I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product.
Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped.
I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again...
Call me a paycheck stealer, quiet quitter etc.
Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day.
I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men. A company that doesn’t know what’s broken is doomed to mediocrity.
But some people want to play music while the ship sinks. So they arrange for the most pleasant rest of the voyage they can, instead of saving as many people as they can.
> I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men
I’m pretty cynical and assumed this was how layoffs worked but at least in faang and even smaller (maybe 500 people) SV companies, I actually don’t think this is the case anymore. Most I’ve seen have been extremely random – it seems like they cut teams/orgs very differently but on an individual level it seems random. I got the impression it’s some lawsuit thing, because they never leak the info beforehand so managers and other seniors can chime in, so it appears they’re cutting blindly from the exec level. There’s probably some politics going on in the higher echelons and maybe they force individuals out but with managers (including decorated ones) and regular employees it has not looked like a surgical political - not performance - play. From what I’ve seen.
The part I'm confused at is it doesn't seem that they are doomed, and end up being very successful companies. But I think this is likely due to lack of competition.
I recently did an internship at one of these big companies, doing ML. I'm a researcher but had a production role. Coming in everything was really weird to me from how they setup their machines to training and evaluation. I brought up that the way they were measuring their performance was wrong and could tell they overfit their data. They didn't believe me. But then it came to be affecting my role. So I fixed it, showed them, and then they were like "oh thanks, but we're moving on to transformers now." Main part of what I did is actually make their model robust and actually work on their customer data! (I constantly hear that "industry is better because we have customers so it has to work" but I'm waiting to see things work like promised...) Of course, their transformer model took way more to train and had all the same problems, but were hidden a few levels deeper due to them dramatically scaling data and model size.
I knew the ML research community had been overly focused on benchmarks but didn't realize how much worse it was in production environments. It just seems that metric hacking is the explicitly stated goal here. But I can't trust anyone to make ML models that themselves are metric hackers. The part that got me though is that I've always been told by industry people that if I added value to the company and made products better that the work (and thus I) would be valued. I did in an uncontestable manner, and I did not in an uncontestable way. I just thought we could make cool products AND make money at the same time. Didn't realize there was far more weight to the latter than the former. I know, I'm naive.
> I'll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men. A company that doesn’t know what’s broken is doomed to mediocrity.
I used to have that attitude, but since then I've grown to learn that people who bring back news are also creating the problems without providing any solution whereas the "yes-men" excuse is a coping mechanism to rationalize why those who try to actually tackle problems and are smart enough to not raise them before they actually exist ir have solutions are indeed an asset to the team.
No one wants to deal with a pain-in-the-ass who creates problems for everyone out of thin air. That's what gets you fired. Everyone has to deal with real problems, and they don't need the distraction of having to deal with artificial ones.
Unless they are given meaningful equity, it's not their ship, and regardless of whether it is or isn't, unlike the shareholders and creditors, they won't be sinking with it.
If you want worker interests to be even a little aligned with owner interests, the correct corporate structure is not an S corp, or a C corp, it is some flavor of worker co-op.
Peoplw conceptualize businesses likr some super organism that should try to maximize the quality of its products.
In reality, it most.often maximizes its executives lives while minimizing all other forms of frictions.
Everyone whose worked with small businesses will rscognize this pattern easily. Uts only when you get a few e?tra executives that the equation itself gets comolicated, but its still typically about maximizing the executives livlihood.
I have been doing this for years and I think it's the best output per hour worked strategy if you have a clear exit plan outside scaling the so-called ladder
> if you have a clear exit plan outside scaling the so-called ladder
Exit plan is FIRE. Everything else is circus and performance art. Others can play status games, I prefer wealth games: wealth is options and options are freedom.
Pragmatic, smart, skilled people are extracted from unless lucky and in a position to see outsized returns from their effort. Better to know what enough is, collect enough freedom coins, and enjoy the one go you get at life.
(n=1, ymmv, "show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome")
I was layed off after being burnt out on exactly what you're describing. The organization lost 5 years of deep institutional knowledge into their systems that I designed because i couldn't get buy in on what I thought was important.
As someone who cares about his work, has strong professional ethics and wisely chooses his employers to not end-up in such environments, no I don't.
The worst places for me are precisely those where you can get by with 1~2h of work a day because no one cares and the company's culture does not value the time and skills of his workers.
> Aren't we all (normal and decent people) doing this already?
I've known many such in my career. They weren't fooling anybody. Everybody knew who they were. When they'd get laid off or were passed over for a raise they were always baffled and outraged.
No. I feel ownership and collaboration over what my team does. We prioritize, design, review, and build together (not endorsing a methodology, just a culture). It has been this way since I was a junior engineer. I want to understand and solve problems. I want to learn and build bigger and better tithings.
Punching in premade tickets for 2 hours a day sounds like you’re already dead.
I've never felt secure enough to check out like this, even when my position was effectively locked in. I always want to improve and attain something bigger, so I look for problems beyond my scope when the work isn't coming to me. I feel comfort thinking I know how to take an idea through the full execution cycle due to my practice in seeking and solving problems. But it is hard for me to relax and let go.
Ignoring the amount of time spend working for a moment. I would be miserable if all I got to do during that time was work on Jira tickets others created.
Sounds similar to me. I didn't get laid off though, and my climb was only one actual promotion even though I was filling a tech lead position. I managed to switch teams right before the layoff/outsourcing. I tried hard on the next team and again achieved a great reputation in the department. But it meant nothing and I got nowhere. I even had a few people in the department ask why I was taking a demotion out of the group - I wasn't, they all just thought I was a higher level than I actually was... fuck the system.
I'm in this trap right now a little bit. After a particularly egregious instance of feeling passed over for a promo, how can I trust that the next jerkoff won't do the same thing?
Did you get cut cause "we need a number" and you're expensive?
Were you the growth guy when they need run the busies blood and guts people?
Did they save 2 people in some other department who matter more with some horse trading?
You can go and be a clock puncher. It's perfectly fine to do so. I know plenty of them, some got laid off recently and cant seem to find jobs. The high achiever's the go the extra mile types who are LIKED (dont be an asshole) are all working already.
Down vote me all you want. I was here for the first (2000) tech flop. The people who went the extra mile and some safe and secure corporates were the ones who made it. Coming out the other side (the ad tech, Web 2.0 boom) there were a lot of talented, ambitious, hard working people around. Any one who wasnt that ended up in another field that made them happy.
It's all well and good to include a disclaimer about downvotes. But, it is somewhat irrelevant, as the reason you are most likely to be downvoted is not because you are touching on a sensitive subject. They are downvoting you because your argument makes it very clear you actually haven't read the article.
If it so happens that that company was wrong in what they did, you run the risk of optimizing for the wrong things based on one bad observation. The company doesn’t care. The negatives only affect your career.
And in the end, the terrible people won. Because you stopped caring seeming about anything, you're likely living a worse more jaded life, and your next company isn't getting a good employee.
Learning an important lesson isn't about flushing your aspirations down the toilet. That's just cementing your destiny as someone who will never achieve moderate success. If that's your goal, shrugs?
> the terrible people won ... you're likely living a worse more jaded life
Respectfully, I think this is rather judgemental (I realize the irony that I am judging you, too :)
It doesn't have to be a battle, there doesn't have to be a winner. Everybody is free to explore their limits and boundaries, and put energy into the areas of life that they find most fruitful.
Maybe OP really does want a kick-in-the-pants "get back in there and fight!" pep talk — in which case, ignore me. But maybe they just decided that it was not their particular hill to die on. It takes all kinds.
When that dynamic takes hold, it is more that the good people failed. There is an extremely real subset of the population that gets a thrill out of telling other people what to do and damn the technical consequences of their orders. If people who are uncomfortable being in charge don't figure out a way to get over their own reservations; then guess who will hold all the positions of power? People who really want to. And not necessarily because they are nice or capable people, but because they'll say or do anything.
The part that frustrates me is that technically competent people often get brutally attacked because they lack charisma. It is wildly counterproductive.
My life exactly. I used to dream of a kind of high drive team, did more than I should, on obvious metrics (velocity, onboarding, performance, ..) .. but the average politics in all human groups makes it too rare and you end up suffering too much absurdities. It's a lesson in statistics and relativism.
Some people don’t care about the grindset or putting in 50hr weeks. As long as work gets done and you’re reasonably keeping your skills up to date, what does it matter?
If anything it’s more of a win by gaining hours of your life back that would’ve been spent people-pleasing.
That's a hard pill to swallow after years and years of the same routine 'unsuccesses' , and it relies on the personal belief that A decent life cannot be lead without success in finance and business; I believe that's simply not the case.
Yep. After being laid off, I decided that I am best working with the diligence of a Boeing QA engineer. Do the bare minimum and use overemployment to flee the work world as fast as possible.
This puts the cart before the horse. In reality, the biggest source of untapped potential, at least anecdotally as an engineer, is that corporations tend to give grease to squeaky wheels. So, the upper quadrants in the article.
If you have even a few years of industry experience, modulo being intentionally naive, you've noticed that work begets work. The 'skilled pragmatists' quietly do their jobs well. Their reward is even more work to do, without much recognition.
It's analogous to software quality. It's fleetingly rare that a consumer of software writes in to let you know how great, zippy and bug-free it is. You only ever hear about how terrible things are. When things are 'good' -- that's just the expected status quo. So no reward for steadily doing good things.
I'm also sure after a few years in industry you've also noticed that the Do-Nothing (TM) guy who sprints around with their head on fire gets managerial recognition, promotions, bonuses.
You know the kind. They wander from meeting to meeting, initiative to initiative, never actually accomplishing anything concrete, but showing their face to management and saying a lot of nice words.
Eventually, the skilled pragmatist notices this dichotomy and mentally clocks out. I've heard this anecdote many times, both in online circles and IRL.
Very true. As an added detail, I see it comes in waves. New CTO/CIO brings in his trusted lieutenants who then bring in their trusted people. They may excel at XYZ but at your company those skills are irrelevant. Some folks who are already on staff hitch their wagon to the new powers that be. These johnny-come-latelys are also insufferable. The game continues until the CTO/CIO is let go and another house cleaning begins. During the meantime, you wonder how any real work gets done.
I don't know if this is related, but growing up there were certain values instilled in me that went something like "don't toot your own horn," "it's better to be seen and not heard," "keep your head down," etc. The main gist being that I should just do my job quietly, competently, and stay out of the way.
In practice, this resulted in me being effectively invisible to management, even when I was out-performing everyone else on the team. The guys who were loud and boisterous and constantly cawing about their achievements got all the raises and promotions, even though I was consistently doing more and better work. This came to a head when someone with far less seniority was promoted over me. I brought it up with my boss who said something like "I don't even know what you do all day. I never hear from you." The guy who was promoted would literally spend twice as much time boasting about what he was doing that actually doing it. I was objectively more productive, as in, there were metrics showing my productivity was significantly higher, but since I wasn't talking about what I was doing, I was unseen.
I obviously don't know enough about your particular situation to be an informed judge, but... it really sounds like the management team is operating in a reactive mode, rather than a proactive one, and as a result, they don't understand what's really going on inside the company. It doesn't bode well for their understanding of what's going on outside the company either. This kind of disconnect is often costly, sometimes fatal.
Congrats you don’t have a micromanager. But the flip side of that is you need to check in with them. That’s both of your fault, but you can only control you. You should at least have a “win/impact” document where you track what you’ve done and share with your manager.
I also try to work effectively but quietly, but an epiphany I had after working on a couple of technically interesting problems I thought were a big deal but were met with "k, thanks, bye" after being finished was the question: "if you don't talk to people about what you're working on, how do you even know it is desired by the org?"
On the other hand I have worked with team mates that just don't communicate what they are doing.
I always got the feeling that they either don't do anything at all or work on things that are completely irrelevant.
Over time I tend to develop a poor opinion of these people.
Communicate what your accomplishments are and why they are important for the business and you will be fine.
> This is an appealing narrative without evidence.
I had the same thought, but I’m grateful to the author for putting their opinions out for us to see.
It is an interesting quandary - getting “more” from someone, pragmatic or otherwise, raises questions. Is the premise that they aren’t providing value on a level with salary? Or, is it that the business has a right/obligation to extract more? The latter is offensive, fundamentally because “value” may be arbitrarily (perhaps capriciously) determined.
On the other hand, I find the folks suggesting that doing an hours work a day is fine. It’s not. That’s equally offensive.
Labor relations are intrinsically adversarial. The employer wants to pay as little as they can get away with for as much work as possible, the employee wants to be paid as much as possible for as little work as they can get away with.
This article is written for the employer's side, trying to optimize their game. The employees trying to normalize working approximately nothing are optimizing their side.
I don’t know how to out this “correctly”. But some of these developer complains remind me of the whole “incel” situation, where people rather complain about how the world works instead of improving themselves or learning how to excel in it.
Sure some people are conflict adverse, but some conflict aversion is healthy (there shouldn’t be physical or verbal fights at work) while some is being introverted or on the spectrum or lazy to a degree that the rest of the world shouldn’t be expected to bend to.
The way the author puts it I’m not even sure what the untapped potential even is. They describe these 75% as “doing what they can”. Okay so they’re just worker bees. That’s fine. What’s the problem?
There's some useful insight here even if the percents are wrong. Whatever the numbers, even if 10% are Marias, they're still an untapped resource, if not "the biggest". And the fact that some of us have been this person proves the percentage is not zero.
Feels like you found a small inaccuracy in the text, and jumped up "Aha! Everything you said is wrong!". Also an appealing narrative.
Yea, everyone is nit-picking the numbers... Where's the evidence? Where's the citations? Not everything is a paper in an academic publication. The quadrants themselves hold up and anecdotally match my experiences over decades of work. I can easily remember people I've worked with in each quadrant, and yes, the lower-right (whatever percent they are) are totally underutilized and mostly invisible.
> There's some useful insight here even if the percents are wrong. Whatever the numbers, even if 10% are Marias, they're still an untapped resource, if not "the biggest". And the fact that some of us have been this person proves the percentage is not zero.
All very fair and good points.
The author does make a strong claim, though, and I'm asking if there's evidence to back it up.
I probably wouldn't if they'd written "Some people are underused by their companies because they're Marias," which is a much smaller claim but still a perfectly fine basis for moving on to a discussion of how to get more value from those employees.
> Feels like you found a small inaccuracy in the text, and jumped up "Aha! Everything you said is wrong!". Also an appealing narrative.
Would you show me where you see this? I reread what I wrote and I'm not finding that, but maybe I'm just missing it.
I left a comment elsewhere on this thread, but here's an interesting quote by General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, an anti-Nazi WWII general.
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
So according to him, most people seem to fall into the bucket of being lazy and stupid, which is closer to reality. "Skilled pragmatists" seem to map into what he terms "clever and lazy".
I don’t think I can agree that 75% of the workforce falls into one quadrant. Particularly this one.
If I’m very lucky the semi space contains 60% of my coworkers, if I’m unlucky (or arrive after the writing is on the wall) it’s more like 1/3.
I suspect part of the confusion is that there are some people with enough political acumen to appear like frustrated agents of change without actually having the drive or skill to do so. If you create opportunities for these people to show up, you may be shocked to find them making excuses for why they still can’t.
And truthfully the industry is not full of untapped brilliant people. It isn’t even “full” of brilliant people period. maybe 1/4 of the human population could be counted as very smart, and we get a disproportionate share of them for sure, but it’s definitely not more than half.
I agree: It's not 75%. But you're suddenly substituting the word "brilliant" for "pragmatic" and that's kinda questionable. It might be that you define brilliant differently than some others, so that IQ is much less significant than pragmatism itself in your equation of brilliance; but if you think IQ -> pragmatic, I disagree. I think they're orthogonal.
Yeah that might have been a poor word choice or projection on my part.
As I replied elsewhere, I feel I am in this quadrant and I often actively look for sympathetic people among bosses and peers to talk to about it. If there are more than ten people I have someone to talk to, but it’s never been anywhere near 75%. And one time I got a very rude awakening when I discovered several of those people were all sizzle and no sausage.
> The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists.
Nothing about brilliant there. Just skilled and pragmatic.
You’re trying to cool head/cold shower the idea but you’re just substituing the narrative for HN’s favorite pastime of talking about high IQ/brilliance for the sake of it.
Yeah agree, I have worked with tons of smart people, talented people, people whose parents had them coding in elementary school, but only one person I would consider brilliant.
It was jarring how he instantly understood any line of reasoning I was going down. There was no need for context or lengthy background explanations, he would just see what you were doing. That was in most areas also, politics, programming, philosophy, etc.
It was refreshing because conveying information to him was effortless, he needed like 20% of the info that is usually required when explaining something to another person. I don't know how one could achieve that other than just being gifted at absorbing and processing information.
To be clear, I feel the author is describing me, and the loneliness and alienation I have felt too often at work tells me he’s using a lot of hyperbole.
If we form a lunch group to complain about our frustrations, it’s never been more than about four people, even in a team of dozens or more. Three is more common.
That said, he may be telling the truth with lies - this sort of untapped resource can have outsized impacts on a business, for good or ill.
I don't even think Pragmatists are "smart", or if they are it shows it self in the non-book ways. I'd be more inclined to describe them as "clever". If you've heard the "Smart, and gets stuff done" ideal, they're more of the latter.
Maybe 75% of the people who interact with the kind of person who blogs about institutional efficiency for the HN audience hate conflict but love their craft. Maybe on a good day.
The top 3 jobs in the US are home health care, retail sales and fast food. Not to denigrate any of those roles but I can't imagine 75% of them saying "X is her passion, but she's not about to burn a lot of social capital by rocking the boat". (I'm skipping over the "skilled" part, but substitute accountants & project managers and I still don't see getting to 75%)
This reads as a cynical description by someone who identifies as a "skilled pragmatist" (as I do, incidentally), but it doesn't seem to have a useful point of view. For example, "playing the system" and "making waves" have other names -- "driving initiatives" and "cross-team collaboration". They seem like "mushy" phrases because they are not well-defined sets of tasks like "deliver feature A" can become.
Are skilled pragmatists undervalued? Maybe, but this article doesn't do an good job of making me believe that.
it's recognition from the individual's perspective. think love languages. one person's recognition might be salary because they make $35,000/yr and another's isn't financial. they are doing this because retirement is boring.
in practice it is often a combination with different ratios.
as an employee it is advantageous to think about what makes you feel recognized and work with your manager on it. if it's monetary and they're stingy then your values won't align and you will be frustrated.
I think the root cause of why managers reward flashy employees over useful ones is because managers are clueless about the work itself. The more a manager understands the work, on a micro level, the more they'll be able to judge it accurately. Note that it doesn't mean micromanagement: you must understand the details, but stop yourself from second-guessing the employees on these details. And it doesn't mean you can't delegate: as long as you have intimate understanding of the details, you're free to delegate and be as hands-off as you want. In fact the best way to delegate is to learn to do the thing well yourself, then delegate it to someone and do occasional spot checks on them.
Readit News
Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped.
I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again...
Call me a paycheck stealer, quiet quitter etc.
Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day.
But some people want to play music while the ship sinks. So they arrange for the most pleasant rest of the voyage they can, instead of saving as many people as they can.
I’m pretty cynical and assumed this was how layoffs worked but at least in faang and even smaller (maybe 500 people) SV companies, I actually don’t think this is the case anymore. Most I’ve seen have been extremely random – it seems like they cut teams/orgs very differently but on an individual level it seems random. I got the impression it’s some lawsuit thing, because they never leak the info beforehand so managers and other seniors can chime in, so it appears they’re cutting blindly from the exec level. There’s probably some politics going on in the higher echelons and maybe they force individuals out but with managers (including decorated ones) and regular employees it has not looked like a surgical political - not performance - play. From what I’ve seen.
I recently did an internship at one of these big companies, doing ML. I'm a researcher but had a production role. Coming in everything was really weird to me from how they setup their machines to training and evaluation. I brought up that the way they were measuring their performance was wrong and could tell they overfit their data. They didn't believe me. But then it came to be affecting my role. So I fixed it, showed them, and then they were like "oh thanks, but we're moving on to transformers now." Main part of what I did is actually make their model robust and actually work on their customer data! (I constantly hear that "industry is better because we have customers so it has to work" but I'm waiting to see things work like promised...) Of course, their transformer model took way more to train and had all the same problems, but were hidden a few levels deeper due to them dramatically scaling data and model size.
I knew the ML research community had been overly focused on benchmarks but didn't realize how much worse it was in production environments. It just seems that metric hacking is the explicitly stated goal here. But I can't trust anyone to make ML models that themselves are metric hackers. The part that got me though is that I've always been told by industry people that if I added value to the company and made products better that the work (and thus I) would be valued. I did in an uncontestable manner, and I did not in an uncontestable way. I just thought we could make cool products AND make money at the same time. Didn't realize there was far more weight to the latter than the former. I know, I'm naive.
I used to have that attitude, but since then I've grown to learn that people who bring back news are also creating the problems without providing any solution whereas the "yes-men" excuse is a coping mechanism to rationalize why those who try to actually tackle problems and are smart enough to not raise them before they actually exist ir have solutions are indeed an asset to the team.
No one wants to deal with a pain-in-the-ass who creates problems for everyone out of thin air. That's what gets you fired. Everyone has to deal with real problems, and they don't need the distraction of having to deal with artificial ones.
If you want worker interests to be even a little aligned with owner interests, the correct corporate structure is not an S corp, or a C corp, it is some flavor of worker co-op.
And even then, it can't grow too big.
In reality, it most.often maximizes its executives lives while minimizing all other forms of frictions.
Everyone whose worked with small businesses will rscognize this pattern easily. Uts only when you get a few e?tra executives that the equation itself gets comolicated, but its still typically about maximizing the executives livlihood.
Exit plan is FIRE. Everything else is circus and performance art. Others can play status games, I prefer wealth games: wealth is options and options are freedom.
Pragmatic, smart, skilled people are extracted from unless lucky and in a position to see outsized returns from their effort. Better to know what enough is, collect enough freedom coins, and enjoy the one go you get at life.
(n=1, ymmv, "show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome")
Aren't we all (normal and decent people) doing this already?
The worst places for me are precisely those where you can get by with 1~2h of work a day because no one cares and the company's culture does not value the time and skills of his workers.
Seriously though, don’t you feel bad by not pulling your weight? Someone has to get your work done.
I've known many such in my career. They weren't fooling anybody. Everybody knew who they were. When they'd get laid off or were passed over for a raise they were always baffled and outraged.
Punching in premade tickets for 2 hours a day sounds like you’re already dead.
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Were you the growth guy when they need run the busies blood and guts people?
Did they save 2 people in some other department who matter more with some horse trading?
You can go and be a clock puncher. It's perfectly fine to do so. I know plenty of them, some got laid off recently and cant seem to find jobs. The high achiever's the go the extra mile types who are LIKED (dont be an asshole) are all working already.
Down vote me all you want. I was here for the first (2000) tech flop. The people who went the extra mile and some safe and secure corporates were the ones who made it. Coming out the other side (the ad tech, Web 2.0 boom) there were a lot of talented, ambitious, hard working people around. Any one who wasnt that ended up in another field that made them happy.
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Learning an important lesson isn't about flushing your aspirations down the toilet. That's just cementing your destiny as someone who will never achieve moderate success. If that's your goal, shrugs?
Good jobs, great jobs even, can and do turn to shit overnight. It's often the management itself.
People don't leave bad jobs they leave bad people.
The job is something in their life workers, in a non-slave market, can take control of.
There's no good reason for a person to stay working for nutters.
There's no good|sane reason to reward bad behavior.
They have ZERO obligation to fix a toxic workplace and culture.
That is management's failing entirely.
>your next company isn't getting a good employee.
Your next employee|team member isn't getting a good boss|colleague.
Respectfully, I think this is rather judgemental (I realize the irony that I am judging you, too :)
It doesn't have to be a battle, there doesn't have to be a winner. Everybody is free to explore their limits and boundaries, and put energy into the areas of life that they find most fruitful.
Maybe OP really does want a kick-in-the-pants "get back in there and fight!" pep talk — in which case, ignore me. But maybe they just decided that it was not their particular hill to die on. It takes all kinds.
When that dynamic takes hold, it is more that the good people failed. There is an extremely real subset of the population that gets a thrill out of telling other people what to do and damn the technical consequences of their orders. If people who are uncomfortable being in charge don't figure out a way to get over their own reservations; then guess who will hold all the positions of power? People who really want to. And not necessarily because they are nice or capable people, but because they'll say or do anything.
The part that frustrates me is that technically competent people often get brutally attacked because they lack charisma. It is wildly counterproductive.
hmm, i seem to have made this a hobby of mine.
Some people don’t care about the grindset or putting in 50hr weeks. As long as work gets done and you’re reasonably keeping your skills up to date, what does it matter?
If anything it’s more of a win by gaining hours of your life back that would’ve been spent people-pleasing.
The devil is in the details and the ‘how’.
If you have even a few years of industry experience, modulo being intentionally naive, you've noticed that work begets work. The 'skilled pragmatists' quietly do their jobs well. Their reward is even more work to do, without much recognition.
It's analogous to software quality. It's fleetingly rare that a consumer of software writes in to let you know how great, zippy and bug-free it is. You only ever hear about how terrible things are. When things are 'good' -- that's just the expected status quo. So no reward for steadily doing good things.
I'm also sure after a few years in industry you've also noticed that the Do-Nothing (TM) guy who sprints around with their head on fire gets managerial recognition, promotions, bonuses.
You know the kind. They wander from meeting to meeting, initiative to initiative, never actually accomplishing anything concrete, but showing their face to management and saying a lot of nice words.
Eventually, the skilled pragmatist notices this dichotomy and mentally clocks out. I've heard this anecdote many times, both in online circles and IRL.
I've been swept up into some of the promo-optimized guys' orbits, and it was deeply unpleasant. Lots of smoke and mirrors to execs...
Good leadership optimizes for looking at ground truths, rather than yes-men. Some places succeed at that more than others...
In practice, this resulted in me being effectively invisible to management, even when I was out-performing everyone else on the team. The guys who were loud and boisterous and constantly cawing about their achievements got all the raises and promotions, even though I was consistently doing more and better work. This came to a head when someone with far less seniority was promoted over me. I brought it up with my boss who said something like "I don't even know what you do all day. I never hear from you." The guy who was promoted would literally spend twice as much time boasting about what he was doing that actually doing it. I was objectively more productive, as in, there were metrics showing my productivity was significantly higher, but since I wasn't talking about what I was doing, I was unseen.
Over time I tend to develop a poor opinion of these people.
Communicate what your accomplishments are and why they are important for the business and you will be fine.
Everything else is kindergarten.
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How does the author know Marias make up the majority of most companies? Where's the data supporting that claim?
It may be true - it sounds plausible to those of us who've been a Maria in the salt mines of a dysfunctional company.
It appeals to us to think we're the hidden gems the company needs to invest in.
Something being appealing doesn't make it true, though, even if you can tell a just-so story about it.
I had the same thought, but I’m grateful to the author for putting their opinions out for us to see.
It is an interesting quandary - getting “more” from someone, pragmatic or otherwise, raises questions. Is the premise that they aren’t providing value on a level with salary? Or, is it that the business has a right/obligation to extract more? The latter is offensive, fundamentally because “value” may be arbitrarily (perhaps capriciously) determined.
On the other hand, I find the folks suggesting that doing an hours work a day is fine. It’s not. That’s equally offensive.
This article is written for the employer's side, trying to optimize their game. The employees trying to normalize working approximately nothing are optimizing their side.
It's not offensive, it's just economics.
Sure some people are conflict adverse, but some conflict aversion is healthy (there shouldn’t be physical or verbal fights at work) while some is being introverted or on the spectrum or lazy to a degree that the rest of the world shouldn’t be expected to bend to.
The way the author puts it I’m not even sure what the untapped potential even is. They describe these 75% as “doing what they can”. Okay so they’re just worker bees. That’s fine. What’s the problem?
Feels like you found a small inaccuracy in the text, and jumped up "Aha! Everything you said is wrong!". Also an appealing narrative.
All very fair and good points.
The author does make a strong claim, though, and I'm asking if there's evidence to back it up.
I probably wouldn't if they'd written "Some people are underused by their companies because they're Marias," which is a much smaller claim but still a perfectly fine basis for moving on to a discussion of how to get more value from those employees.
> Feels like you found a small inaccuracy in the text, and jumped up "Aha! Everything you said is wrong!". Also an appealing narrative.
Would you show me where you see this? I reread what I wrote and I'm not finding that, but maybe I'm just missing it.
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
So according to him, most people seem to fall into the bucket of being lazy and stupid, which is closer to reality. "Skilled pragmatists" seem to map into what he terms "clever and lazy".
If I’m very lucky the semi space contains 60% of my coworkers, if I’m unlucky (or arrive after the writing is on the wall) it’s more like 1/3.
I suspect part of the confusion is that there are some people with enough political acumen to appear like frustrated agents of change without actually having the drive or skill to do so. If you create opportunities for these people to show up, you may be shocked to find them making excuses for why they still can’t.
And truthfully the industry is not full of untapped brilliant people. It isn’t even “full” of brilliant people period. maybe 1/4 of the human population could be counted as very smart, and we get a disproportionate share of them for sure, but it’s definitely not more than half.
As I replied elsewhere, I feel I am in this quadrant and I often actively look for sympathetic people among bosses and peers to talk to about it. If there are more than ten people I have someone to talk to, but it’s never been anywhere near 75%. And one time I got a very rude awakening when I discovered several of those people were all sizzle and no sausage.
> The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists.
Nothing about brilliant there. Just skilled and pragmatic.
You’re trying to cool head/cold shower the idea but you’re just substituing the narrative for HN’s favorite pastime of talking about high IQ/brilliance for the sake of it.
That’s a very generous assessment. To me someone who’s “brilliant” is more like 1/1000.
It was jarring how he instantly understood any line of reasoning I was going down. There was no need for context or lengthy background explanations, he would just see what you were doing. That was in most areas also, politics, programming, philosophy, etc.
It was refreshing because conveying information to him was effortless, he needed like 20% of the info that is usually required when explaining something to another person. I don't know how one could achieve that other than just being gifted at absorbing and processing information.
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Maybe there are 8 million bonafide geniuses on Earth, and maybe 80 million very smart people, at max.
And being very generous to the US, maybe a tenth of them are full time residents somewhere in the 50 states plus DC.
Claims that a meaningfully large portion of them are being 'wasted', are hard to believe since there aren't that many to begin with.
If we form a lunch group to complain about our frustrations, it’s never been more than about four people, even in a team of dozens or more. Three is more common.
That said, he may be telling the truth with lies - this sort of untapped resource can have outsized impacts on a business, for good or ill.
The pragmatist has a better grasp on can vs should.
The top 3 jobs in the US are home health care, retail sales and fast food. Not to denigrate any of those roles but I can't imagine 75% of them saying "X is her passion, but she's not about to burn a lot of social capital by rocking the boat". (I'm skipping over the "skilled" part, but substitute accountants & project managers and I still don't see getting to 75%)
Are skilled pragmatists undervalued? Maybe, but this article doesn't do an good job of making me believe that.
1) Control
2) Responsibility
3) Recognition
Control and responsibility of a project but no recognition will demotivate quickly
Responsibility and recognition with no control means they’re a scapegoat for when things bad
Recognition and control with no responsibility is like a third party who will take credit but has no reason to ensure success
All three need to happen for an employee to care. If an employee is missing one or two of the three, they’ll feel it in their work
it's recognition from the individual's perspective. think love languages. one person's recognition might be salary because they make $35,000/yr and another's isn't financial. they are doing this because retirement is boring.
in practice it is often a combination with different ratios.
as an employee it is advantageous to think about what makes you feel recognized and work with your manager on it. if it's monetary and they're stingy then your values won't align and you will be frustrated.
some value more control
some value more responsibility
some value more recognition