These articles come out with some regularity, and yet no one ever says, "Yep! That's totally me! I'm a non contributing zero but I've made a living at making others think I add to the team!" Everyone knows people like this, but no one is one.
Edit : I'm actually serious. I don't do most of the things in the article, or at least definitely not with the intent and detail - but I've been moved over time from being a pretty good and certainly respected hands on techie, to a middle to upper manager with massive imposter syndrome, and certainly feel I contribute less for more credit. Client loves me. My boss loves me. My team loves me. But I myself definitely struggle to always understand my value and I definitely spend many hours each week fine tuning PowerPoint slides, reporting, over communicating, team building, teaching people to communicate differently, etc - which again, seems to make everybody happy and impressed. Maybe my hidden talent is communicating between techies and business? Possibly there's real value in my role - but DEFINITELY not according to any hacker news colleagues - nearly everything I do is venomously dismissed by th HN zeitgeist (I'm neither surprised nor resentful - I spent 20 years saying same things, until I have become them:) . So - AMA :)
Maybe attaching all the value to technical contributions was incorrect behaviour in first place?
I used to do that a lot until I got my first real not fully technical job and realised that all the technical stuff is actually much more learnable by many, much less impactful on the work than the dark art of working with humans. Maybe its the zeal of the convert but I think the technical contributions are not that important unless there is no margin for errors or its groundbreaking work and most of the time its not.
That's because people working with humans tend to be TERRIBLE at keeping proper documentation about their job. If "people person" kept full psychological profile of each client and manager they work with it would be way easier to replace them so in a way it is a job-security-guaranteeing move to be obtuse.
Joking aside the way I see it is that you have to have some vision on the product, enough organization skill (which can be another person specialized in translating "visioner" ramblings into actionable stuff) to organize making it, enough marketing skill to actually sell it, and then enough tech/engineering oriented people to not fuck the product up.
Bad engineering - product that kinda works shit but depending on niche it can still be good enough to be profitable
Bad marketing/client acquisition - most cases bankruptcy, very small amount of things "sell itself", unless you get luck.
Bad vision - well, if rest is fine you either pivot to something else and deliver or bankrupt
Bad communication/managing - inefficiencies at every way that can and will hamper everyone else.
spend many hours each week fine tuning PowerPoint slides, reporting, over communicating, team building, teaching people to communicate differently
I’m in a process of leaving a company where I work at for way too many years (cause I liked the job and its tech samurai format, not even the money), because there is no person like you and the “management” actively refuses to hire one, while steadily degrading into communicating through incomplete, false and illiterate streams of consciousness and providing organizational help through lowest common denominator roles who basically return to you in a couple of days asking you to do their heavily miscommunicated job for them. Sometimes I helped people doing my own request not even realizing it, so perverted it became. Any issue harder than “we’re out of paper” isn’t worth reporting. Any new module or a process is a brainstorm between me and other roles on what “they” meant and how their words most likely correlate. The tragedy is that the team is actually good, just has no clue what we do and what the plan is.
I’m an aspiring overrated person, I started as a developer, then was promoted into a product owner role because of attrition.
I have ended up spending most of my day in meetings and being interrupted over IM, and there is not much time for coding. Realistically, I should either do less meetings, or commit to less coding. The latter is better because I’m not as good at coding as my peers.
My barriers are that I’m not great at the people skills, and to compensate I’ve focused on the technicals of this pseudo leadership role such as making graphics for power point slides, and agile administration, like using the tools and scheduling those rituals.
How can I make the leap to doing no coding and just doing the meetings and delegation?
> I definitely spend many hours each week fine tuning PowerPoint slides, reporting, over communicating, team building, teaching people to communicate differently, etc - which again, seems to make everybody happy and impressed
This is why people love you. You're massively underestimating the amount of spoon-feeding people desire. The alternative to people like you is for individuals to do the work of understanding and empathizing outside their areas of interest or domains of expertise and/or comfort.
In my first Agile company, it felt like we developers were inventing features! In fact, a PM was spoon feeding the backlog to us, organized by theme, letting us invent the interesting parts. I only realized it 10 years later.
I'm interested to hear more about what you mean when saying that it felt like you were inventing the features. And how did the PM do it exactly? Thanks!
You listed communication and communication-training things. These are very valuable and easy to under-value. The API to an organization is people. Speaking this language you are serving your team.
First: there is of course an incentive not to admit this.
Second: I do believe that many people on HN really deeply care about technology/hacking topics and have detest for office politics. On the other hand, the people that the article discuss are good at office politics/marketing themselves and often don't have such a deep knowledge about programming. Thus, I would indeed assume that the typical HN reader/writer less likely fits into the "highly overrated people" pattern of the article.
> Second: I do believe that many people on HN really deeply care about technology/hacking topics and have detest for office politics.
I think it's more accurate to say that they have a detest for dealing with people in ways that require persuasion, or more generally situations without an "objective" right answer.
You want to do A, someone else wants to do B, you can't do both, you both think you're right, boom, "politics."
A lot of the time, the person who takes this stance tend to forget that execution matters more than the idea being objectively correct. Good "politics" is about persuading the actual people who have to own and execute that idea. There are bad situations where you find yourself opposite people who add little value that is obvious and yet demand they be persuaded or else they will stand the way of your idea. When the emotional burden of fighting such battles crosses a certain threshold you feel burn-out and give up. This threshold is high for people who can do office politics well and it is low for most self-described techies. This does not mean that latter kind of people don't create the same emotional stress for others through their own political schemings (yes, even without knowing consciously, we are all political animals in our own ways – we wield what powers we have to attain our agenda, in however good or bad ways we do it).
There are so many interactions at work outside of politics, which I would define as the advancement of your personal agenda before that of the organization and of anybody else.
I have such rich interactions with my colleagues. Sometimes we work together on a project. Sometimes it's purely social, like the first few minutes of a meeting with someone I haven't talked to in a long time. Sometimes they need my support or I need theirs. And sometimes (rarely) it's about having an uncomfortable conversation because something didn't go well. But none of these is about politics. I love where I work, in big parts because of the lack of politics.
It can turn into office politics fast. Maybe you say the wrong thing and now you and your coworker have an awkward tension.
IMO it's almost never worth trying to make friends with your coworkers. Be nice, be helpful, and do a good job but keep your friends and work life separate.
In my experience most close friends vent about their jobs to each other. Something that I very rarely feel comfortable doing with coworkers. I think I've met about 2 coworkers in my whole career who I felt that level of comfort with.
Where is the line for you? Is a meeting with a sales team “office politics”? What about a meeting with software developers?
The problem is that there’s no reasonable definition of “office politics” that frames it as a positive thing. You’re approaching every interaction negatively as something you can win/lose.
> Yes because if you look at it objectively those people tend to be lying, manipulative people with big fake smiles on their faces.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. There’s nothing objective about what you’re saying here. You just paint a huge group of people with a very broad (and very negative) brush.
If that’s what helps you feel superior to other people, I guess there’s not much I can do about it. But I’d encourage you to reexamine how you see the real people around you.
You misunderstood what I was saying. What I meant was that lying and manipulating are generally considered objectively bad by most people. However, that behavior is considered normal in corporate cultures. It's even part of the job if you're in marketing or sales!
And no, I won't stop judging large groups of people who's jobs are built on deception. And I won't stop judging people who are naturally drawn to those jobs. I've had enough of this whole system and I'm done apologizing for saying negative things just because these behaviors and jobs are normal.
Sexualizing products. Creating cute jokes during the super bowl. Implying that if you buy this product, you'll improve your social status.
Am I expected to believe that these things are about communicating value? I'm sorry but that's a steaming pile of BS.
Using power tactics with your customers during sales calls. Creating a sense of urgency. Bending the truth to make your product appear more favorable in general and vs competitors products.
Am I expected to believe that these things are about communicating value? I'm sorry but that's a steaming pile of BS.
This is a false equivalency. Most software engineers aren't working on weapons, but most sales and marketing people engage in deception and other amoral practices.
Not to mention that software engineers literally build the products. Sales and marketing's job is to shove it down people's throats.
To the contrary, I think paulcole made a great point. It doesn’t need to be weapons. A programmer who makes a social media feed more addictive isn’t necessarily moral. But a salesperson/marketer can promote something generally seen as good, or at least far more good than the example programmer.
Ad campaigns can remind people to vote, encourage people to quit smoking, or convince people to avoid drunken driving. A marketer is behind for the design and distribution of these public advocacy campaigns.
No it's not a great point. It's a point made to distract from the real issue. It's a debate tactic.
If you read the conversation carefully I'm trying to discuss the fundamental nature of the professions, not the specific products they are building or selling. That was something paulcole brought up.
The fundamental nature of sales and marketing is manipulating people for personal gain. You could be selling hugs or whatever warm and fuzzy product you can imagine, but at the end of the day the sales person's job is to be the best people manipulator they can be.
And I've seen it countless times through my career. I've met many sales people, I've sat in on sales calls, and I've heard them discussing their trade. It's honestly disgusting.
On the other hand, the fundamental nature of engineering is building things. It's bringing something new into the world. It couldn't be more different from sales and marketing.
It sounds like this is a difference in personal values. You can certainly assess the morality of one’s work based on its methods, but it’s also valid to assess the morality based on outcomes.
On outcomes: You framed building things and creating new things as inherently good, but entire fields of the philosophy of science question whether technological progress is inherently good. Is AI-generated art necessarily good if it causes artists to lose jobs? Are ad trackers necessarily good if it increases engagement at the loss of privacy? Are hackers/crackers seen as more noble than salespeople, as they create new exploits that make hospitals pay ransom, and expose people’s information? If a new chemical weapon or bioweapon is created, are its developers inherently noble for creating something new? Even Einstein expressed deep regret for his role in developing the atomic bomb (and Feynman went into a depression) after its usage.
On methods: most methods start as morally neutral. A person training to be a soldier may or may not end up doing immoral things, depending on what they do in their career. Research scientists may or may not do moral things (though nowadays most abide by research ethics, in the past and likely the present, many studies have caused far more suffering than their benefits). Lawyers can go on to defend fundamental rights, or end up filing frivolous lawsuits or chasing ambulances. Developers can create something genuinely useful, or cause people to lose jobs or get killed due to bugs.
To be charitable to your point: yes, I intuitively have a deep sense of respect for the discipline required to become a good software developer and create something new. But it’s completely separate from a moral respect and moral judgement: I have to know what that developer is actually creating, and how that will impact real people.
You can use the utilitarian argument to justify anything. According to your logic hugging people isn't good or bad because technically you can hug someone to death. Engineering is a form of human expression and human expression is generally good, even if it can be used for evil.
A sick society corrupts good things and incentivizes bad things. Yeah sure, a sales person can sell hugs and use their money to donate to charity but that doesn't change the fact that their job exists because our society creates perverse incentives and I definitely judge people who are naturally drawn to these positions.
Most people would be happy if sales people were no longer needed in society. They are a necessary evil.
I think the soldier comparison is interesting. At least with soldiers there is plausible deniability because being a soldier doesn't automatically mean murder. It's not like soldiers have a daily murder quota. However, the same isn't true for sales. Sales people have sales quotas. Their entire job is shoving products down peoples throats.
They are also the reason why you have a job. Without sales you have nothing. Without marketing you don't know what to build. Building stuff that no one wants is useless.
Understanding politics that way is common and understandable. It's also an unfortunate cultural construction of the term, because this understanding is deeply incorrect.
Politics is what happens when people disagree about what should be done, or how it should be done. That's it. That's what politics is.
There are principled and corrupt reasons for disagreement. There are forthright and deceptive/manipulative means of engaging disagreement. All of that is politics.
When someone is advocating for a better PTO policy either because they personally would like something more advantageous for themselves or because they think it'll boost morale and productivity, that's politics.
When someone manages their office relationships to increase their chances or being hired into a higher management position either because they personally would like to advance their career or because they think they can help the business run more effectively, that's politics.
When someone attempts to spoil management on tech stack X and talk up tech stack Y, that's politics whether it's because they know both well and are sure which will suit the business & problem domain better, or because their personal expertise is more with Y than X and it'll increase their value to the organization without further investment.
The problem with assuming "politics" refers to inherently underhanded activity is that it shirks the work of engaging disagreement productively and instead pathologizes disagreement in one way or another -- usually by either pathologizing an opposing position or class of people.
Good faith disagreements are not politics, they're negotiation.
Politics is when one person/group tries to sabotage/undermine another person/group out of self-interest, even though it harms the project and reduces value.
Their self-interest becomes their top goal.
My personal take is that there are two extremes of culture. One is dedicated to engineering and management excellence. Everyone contributes. Even if there's vigorous disagreement the engine runs smoothly and Things Get Done.
The other is a snake pit of back stabbing, drama, competitive ambition, and narcissism which spreads from the c-suite down. Things still get done, sometimes, but they're poor quality - or at least much poorer than they could be. If they make it to market they'll be overhyped and oversold. (Contempt for customers and employees alike is a good tell-tale.)
No org is 100% one or the other, but those are the competing tendencies, and - of course - they're very different to work in.
Negotiation is a form of politics, not a separate thing from politics. Good faith negotiation is a principled and often relatively productive form of politics, but it remains politics nonetheless.
> out of self-interest
It's important to note that politics is as frequently driven by values as interests. This is true both in the office and in nation-states. And given that differing values often produce differing visions of excellence, a commitment to excellence doesn't spare people from the efforts/rigors of politics.
A lot of decent management books indicate politics are natural and your job as manager is to manage them. Pretending they don't exist or can be done away with is unrealistic and counter productive.
Politics in this sense is kinda negative but not really - acknowledgment that different people and groups may reasonably or unreasonably have different priorities, goals, perspectives, preferences, methodologies. I've spent most of my life under the Delusion of "reasonable people will agree if we just sit down and talk", but I no longer think that's the case (not the least because otherwise eventually you have to label everybody but yourself "unreasonable" :).
As techies often we want full, comprehensive, correct unmutable requirements, full understanding for all issues encountered, and flexibility of schedule to reach out architectural and technical goals and standards, and everything else is "office politics".
Difference exists.
Politics is trying to reconcile different perspectives priorities methods and goals. Hidden motives and deception are not necessary part of it.
I think the reality is that anyone might engage in these behaviors from time to time. I've seen myself doing some of these things in my weaker moments and I've seen others doing them. And I've seen those same people turn around and contribute positively on other days. Of course no one is going to categorize themselves as highly overrated. Maybe that's because people often don't reliably fit into specific categories.
Well, some of them are not exactly something you'd do on purpose, can be just from the work flow, or just how some people are
> Distract with Arguments about Minutiae
is easy for tech people as we could discuss every detail for tens of minutes ignoring the fact remaining 4 people in the meeting don't give a shit about the minutia of solution, just that it is done
> Time It So You Look Good (Or Everyone Else Looks Bad)
is easy if you (or your manager!) mismanages priorities of tasks and you don't have habit of starting with stuff that might block other people first..
Like, simeple example, ticket looks "long" from title so you don't even read it before you have longer time period. You read it, then it turns out before start you need some information first from the submitter.
You now delayed tasks by hours, maybe days, compared to if you read it first, sent the "give me stuff I need" message, then went back to doing other things before the response came
There is a fine line between being highly overrated or just being successful at selling your achievements. I suspect a lot of people start out successfully selling their genuine achievements, but over time realise they can just do the selling.
They get caught up in the image they have created of themselves. I think there is a need for "Social Adaptation" but taken too far becomes counter-productive i.e. you lose authenticity.
You could probably say this about my last year or so at my previous job, but I didn't really use these strategies. I just had a plan to leave without leaving a gap, so I intentionally allowed my ongoijg work to be taken over, stopped picking up new things, and made sure to finish up the loose ends. I also had some time for leadership and mentoring, but I think that was more real than the type of leadership in the article; I did build a working prototype and provided real code review help and meeting support (which isn't very technical, but can be really helpful for a junior employee to keep a project moving). At the end, people expressed to me that they thought it would be hard for them after I left, but it really wasn't.
Also, I'd have to say, if you're at a small company, being the person who sets up corporate/production accounts gets you in as an important person for new employees and really helps with being overrated, because everyone has interacted with you.
I actually don't like that kind of articles at all precisely because I tend to find things from myself and the authors often do very bad job in analysing these behaviours because the articles are one sided "hit pieces" that essentially promote a narrative or a worldview.
All the same behaviours can be written in a self improvement post on LinkedIn or something or a successful person might try to attribute the success to these behaviours. In its core its all the same, at best people trying to explain things they don't understand using broken mental models and at worst people trying to explain their failure through their virtues(I could have been great but I'm too good of a person to act in that way).
IMHO all these behaviours have different roots and dynamics and plays little role in the actual results(being successful or overrated).
The acceptance of others in our team called "society", who assume as a
matter of human dignity that we each "add" something, is how we all
get by and live. We're all nice people, terrified of growing old and
alone, being left out out in the cold and hungry. We're all part of
the same team, under the same shit system that makes us feel safer by
devaluing others.
I have known many folks like this. I have found they don't really last long, in the evironments in which I worked.
I've definitely not been one, but I have been in ultra-high-performing environments, in a Japanese company (where they watch everything), so it became habit.
Even so, I often feel like I was the dumbest kid in the room, because I was around some damn smart people.
But I do find that making a negative posting, is a great way to get "engagement," and it's fairly common. There's lots of "Y'all are doing it wrong" posts, out there, compared to "This is why I think what I do, works well" posts.
Fair point. Although in my experience the most useless people at work usually spend working hours jacking around with their plex server, daytrading crypto, etc.
...how many people in general you know that tell other their flaws and "crimes" out of blue ?
It's just not the thing people do, and I don't think many do that with premeditation too, by mix of impostor complex and trying to look busy for the boss
