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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2518 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 30, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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There is a "game" and you'll learn how to play it. Take these with a grain of salt:

  • Whatever your job is, your job is to make your manager happy
  • Figure out how your manager (and others who have power over you and your career) are rating you, and optimize for that.
  • On the above, it may not matter how your coworkers rate you, so you may not need to optimize for their opinions.
  • It is easier for others to judge superficial details than deep ones, so that's what they'll do.
  • You are always "busy". You help others by "squeezing in" the work between X and Y.
  • The helpful guy who always accepts extra work will inevitability end up with lots of extra work. This is okay if this work counts towards something (e.g. promotion), but otherwise can be harmful if it prevents you from doing higher impact work, so act accordingly.
  • Do visible, high impact work. If you do something, and nobody knows about it, did you really do anything?
  • Go to the social events, build relationships. Relationships outside your local team can be particularly valuable.

Maybe these are obvious, but I have seen people who don't get it. To be clear, I am not saying don't work hard, but work hard on things that matter, and there is a skill in figuring what what matters.

I think that this is heavily dependent on what field you work in. I have worked in corporate IT for almost 20 years now, and in a healthy environment it's nothing like what you describe. It may be different for other fields of course.

I've worked in IT/dev for about 10 years, and I've found these things to all be true both in functional and dysfunctional workplaces, although they are more important in the latter. If you have a fantastic, altruistic manager, you might be able to ignore some of these, but even then it's probably unwise.

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