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Comment by jressey | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with this, it's really only easy to recognize this after you've figured it out. I also want to emphasize I'm in a position now with equity do not adhere to the philosophy below.

Focus on enjoying the people you work with and spend less energy thinking about your work. Stressing over work is a fool's game unless you have skin in it.

I had a pretty low point in my career and I simply changed my focus to collecting as much money from the wealthy bosses as I could while providing as little value as I could. After all, that's what they're trying to do on the other side of the relationship.

Now again, what I have said is easy to grok and enact once you've had some success. I don't advise this attitude for folks just entering the industry, but after 5-10 years you'd be amazed at just how valuable you are, even when not really working too hard.

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> changed my focus to collecting as much money from the wealthy bosses as I could while providing as little value as I could.

I thought about this and tried it this past year. It didn't go well and my performance review was abysmal. Some of my colleagues hate my guts because they feel like they're doing all the work and I'm not.

For example, I never do overtime especially when it's to meet unrealistic arbitrary deadlines. But they do and we meet the deadline, and this is why we keep having those deadlines: management knows they can keep doing it and someone will roll over to make it happen. "attaboy, great job on giving your life away this week, thank you for the new Porsche"

How do you pull it off without your colleagues hating you?

Work somewhere where there aren’t clueless people?

You can only fix so much of a company’s culture.

> changed my focus to collecting as much money from the wealthy bosses as I could while providing as little value as I could.

This sounds like a bad idea. I always try to collect as much money as I can while providing a fair amount of value. You'll probably end up shooting yourself in the foot if you're providing little value to a company.

> It didn't go well and my performance review was abysmal. Some of my colleagues hate my guts because they feel like they're doing all the work and I'm not.

If you're going to do this, you are going to need to own it and not be concerned that sheep are going to hate you for not being a sheep.

Also understand that the company is never going to choose a non-sheep over a sheep that will kill themselves for the company, so your performance will (in their opinion) suffer.

Best option IMO is to try not to care if your colleagues hate you for stupid reasons that are none of their business. They should be hating their management for having unfair expectations of your team.

My work colleagues are generally not my friends and I'm not too concerned with whether they like me or not, although obviously I would rather they did, and generally I'd say that they do like me.

If they hated me for not doing overtime, then that's their problem.

I think there's an art to it. First off, if you work in that type of environment, yea you're gonna get shit from your colleagues. If that bothers you, you might need to be working somewhere else to pull it off. I would probably try to convince them to change to your philosophy.

To be honest, the real secret is to be everybody's friend. Focus on knowing them personally and spend lots of time bullshitting with them. You also can't flaunt what you're doing. Just make your estimates really long up front, clearly state all of the potential blockers and how they will affect your deadlines. Ask lots of questions in meetings. When confronted, product people, leaders, whoever is in charge usually do not know what they want. Put it on them to actually articulate their needs. You'll have them going back to the drawing board over and over.

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