In the beginning of my career, I've been once told by my senior management that I should never again:
1. Optimize things so that they work 10 000 times faster because it makes us look incompetent (must be done slowly to show gradual progress).
2. Brag about such optimization (to stakeholders) without first synchronizing this with them (so they can brag proportionally to their pay rate :) ).
This is the prime example of Law 1 of Robert Greene's "The 48 Laws of Power": "Never Outshine the Master."
The core principle is to always make those above you - your bosses, mentors, or superiors feel comfortably superior.
If you display your talents too aggressively, you risk triggering their deep-seated insecurities, which can lead them to sabotage your career or remove you from your position.
Galileo Galilei handled this really well. When he discovered the moons of Jupiter he strategically named them after the ruling Medici family.
By making the discovery about their greatness rather than his own intellect, he secured their lifelong patronage.
However, if your superior is a "fading star" or is clearly about to fall, you do not need to be merciful. In these cases, it may be strategic to outshine them to hasten their downfall and position yourself as the natural successor.
Sure it has been codified into a "law" but really this is just basic social skills / emotional intelligence which engineers on the spectrum struggle with.
If you've spent any time in a large enough organization you realize quickly that hierarchies form based on status, power and influence & not necessarily technical merit. No it's not "the best person for the job" that rises up and tells you what to do.
Casually solving a problem that required a lot of resources and personnel has big implications in the power dynamics of the org. This is like setting off a nuke. You don't just do this unless you are prepared for the blow back or can easily consolidate attention & influence in the immediate aftermath.
Take a look at OpenAI's corporate politics for an example of how this works in practice. All the key talent that defined the company has left or was forced out and will likely languish in whatever ventures they start next, all because they don't understand how humans operate & how to drive change by aligning incentives.
It’s hardly basic social skill. This is an executive management skill set. That’s the advanced game.
The basic social skill is to avoid conflict and seek acceptance. Go along to get along.
One wouldn’t rewrite the app on one’s on recognizance without peer approval first if this is your vibe.
some people discuss these dynamics as sheep versus goats. Social stability was more precious due to scarcity, while goat behavior included 40 armed men killing their rivals with swords (and better if the rivals do not have their own swords). Many, many parallels exist in mammals that live in groups. You might be surprised at the details of how some mammals actually behave in real life!
Competent management says:
"Look how clever we were to hire this person and put them in the right place at the right time! We are now ahead of schedule and are reallocating teams."
There's remarkably little competent management.
My rule had always been "hire people smarter than you and give them everything they need to succeed". Set a clearly defined goal, ensure understanding of the reasons behind it then provide the support the team needs to make it happen.
doesn't even need to be "smarter than you", just realise that as a manager your job is not to build the product, it's to build the environment in which the people building the product can thrive and build the best product they are capable of.
Ditto. And then celebrate them like crazy for every win and give them all the credit, even if you helped. Who wouldn't want to do their absolute best work in an environment like that?
It seems like you are suggesting it is lamentable that a group of people with the analytical intelligence to create a technology that has changed the world, don't have the social intelligence to be irrational when that is called for? Shouldn't we instead hate the game itself and lament that leaders can't behave rationally? In my more frustrated moments I wonder about a world following a disease that eliminated all neurotypical people.
But then he went on to spite the pope for no good reason, leading to all that trouble with the church.
>>> Galileo Galilei handled this really well
Errr… Galileo was asked to write a book discussing both sides of the heliocentric / geocentric debate … and so wrote a book with two characters having a debate while walking in a garden - one named (I paraphrase for effect) “Galileo” and one named “Pope Simplehead”
Needless to say the next twenty years under house arrest gave him a lot of time to think about character names :-)
Thank you Machiavelli
great perspective and wisdom nuggets.
Sounds like when I was asked to give minimum hardware requirements for something doing backend processing (receive text submitted as print jobs, massage, send to printers).
The requirements as they went out were much higher than they needed to be, because I decided telling them that we weren't stressing anything on the obsolete NT desktop repurposed as the test system might not please everyone.
This was the moment I’ve stopped putting any effort in my work.
IMHO I think the best any engineer can do in an org is to ask "what is the highest value problem to solve for the business" and "can I solve it".
"I made this x times better" is not relevant to _most peoples in any org_.
That's the dark secret. Nobody cares how good of an engineer you are _unless there is a fire to put out_. After which you get pat on the back and back to usual business.
There are situations where years of impeccable, high value diligent work is rewarded.
But what is more common is that the rewards go to those who are in politically expedient position to get the rewards. Favourites, culturally aligned folk, etc. And sometimes it's not even about you or your boss, but the politics in the organization at large. "You are not allowed to promote anyone due to budget" is a very common thing.
So I guess what I mean to say is if as an egineer you want to retain your sanity, when at work focus on maximizing business value. If you know a kick-ass solution that is 10000x better than industry standard go with it but know this - nobody will care! Nobody believes _someone in their org_ could have beaten _industry standard_ unless the org is very unique. What you get is small increase in your reputation - and sadly nobody recognizes how hard that was. Maybe you will meet some other engineer at some point who has tackled that same issue - and then you can bond over the solution.
A large part of software ecosystems is about business, politics, and the large scale impact of technology.
Saying this as an IC whose previous tasks at previous employer could have employed _teams_ but since we were allowed to deal with them smartly it was just me.
So if you know a 10000x solution to a problem many people have - that's a good opportunity to consider can it be productized!
The sad corollary to "you will be noticed only if you put out fires" is nobody actually realizes the elegant solution you shipped will stop tons of these fires from happening. Rather the reaction will be "that looked simple and easy so probably is not important".
And on the other hand, the complexifier (you know the type) ships rude goldberg gizmos just waiting to go off-kilter - and then they come in and save the day - and get rewarded. This creates a very strong "emperor has no clothes" syndrome until reality hits the organization really hard in the face. More often than not these horrible solutions are "good enough" and the show just goes on.
Don't take it too seriously! That's what people are like!
> The sad corollary to "you will be noticed only if you put out fires" is nobody actually realizes the elegant solution you shipped will stop tons of these fires from happening. Rather the reaction will be "that looked simple and easy so probably is not important".
Or that reaction is really "that looked simple, easy and like the last 10 "elegant solutions" that caused fires".
Yes! There are also very good reasons for deep skepticism.
Just smear the heck out of them to stakeholders, after implementing something big and climb over these incompetent shmucks and watch their fall
Also make sure to brag using terms that non-technical people can understand and want to hear. Less "we stopped writing an in-house CRUD that was Django but worse" and more "we saved months and increased security by adopting a market leading solution and it works better with AI too".
While probably facetious, those with power (who you aim to smear and replace) will save themselves and work together to fire you ASAP. This is not a winnable battle nor strategy for success, unfortunately.
This 100%. I once got disciplined for insubordination for skip-leveling my "manager" and disregarding their instructions when she started telling people on the team to work on something totally non-critical, when the team had a demo in a few days that wasn't ready yet, with a client that was already unhappy, on an 8 million dollar contract.
I didn't hang around that place long.
Did they know something you didn't know, about that demo/client? i.e. misaligned incentives?
The opposite, they were 12 hours timeshifted and out of the loop managing a side hustle while I was interacting with the client daily.
If I can only go back in time to 2007 :)
See also, test the flammability of every bridge you cross.
Unless you were working at a startup full of very naive people, I gotta say this sounds made up.
If people at startups weren't slightly naive, they wouldn't attempt an endeavour that has such a low success rate :)
This happens all the time.
Basically build vs buy. The problem is on the 'buy' portion of looking at things the company failed. So they took who they had on hand and built something. It took a fresh perspective to say 'hey have you tried this' and looks like they did not want to hear it. I would say the right choice was made to move on.
This is wildly common. At that point they were committed to the wrong path at 'above my pay grade levels'. Once you get that buy in you better do it that way. Most companies will not pivot unless the champion for whatever is going on is removed in some way.
At 'my paygrade' I can prototype tech but I better make a good case why I need everyone else to do it too. If I dont I will be summerly ignored at best, at worst 'the guy with the lets rewrite the system hahahaha' guy. I might even be right about it. But the probelm is a jr level guy is not going to have the political cover to make it happen. Even if they are right.
But if you can get 'the higher ups' to buy in. Then it is quite dramatic how much better somethings putting that sort of tech in. Then other times it can be a total disaster. So you have to pick your hill to die on.
Yes, but that's not what the specific comment I replied to is saying.
It sounds like pure junior dev fantasy that anyone would care beyond whether it meets the explicitly stated requirements.
Any other flourishes that the devs add are going to be unused or ignored, and that definitely includes what the devs think about their own work.