Hacker News Reader

Comment by buscoquadnary | Hacker News Reader

Success meaning being high up on the corporate ladder and making lots of money.

Success not meaning doing work that makes a difference, helping others, achieving contentment, or having a balanced meaningful life.

Not that the stated qualities don't help you with accomplishing the seocnd as being able to communicate appropriately is a powerful tool, but I've found the person on my engineering team that does the most actual work right now is the quiet guy who isn't trying to lead the team, doesn't spend a lot of time talking in meetings, and just diligently chips away at whatever he has been assigned. His quality of work is high, his output consistent and his stress and complaining seem lower.

Meanwhile as a loud "senior engineer" I have to spend all day trapped in meetings and arguing with people and get to spend very little time doing what I enjoy, spending more of my time fighting the "process".

I am more "successful" but I wish I was him.

View on HN

Don't you think that if it weren't for you arguing with the rest of the organization, that quiet guy might not be nearly as productive as he is now? So from his perspective, I think your work does make a difference.

I’ve been that quiet guy, and can attest: my productivity pretty much had a 1:1 correlation with my PM or lead’s ability to shelter me from BS interruptions.

You are very right. However, our society makes someone lacking 2-3 of OP's mentioned abilities extremely difficult to pursue their dreams, especially if their significant other/supporting family are not 100% supporting. It takes ones' perseverance dialed up to 1000. Even with that, there are still too many factors to overcome. For every success story of someone lacking OP's mentioned abilities, there are thousands of unheard failed stories. The story of Yitang [1] mentioned here 1-2 days ago is the perfect example. It touched me so much due to a few resemblance (not the genius part) of our lives. Had he worked on a harder problem, such as the one he's working on now, or if his friend didn't introduce him to his lecturer job, he may have been known as a failure by people who knows him.

For those who has the perseverance and can ignore haters, there's still the money problem. UBI may help. But I feel like to support a decent standard of living in today's world, it's not possible unless mega crops buy-in or budget cuts happen elsewhere like defense. Both of which has close to zero chance of happening.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524518

>Success meaning being high up on the corporate ladder and making lots of money.

>Success not meaning doing work that makes a difference, helping others, achieving contentment, or having a balanced meaningful life.

>For those who has the perseverance and can ignore haters, there's still the money problem.

I don't think success should be spelled money to begin with.

More like

The ability to speak.

The ability to write.

The quality of your ideas.

Is the type of success in itself that is even more elusive.

That can be enough to make a difference, help others, achieve contentment, and have a meaningful life.

No guarantee of balance whether there is money or not.

I think it's good to be more or less fuzzy ourselves from time to time.

I have to spend all day trapped in meetings and arguing with people and get to spend very little time doing what I enjoy

The only "have to" in life is death. I've been in situations like you describe as a lead, choose another role or choose a better story for yourself. Lead positions are hard for the very reasons you describe, they don't offer the immediate dopamine hit of typing code into your IDE or lining up commits throughout the day. It does take an extra degree of learned faith to understand your impact on the team. As the saying goes "manage it or it will manage you." Do you block off 1hr on your calendar every day to do things you want/enjoy like coding or skill improvement?

Lead positions don't have to be that way. As a lead, it's important to find org structure and management personalities that not only enable leaders but also give them direct domains of authority. A lot of the time when I've read about people disattisfied in leadership positions and the general toxicity around them, it's because the structure and culture remove authority from engineers, proxy it through non-engineers, and create an environment of "leadership through influence", which is absolute junk.

Have worked with this for a while - multiple positions where "hey, just lead by example" which... never works. I was referred to as a "lead developer" on a small team, but everyone would still defer to (or explicitly seek out) input from the company owner. He went through a period of "do whatever jacob says" but that wasn't followed. I would give input, then it would be tabled until someone could 'confirm' with owner.

I feel like life is a lot better if people prioritize these things in the reverse order of what Winston prescribes. Look at our bureaucracies and you'll see that the people leading it have taken Winston's advice to heart -- excellent speakers, decent writers, and low quality ideas / creativity.

Although personally, I have no desire to become like the people who currently lead our society -- the most 'successful' -- so I guess I'm disagreeing more with his definition of success than his means of achieving it within the bounds he has set.

I believe that a crucial component of rigorous college education today is the acculturation into an ability to sell, spin, etc. absolutely anything into a persuasive, confident, narrative delivery --- putting the BS in bachelor's degree, one might say.

Literature classes felt this way sometimes. Having to find and present in writing some interesting meaning to be discovered from the blandest of passages. Alfred E Prufrock comes to mind.

I'd generally look at bureaucracies as being extremely process driven, with the goals of the process to create reproducible results no matter who is involved.

Ideas and creativity don't fit that reproducible mould

The quiet engineer is happy to work on things for which the result is meaningless, digging and refilling the same hole to perfection

It's fun being heads down on things, but also it's disconnected from some of those same things you describe as success - doing work that makes a difference and helping others

Do you get satisfaction reading code and imagining yourself typing it? I don't think what defines a lead is politicking at meetings, but rather having an outward focus. One way to do that is to just read what everyone else is doing and engage with them. Even if you're just fixing bugs with automatic analysis tools. I think that's one way folks like your diligent colleague can advance..

"Policking" or politicking?

The people you’re trapped in meetings with probably suck at speaking and writing and have crappy ideas.

The point is both you and them would be far more effective if that wasn’t the case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com