High output management (Andy Grove) is a classic that I've found a lot of value from over the years — written in the 80s and shows its age here and there, but otherwise good for the fundamentals: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/d...
+1 best book I have ever read on the topic. A short concise book with a number of good ideas that anyone working in a large/medium or perhaps even a small company would benefit from. So good, that I re-read parts of it twice already. My full review and notes are here: https://ryan-h.com/2019/10/21/andrew-grove-high-output-manag...
This is (unfortunately) great advice for large companies like Google, MSFT, Meta, where the internal mechanics of vying for and achieving promotion tend to drive behavior. Promo packets, calibration sessions, etc. OTOH, this is not good advice for any organization that maintains the capacity to (1) recognize and (2) value great work on merit. Better to spend your mental energy on doing something you and your colleagues deeply value, towards some shared goal.
Not just one document for "achievements". Have a separate section for the big "bar raiser" moments.
If you don't keep this document constantly updated on a daily basis, you will quickly forget what you did and when, and then you won't have a document for any of your achievements.
You need to show this document to your manager and discuss each item on the list during your weekly 1-on-1 meetings.
Failure to do so is pretty much guaranteed to keep you from being promoted. Failure to be promoted is pretty much guaranteed to get you pushed out the door.
The U.S. Military has a concept of "too much time in grade", a.k.a., "up or out". The big companies have a similar process -- if you're not moving up the ladder fast enough in comparison to all the other people at your level, then you need to leave.
My biggest problem is recognizing when I've done anything worthy of writing down as an achievement.
False. This is great for any job. Not saying it will always be successful but its a red flag if you do this and it has no impact on your compensation or promos.
I couldn’t disagree more. In healthy organizations your manager and your peers can observe your impact and and calibrate correctly.
It’s only on teams and organizations that are disfunctional that such artifacts are useful. If I have to keep a document for this I’m already looking for a new job.
This is really interesting to hear; I work in a team & org that I think is pretty healthy, but I've found the yearly "brag doc" exercise useful for several years running, if only to go through and remind myself of everything I worked on. I consistently find that I've done a _lot_ more than I remember, and that's both a boost and also a healthy opportunity to reflect. The artifact is then useful over the next year as a reminder.
This is in fact the focus of Julia's post (she literally says this early on), and I think it's kind of unfortunate that folks are mostly talking about using the brag doc as advocacy in the performance review process.
When the organization is healthy there is no need for a catalog of achievements.
For mental boosts you get affirmation regularly that you are moving the team/product/org in the right direction (or the opposite you recalibrate quickly if you aren’t).
Similarly, reflecting on what has been accomplished is a regular part of the holistic process, not a bespoke individuals task.
If a brag doc is valuable to you personally, great! By all means feel free to build one. But if building one is necessary to excel in an organization that is a very bad sign.
Sure - earlier you said "if this is useful that's a really bad sign", and now you're saying "if it's necessary it's a very bad sign", which are pretty different claims. I'm mostly interested in probing the former, so if you're not making that stronger claim then I think we're on the same page.
I was responding to this claim: “ but its a red flag if you do this and it has no impact on your compensation or promos”
That implies (to me at least) that the brag doc is necessary to get appropriate recognition externally in the org. That’s a huge red flag. If it provides you personally some internal validation then whatever, that doesn’t say anything about your organization.
This really depends on the organization and the manager. I have been in orgs where my manager knows very well what I am doing and my impact. A list like this would be fairly useless in that case.
I have worked for bigger corps where my manager has no idea what I do, especially consulting service companies. If I’ve worked with 7 clients over 3 different account groups, I am the only one who knows what those 7 clients are, and what I did for them. In those cases I do document my accomplishments. I have even gone as far as create a brief presentation for when I get a new manager.
This also differs from a CV not only in being more detailed, but also flagging things like “successfully worked with XYZ account manager, who is widely known to be difficult to work with”.
Managers, especially if they have a large span of control (but even if they don't), aren't all uniformly disciplined at recording every instance of impact. To help your manager and reduce variability (i.e. their perception of your performance should be based on data, not vibes), it's to your advantage to keep your own list.
I've had good managers that I keep in the loop with weekly 1:1's but come promo time, even they need help figuring out what I did over the span of a year. (to be honest, if I hadn't written it down, I don't even remember myself)
As they should. But... you are the driver of your career, not your manager. It's a HUGE risk to rely on your manager only to do it. We get busy and even if were doing that we have a ton of other things were balancing. The risk is that things are missed. Your manager is a support person to your career development.
So untrue.
Creation of this kind of a brag document comes under the "retrospective" process - which is one of the core requirements of any culture that maintains capacity to recognise and value great work.
If you think you are able to do that in your company without a prioritised retrospective process, I would be very curious to know how that happens.
(From my experience of working in 10+ organisations, people who think so usually are lying to themselves that they are recognising and valuing great work. They are (without exception, in my experience) running a very political organisation. But I would love to be proved wrong.)
This is arguably good advice in most circumstances, even in private projects. Like it or not, self-promotion gets you noticed. Getting noticed grants you opportunities. Opportunities let you show off what you can do. Rinse and repeat.
Congrats on joining Dropbox! As someone who has a ton of stuff that I'm too lazy to sell, I'm curious if you could speak at all about why the business was not working. Do you think Shyp [http://www.shyp.com/] is a better business model?
Congrats on the acquisition ! Can we know a little more about who (if not all) of the team will be joining Dropbox ? How many people were working at Sold ?
Seriously. The bash-everything mentality is bad - for the Hacker News community, but also for the startup community as a whole. No one is going to create anything new if they're afraid to try.
Beyond that, I don't come to this site to read people insult everyone else. Can you imagine going to a developer meetup where everyone just walks around and criticizes everyone else? But somehow people think that sort of thing is okay online.
As far as I'm concerned, people like this represent the worst form of hackers, and should not be welcome on this site.
Peddl makes selling as easy as snapping a photo. With the push of a button, Peddl automatically prices and categorizes whatever it is you’re selling, creating an instant online storefront which accepts credit card payments. Peddl turns the mobile device into the most efficient tool for selling things to the people around you.
We’re a small team spun out of the MIT Media Lab set to change the way people think about buying and selling second hand goods online and we aren’t stopping until it’s done. Learn more about the founding team at http://www.terrarium.io
– Current Positions –
Back End Engineer:
We’re building a next generation transaction platform which brings insanely simple payment to the masses. We care deeply about both external and internal craftsmanship of our products and look for candidates that do too.
Android Engineer:
We’re looking for a talented front-end engineer to help us create best in class mobile apps for Android and iOS. We care about every pixel and look for candidates that do too.
Growth Hacker:
We’re looking for an exceptional marketer with a high level of exposure to technology and experience with code. We believe that marketing, product, and engineering work together to make the product market itself.
Intern:
We are looking for a handful of super smart, passionate interns who have serious interest in local marketplaces. If you’re interested in app development, the mobile web, and have a sense for great design, Peddl has a spot for you.
It's fairly plain to see that the "redesign" completely disregards any presence of advertisement. I'd say that would be a constraint failed to be considered.
> Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages. Story pages could still have one or two tastefully-presented ads, but preservation of the content is what will keep readers happy, engaged, and willing to continue paying their subscriptions…just like in olden times.
"Considering" a constraint using magic fairy dust and an imaginary world where people pay for news content isn't really addressing it, unfortunately. It's like saying "since people can levitate, we can ditch their shoes. They can wear minimal shoes for times when they might want to land, but unencumbered feet will keep people happy".
I try to keep up with Khoi Vihn and Subtraction because I believe he always provides a balanced insight into respectable/high-design principals and the practicality of applying them to mammoth operations like the NYT and such.
In fact, his tone of decency and respect, despite the the off-the-cuff pronouncements made by Andy Rutledge is exactly the voice I've come to expect from Khoi. Which is awesome.
Also, this reminds me a lot of the Delta Airlines redesign fiasco brought on by another designer (http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html). It's really easy to sit back and critique the obvious flaws in design from within the ivory tower of photoshop, where you can arbitrarily remove advertisements and ignore the loads of user studies that entire teams have spent significant portions of their careers.
This is the kind of stuff that gives designers the MO of being 'decorators' who don't 'respect constraints' - operational or technical. As a designer myself, it's sad to see this behavior showing up again and again.
There are some 2,000+ four year colleges in the US, and "recruiters" are only interested in grads from 3 or 4 of them? I'm a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab, no one I know or work with is even interested in job fairs, recruiters, etc.
That said, any company that won't look at me because I'm from MIT and not Princeton isn't the kind of place I would want to work anyway. I'm sure this sort of discrimination makes for great internal culture.
That said, any company that won't look at me because I'm from MIT and not Princeton isn't the kind of place I would want to work anyway. I'm sure this sort of discrimination makes for great internal culture.
Would you count Google in that statement -- with their notoriously discriminating hiring practices with respect to schooling?
The handful of people I know at Google are from a variety of academic institutions, ASU, UW, Stanford, and MIT to name a few. Most importantly, they're all passionate, creative hackers who take pride in their work – not riding the prestige of their education.
The answer directly, if google decided folks from Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, MIT were not good enough while those from Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and Harvard were - then yes, I would count Google in my statement.
That's good to hear -- and sounds like an improvement.
I was having dinner with a coordinator of university job fairs about a year ago and she commented that Google and Facebook were among the worst companies she's ever dealt with respect to hiring practices due to a very large school bias. Many of the schools she works with complains that their students don't even get their resumes looked at. She also note that Microsoft used to be one of those as well, but with Google and FB vacuuming up everybody else they've had to cast their net a bit wider.
Perhaps times are changing?
Anecdotally, the most brilliant people I've ever worked with came from either state schools or CMU or Stanford or MIT (specifically). I've had very little success finding top-notch folks from other established Ivies. Not sure why that is.
I think pg's essay on schools really helps bring some data to that though. It really is the individuals that count.
I started losing interest when LinkedIn turned into yet another Twitter status stream. I enjoyed it much more when it was pure, and focused on professional relationship growth (debatable, yes). In the most egotistical sense, it is still interesting to see who has been viewing your profile.
