the planet you can live where you can take
| people or systems of people at their word.
| fragmede wrote:
| If it's only an eventuality, then doesn't that imply that
| you can mostly take people at their word? If you do nine
| deals, and get scammed on the the tenth, then doesn't
| that mean those first nine people are honest and could be
| taken at their word?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| lol no the eventuality is because a lot of people are
| just too poor to even be allowed to engage in deals --
| they're largely living in faceless systems where they're
| pre-scammed by faceless corporations
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Sorry, but this feels like a very American take. There
| are places in the world that still have high social
| cohesion and high trust. Not everyone is out to get you
| everywhere all the time, just in societies which
| encourage that sort of relating to others.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Which one would you recommend? because AFAIK most of them
| are consuming the American products that are constantly
| scamming you... I've experienced this as a resident of
| the EU as well.
| theplatman wrote:
| there are high trust societies where you still cannot
| take people at their word because it might not be a
| culture of being direct to others. thinking of japan
| which is high social cohesion and trust, but still
| difficult to navigate business contexts due to how
| problems would be communicated.
| fsckboy wrote:
| thank you, venturecruelty, for your take on who might be
| out to get me. do you think choosing a username says
| nothing about what comes to your mind?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It works that way sometimes but I have found that merit and
| skill does get rewarded. The best case is when you have both.
| landedgentry wrote:
| When merit is easy to define and measure. I have a lot more
| respect for athletes than tech leaders.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There's an exception though if you're truly good. If you can
| hit home runs or throw a baseball with laser accuracy and
| speed you will be on the varsity team even if you're an
| introverted social misfit. You might not be team captain but
| bottom line is the coach wants players who can win games, not
| be prom king.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| Where I went to school the coach distributed chewing
| tobacco to players he liked and bullied the nerds. The
| black kid who was extremely athletic got bullied and
| switched schools. The starting pitcher was an idiot who
| drove a big truck, and was not especially talented.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah I'm assuming the coach is a normal person who's goal
| is to build a team and win. If his goal as an adult is to
| have a lot of teenagers for friends because he himself is
| still stuck in that mentality, then there's not much you
| can do but get away.
| thwarted wrote:
| Sometimes achievements speak for themselves and provide the
| marketing for the actor. But that requires both the
| achievement to be extremely outsized, so as not to get lost
| in the noise, and very obviously the result of a singular
| actor. Only one person can step up to the plate and swing
| the bat.
| marcinzm wrote:
| It's not a scam. It's a system that exists for people and
| made by people. Period. Money, outcomes and so on only have
| value because people assign them value. If you remove
| people then what you do has no value or concept of value.
| Life is not some video game with an omniscient score
| counter. Other people are the score counter.
| QuantumFunnel wrote:
| People are terrible at keeping score for others, because
| they're usually only paying attention to themselves
| marcinzm wrote:
| There is no objective score and thus people are perfect
| at it since the score is by definition what other people
| think it is. Like the value of money or stocks. Once you
| realize that a lot of life is significantly less
| frustrating.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'd say life becomes more frustrating of you really think
| this extreme. You realize your values and then realize
| certain people with contradictoryvalues aren't part of
| your community, hut obstacles to overcome. Now it's not a
| team game, it's a battle royale. Not necessarily winner
| take all, but overall a lot of people will lose more than
| they win.
|
| A collective sense of "score" is needed to prevent that.
| marcinzm wrote:
| It's got nothing to do with values but value. Are you
| doing things that provide value. Once you realize the
| only measure of that is how other people perceive what
| you've done it's a lot less frustrating. It makes thing
| more cooperative as you now need to work with others and
| communicate with others and you know that versus clinging
| to a siloed invalid notion of value.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That goes into what my above reply warns about. Of their
| "value" is something that contradicts yours, you have an
| obstacle, not a team working towards a goal.
|
| If some manager's value is "I just need to phone it in
| and retire" and you are misson-driven, you have an
| obstacle. Now you're going behind the back of the
| obstacle trying to stand out, and essential work isn't
| being met. Mamager panics, has to do more work and
| probably chastises the other person. Each are only trying
| to follow what their goals "value".
|
| We do need "values", plural. "Values" will help let out
| singular "value" compromise as needed. So we shift from
| "I just want to retire" to "okay, I'll male sure the
| excited one can get on bigger projects while I chill".
| And let's the "I want to change the world" types
| occasionally compromise with "okay this person needs help
| for a moment". It's not crushing dreams but also making
| sure that other collective goals are met.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| In your lens: people are often horrible at keeping score,
| distracted by values that do no help them win overall.
|
| Not necessarily a bad thing at times. Of course some
| chance encounter that builds a friendship or even family
| can be worth not winning that ball game. But actions have
| consequences and maybe someone else needed to win to get
| their goals fulfilled.
| marcinzm wrote:
| In my lens the only true score is the collection
| perception of the score. Not a number, not a formula and
| not what you think the score is. There is no external
| absolute counter you can point to because the collective
| view is the truth.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >In my lens the only true score is the collection
| perception of the score, not what you think the score is.
|
| Am I not part of the collective? When does my perception
| matter or not? Is it majority rule and I'm just a pariah
| following my own beat?
|
| Given the "collective view" of my country on 2025, I
| think I'll opt out of the score, thanks.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Depends. Look at the graph of month year of professional
| hockey player[1]. Player born in first quarter is twice as
| more likely to be in pro leagues than last quarter. Month
| of birth's only effect is that it gives 0.5 year extra
| during junior year to be in spotlight. It shouldn't affect
| player's performance in any other way. And the effect
| persists for decades.
|
| If you get supported initially when you aren't the best,
| the effect of the small support can make you much better
| player.
|
| [1]: https://www.lockhartjosh.ca/2017/11/hockey-birth-
| month-why-i...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In the US, USA Hockey (by far the biggest youth hockey
| organization) groups players by birth year. So if you are
| born late in the year, you are among the youngest players
| on your team. You tend to be smaller, and less
| experienced, and unless you are exceptional you tend to
| play less. This impacts you from your first youth teams
| up until high-school.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| But you will never make it to the MLB if you are the best
| baseball player in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska and no one
| knows you exist
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That ideally what scouts are for. Digging deep for
| treasure.
|
| But talent correlates too. It's rare to see someone self
| taught that can be competitive with years of
| conditioning. So there's arguments both ways.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| True, but how many skip managers are going to go scouting
| in a large tech company for a great developer who is
| working on the internal performance review system?
|
| The skip manager has a lot to do with promotions in my
| experience.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| [delayed]
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Kind of no.
|
| The example I am going to point to is TSMC/Morris Chang.
|
| > During his 25-year career (1958-1983) at Texas
| Instruments, he rose up in the ranks to become the group
| vice president responsible for TI's worldwide semiconductor
| business.[19] In the late 1970s, when TI's focus turned to
| calculators, digital watches and home computers, Chang felt
| like his career focused on semiconductors was at a dead end
| at TI.
|
| The guy was literal gold, and Texas Instruments pivoted
| away from him (I have also read that anti-Asian sentiment
| in the USA/TI created a glass ceiling where he could never
| be CEO
|
| His ability to "hit home runs" was ignored in the USA, and
| only worked in his favour in the ROC/Taiwan. In both cases
| (positive and negative) it wasn't his ability, but who
| believed in him that made the difference.
|
| Edit: At the risk of drawing (more) ire for making it
| political.
|
| Almost all of the "isms" that the left are (in general)
| working to stop, are actually preventing economies from
| reaching their full potential - sexism, racism are the
| really big ones (because of the sheer numbers of people
| they affect)
| creato wrote:
| This _might_ be a reasonable summary of the situation but
| I suspect it 's vastly oversimplified. The trajectory of
| these businesses depends on more than who's name is at
| the top of the org chart. TI pivoting away from
| semiconductors and towards other goods may seem like a
| stupid move in hindsight, but even in hindsight it's not
| clearly the case. TI's move is basically them trying to
| be Apple or NVIDIA instead of Intel or TSMC. Because they
| failed at that, doesn't necessarily mean that attempting
| it was wrong.
|
| And none of this necessarily has anything to do with
| Morris Chang personally. Many factors need to align for a
| company like TSMC to be successful. Morris Chang may be
| one of them, but there are other factors that may or may
| not have existed at TI. The claim that they didn't exist
| at TI because TI didn't like Morris Chang is not
| something we'll ever know for sure.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| > The claim that they didn't exist at TI because TI
| didn't like Morris Chang is not something we'll ever know
| for sure.
|
| We do, though, have VERY GOOD evidence of what TI could
| have been had they provided the conditions that TSMC did.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >TI pivoting away from semiconductors and towards other
| goods may seem like a stupid move in hindsight, but even
| in hindsight it's not clearly the case
|
| I think even by the turn of the 90's this could be seen
| as an extraordinarily stupid move. The PC was on the up
| and up and they abandon expertise on a resource that will
| only explode in demand? I'm sure there was some cushy
| educational deals with school supplies, but they
| literally left a gold mine for China.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well yea. If you truly look at US history, you'll see the
| current situation in 2025 is ultimately a huge counter
| reaction to the idea of colored people and women being
| able to work alongside Caucasians, and some of the latter
| just couldn't stand that. "when you're accustomed to
| privilege, equality feels like oppression"
|
| So. Tear down the unions and regulations, let the rich
| consolidate wealth, and everything else in between for 50
| years. They are still moserable, but hey. They feel
| better than Enrique over there who just wanted his kids
| to love a better life.
| mh2266 wrote:
| I don't think being popular with the players is entirely
| irrelevant for players in team sports. Locker room cohesion
| matters.
| reactordev wrote:
| It shouldn't be this way. Merit should be the metric. But it's
| true. No matter how good or bad your numbers are, if Bob likes
| you, you're good.
|
| Keep polishing those soft skills and if you have a face only
| your mother would love, be a writer... but get your voice out
| there.
| TimByte wrote:
| You don't have to self-promote aggressively, but you do have to
| advocate for your work
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Personally, I don't care. Pay me and leave me the hell alone.
| We get 80 short years on this beautiful blue marble, if we're
| exceedingly lucky, and I refuse to spend one red second of that
| playing stupid games to excel in a sclerotic economic system
| that didn't even exist until very recently.
|
| So I'm going to continue to try to grind it out as best as I
| can, while spending time on the things that actually matter:
| music, art, making delicious food for me and my friends, my
| hobbies, my family, my local community. Corporate America is
| bereft of joy and meaning anyway. Maybe it makes me some sort
| of sucker, but I don't care. I'd rather live.
| mbajkowski wrote:
| Seems to me you have your Life Razor, per Sahil Bloom, pretty
| much in place for your current stage in life
| trjordan wrote:
| This is a really good article. Don't get caught up in the tone of
| "anti-politics" or "slow is good." It's describing a brand of
| politics and impact that is just as mercurial as product
| development if you do it wrong. Infra and DevEx behaves
| fundamentally differently, and it can be a really great path if
| it suites your personality.
|
| For context: my last job was PM for the infra team at Slack. I
| did it for 5 years. I didn't learn about Slack's product launch
| process until year 4. Everything until that point was internal
| work, on our k8s/service mesh and DB infrastructure.
|
| The important insight here is about customer success and shadow
| management. Every successful engineer (and my own success)
| derived from figuring out what product engineers needed and
| delivering it. The "Shadow Hierarchy" feedback was make-or-break
| for those promotions. It's _hard_ to optimize for that, because
| you need to seek that feedback, understand if addressing it will
| actually fix the problem, and deliver it quickly enough to matter
| in the product org.
|
| If you're willing to optimize for that internal success, you'll
| be rewarded, but in your career and in stability in the
| organization. I disagree this is only at Big Tech -- companies as
| small as 100 engineers have real and strong cultures in the right
| team, under the right manager.
|
| But don't think this is some magical cheat code to ignoring
| what's important to the business. It's just a different, perhaps
| more palatable, route to managing the alignment and politics that
| are a necessary part of growth at any company.
| TimByte wrote:
| I've seen the same dynamics play out at mid-sized companies
| tanepiper wrote:
| This article resonated a lot with me - I have a 25+ year career
| and until my most recent role I'd usually switch companies every
| 2 years.
|
| My current company I'm now on year 4, and 3rd year leading a team
| building an internal platform for the business - for me it is a
| dream role - management mostly stay out the way, strategy comes
| from top down but our team make all the decisions, and after a
| slow start it's now paying off with several teams using us and
| helping drive through real requirements, and not the imagined
| ones from a few execs.
|
| This has lead to constant positive feedback from all of our
| 'customers' who would never have been able to consider running
| their own content delivery pipelines - we're solving their real
| problems. Regardless of any politics, this is what gives me the
| energy to turn up every day.
| TimByte wrote:
| That kind of bottom-up traction feels rare, but when it
| happens, it's incredibly energizing
| TimByte wrote:
| The long-game of quiet impact: context accumulation, trust-
| building, and systems thinking
| GMoromisato wrote:
| There are downsides to this approach, however.
|
| If your team is not critical, at least in the eyes of upper-
| management, then you'll be first on the chopping block in the
| next downturn.
|
| But if you are critical--say, running critical but unsexy
| infrastructure--then it's all downside risk with no upside. If
| things work, they ignore you, but if they mess up, you get the
| blame and the spotlight.
|
| As with any business/career advice, there are no silver bullets,
| only trade-offs.
| mh2266 wrote:
| This completely matches my experience as an infra principal
| engineer in a coding archetype at another big company. I do
| impactful and good technical work and always try to defer credit
| to those "under" me even if it was my idea they are implementing.
| As long as my manager knows it was my idea everything works out
| fine.
|
| That being said you do kind of end up in the spotlight anyways
| but it feels very different to do it through reputation of
| knowledge and technical competence rather than through PR-like
| selling.
| dbacar wrote:
| You dont have to be at google or zoogle to witness these, even be
| an engineer.
|
| People are people.
| froggertoaster wrote:
| Ignoring the spotlight is detrimental.
|
| As a person who does consulting work, the best thing I've found I
| can do is stay visible with my accomplishments.
|
| I did a presentation earlier this year for a client where the CEO
| was in attendance. I did not know he was going to be there. They
| were blown away by my presentation.
|
| You make your own luck.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I am not criticizing the author or his opinion in any way. But
| what he didn't emphasize enough that yes he might ignore the
| spotlight as a staff engineer. But he can only do so because he
| _is_ a staff software engineer.
|
| When I was working at a startup from 2018-2020, I was hired as
| the second technical hire by then new CTO who was tasked to bring
| tech leadership into the company from an outside consulting
| agency where all of the long term developers were in India.
|
| They were constantly seeking the spotlight to insure they kept
| their jobs. I could afford to not seek the spotlight. I already
| had the trust of the owners, CTO etc. I had no fear of being made
| redundant because the right people didn't know what I
| contributed.
|
| I wasn't trying to get a promotion, I was already leading all of
| the big technical cross functional initiatives as the company
| grew.
|
| On the other hand, when I got into BigTech in 2020 as an L5
| (Professional Services consulting not SDE), I saw for the first
| time how much politics played in getting ahead. I personally
| didn't care. My goal from day 1 was to make money and leave after
| 4 years. I was already 46 and knew I didn't want to stay long
| term.
|
| But I did see how hard it was for a damn good intern I mentored
| their senior year and when they came back to get noticed. I had
| to create opportunities for them to get noticed because they were
| ignored by their manager [1]. They still had to change
| departments to just get a chance to get on a promotion track.
|
| I see it again on the other side. I would hate to have to play
| the games and go through the gauntlet to get promoted at the
| company I work at now and where I was brought in at the staff
| level.
|
| But I would be chasing after the spotlight with the best of them
| to get ahead.
|
| I do have the luxury to not chase recognition - everyone who is
| important already knows me and what I do. My projects
| automatically give me visibility without my chasing them.
|
| [1] all of the early career people reported to a separate manager
| and were loaned out to teams.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| > But he can only do so because he is a staff software
| engineer.
|
| I don't agree with this at all. This is how I've worked for my
| entire time at Google, all the way from new grad L3 joining the
| company till today. Ignoring the spotlight does not mean "don't
| get attention from other people" but "don't chase the project
| execs are focusing on".
|
| Whenever I've work on a project, I make a very active effort to
| make sure engineers are aware of it, especially if I think they
| would find it useful. But that's different than going to my
| execs and asking "what's the highest priority at the moment"
| and working on that.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And how does that look on your promo doc?
|
| Would you rather be working on some obscure internal website
| for employees to track their performance that no one cares
| about or something related to Google ads? Which would you
| suggest a new grad work on?
|
| It sounds cynical. But I never personal tried to get ahead at
| BigTech, it was never my goal, I just saw the struggles that
| others had navigating the promo process from L4 (entry level)
| -> L5 and L6->L7. It seemed like L5->L6 was the easiest for
| some reason.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| I would say it's worked out pretty well for me at least
| given my career trajectory! Feel free to draw your own
| conclusions from my resume (it's on my about page).
|
| I think you are conflating "exec attention" with "important
| projects": these are very much _not_ the same thing.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Fair point. So if you are saying "get on important
| projects" is the lever, we are in complete agreement.
|
| You can put important projects on your promo doc and if
| you communicate it well, you are golden. That's far more
| important than "executive attention" when it comes to the
| promotion committee.
|
| Just don't be the guy who is working on the internal comp
| tracking system that no one thinks about more than once a
| year
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > Stewardship, staying with a system long-term, unlocks
| compounding returns that are impossible to achieve on a short
| rotation.
|
| This is not just true of developer tools, but I think all
| projects and products.
|
| It's a big problem that many parts of our industry are
| essentially optimized against this happening.
| mooreds wrote:
| Great post. Also a reminder that there isn't one career path for
| everyone.
|
| The thing that is most interesting to me as someone who works at
| a devtool company is how this puts a spotlight on what vendors
| can offer (and what they can't). Every time you integrate a
| devtool into your product, you are trusting that they've thought
| out and gone through the deep process work of stewardship.
| rconti wrote:
| Can confirm. I've worked on infra teams for decades, at companies
| from 80-80,000 people, and I don't think I've _ever_ had a PM on
| a project I worked on.
|
| EDIT: Note, this is not _necessarily_ a complaint, although I
| think they would have been very helpful in some circumstances. My
| main misgivings in working with PM orgs is when they treat my
| projects as a necessary evil input to the success of the projects
| they care about. So you get all of the hectoring and demands of
| professional management with none of the help.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Google is an unusual environment for internal tools. A lot of
| companies will build things, and then starve them of funding and
| engineers, as they aren't part of any of the top company
| priorities.
|
| This often means building tools comes with a penalty. People will
| keep reaching out to you for help, because there is no one else.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Priorities only become priorities because people fought for
| them to become priorities.
|
| You can fight that battle via significant self promotion, but
| you can also lobby for yourself by keeping in constant contact
| with a subset of stakeholders who actually matter (your
| manager, your skip manager, your PM, your PM's manager, and
| maybe 1-2 adjacent EMs).
|
| And honestly, the latter is the norm and much easier as well
| simply because it ensures that other people are fighting your
| battle.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Well, no, the priorities are often whatever the CEO thinks
| they are right now.
|
| People have to be open to being convinced. It'd be nice if
| that was always true, but it's clearly not always the case.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| There's also another path to staying out of the spotlight - when
| you've been under the spotlight a couple times and got no reward
| at all from it.
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