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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had written this. If the humor/cynicism gets to you please power through and look at the actionable tips which will earn you more money.

There is approximately no-one on HN, not even at the best managed firms with the least BS imaginable, who would not experience positive ROI from "Congrats guys, we just shipped X, let's have a celebratory dinner at $FAVORITE and I'm buying." That idea is freaking genius. It gets you instant political capital and will make sure decisionmakers actually remember X the next time it rolls around because they'll have a hundred projects to worry about but only one or two which were so important they had celebratory dinners at completion.

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Come on, seriously. A team of 20 ships a product and some junior engineer buys everybody a dinner out, incl all the bosses and their bosses?

Yeah, OK, that's one way of making all your peers feel really awkward and uncomfortable. And wondering what the little suckup is up to.

"The ramen and kool-aid's on me!"

Wow. I didn't realize there is actually peer pressure in IT companies not to use knowledge of social relationships and human nature for your own benefit. In my opinion, the general unwillingness of computer workers to stand up for their own rights and interests is keeping our entire profession back from getting the money and respect it deserves. If we actively sabotage efforts of people who are trying to improve things, I don't see that there is much hope. Being nerds does not have to imply being clueless nerds.

Serious question: how is sucking up to your bosses by giving them treats "trying to improve things"?

Note, not trying to be cynical here. Maybe I'm so ingrained with this culture you describe that I can't see your point.

When you phrase it that way, of course it sounds useless.

Have you ever gone out to a bar and bought a round of drinks for your friends? Yes, that's like $90 a round for 10 people in a New York bar. But I bet you got a drink back from every one of those people some day (and if you didn't, they're not great friends or you make a lot more money than them).

It's kind of the same principle here. It doesn't have to be a steak dinner for 20 people - I know I can't afford that. But if you go out for wings and beer, buy around of beers. If you don't want to do that, go to the local bakery and bring in two dozen bagels and cream cheese. The point isn't how much you spend to be impress everyone, the point is to do something other than just show up and mooch.

Patrick said "Buy your team dinner". That's what I was referring to. Buying a round of drinks is a very different thing, IMO. It's perfectly natural and social behaviour in many cultures.

A lot of IT people just want an easy life - doing what they [used to] love, and gradually progress up the chain based on their skills and experience. People who take short-cuts like this probably don't care about the work, their focus is manipulating their way up the organisation.

In my experience this isn't really true. People are perfectly capable of being ambitious, enjoying their work, and wanting to make a big impact. And there's definitely a positive correlation between social skills and impact.

maybe you don't need to buy the whole company dinner, just bake a cake , grab a case of beer or something.

To be fair to the author of the original article, he suggests buying a round at the pub, which isn't quite on the same scale as buying dinner out for everyone. In the UK that would only be appropriate if you were the manager of the team in question & you had reached a significant milestone in development IMO.

Reciprocal buying of rounds on the other hand is standard issue UK social lubricant. Using "We shipped, yay!" as an excuse to make your's the next round would be exactly the right thing to do.

Exactly , but if your working in a large non IT business you have the problem of getting people who are not in the IT dept to show up at the pub. Especially the movers and shakers.

There's a social dance going on here: You mention drinks to the appropriate people, knowing that some of them won't come but they'll remember the invitation positively.

In the UK that would only be appropriate if you were the manager of the team in question & you had reached a significant milestone in development IMO.

Then again, the UK has a messed up class system.

People even love the Queen, for Turing's sake!

That is a detail needing cultural adjustment, but the concept is universal.

For example, here in Israel most high-tech jobs include ZeroCater-esque food plans, so (without significant spending) buying food for your team would probably result in a worse meal for everyone. However, buying your team snacks and drinks on special events was standard practice at my last job.

Possibly a bit OT:

Larger events can be harder to coordinate, but I've often used food in various ways at work. Usually, bringing in a cake or something like that to celebrate something, and often something small ("hey, the build server works!" or "hey, 3 people had a birthday in December!")

It can certainly be overdone, but can also make you memorable to people. I brought cookies and milk (for up to, say, 6 people) to a job interview 7 years ago. The day I did, it happened to be the company owner's birthday, which was quite a coincidence. The owner called me up a few weeks ago asking if I was available for some work.

He remembered me all those years later because of the $7 I spent before a job interview. Not because of the paper my resume was on, or how cleverly it was worded, or the color of the tie I wore, or what I drove, or what my code looked like, or how I used vim instead of emacs, or what certifications I had, or what color my hair was.

An elegant example of just how broken some interview / hiring practices are.

Broken in what sense? That "programming ability" is not the only criteria selected for?

In this case, and in most interview cases, there's already been some vetting done via resume/portfolio/phone, and face to face interviews are as much about personality and team fit as they are about technical competence. Being able to demonstrate that you can think about others socially, include them in to a small ritual, and do it in a way that's memorable without coming across as too cheesy (I don't think I did) is... dare I say, a skill.

I've definitely been on the interviewer side of the table, and if someone had brought in some cookies to munch on, it would bode well. If that's the only thing they do, and they still suck during the interview, no job.

I'd done this a few times over the years, and in a couple cases never even got a followup call back. If it was because of the cookies/cake/snacks/whatever, then I'm glad I don't work at a place that's so uptight/rigid that they can't take some fun.

FWIW, I didn't take a job after that interview, but was offered one.

By your own words you were called not because any ability of yours stood out, but because you did the right thing to suck up on the right day.

That makes it a good example of how little skill and ability mean in the interview process. That's broken; say the right thing or do the right thing and you're in.

"say the right thing or do the right thing and you're in".

Knowing what those are and how to do this is, by most measures, a good skill to have.

"you were called not because any ability of yours stood out, but because you did the right thing to suck up on the right day".

In that case, the birthday thing was a total fluke, and not really that big a deal, more a happy coincidence. But as I mentioned before, I wouldn't have had an interview in the first place without a baseline of skill/ability already demonstrated through other means (online portfolio, resume, phone screen process). The ability to make a positive memorable impression is, imo, an ability that did stand out.

Applying De Morgan's laws to fix how to determine if you're in or not then yields: say the wrong thing AND do the wrong thing

I would also like to point out that an ability of your parent poster clearly stood out, that of making themselves memorable. Hiring is a multivariate problem, focusing on just one of those variables could be the most broken solution within the space.

True,

Blow your trumpet and blow it louder. That always helps.

Your accomplishments are nothing until you successfully explain it to others and let them know you did it.

Keeping things to yourself and telling no one appreciates your genius never works.

The problem is getting people to understand the accomplishment especially if you have to do some heroic hack to get something mundane but important to work.

Like this xkcd

http://xkcd.com/664/

The cynic would say: Why were you working on a mundane problem? That's for some other nameless jr. dev to fix while you focus on the high-profile-yet-easy stuff.

True, maybe instead of working I should start producing weekly "website ROI & Key Performance Indicators Executive Report" and Email it to everyone.

All I would actually have to do is dump some google analytics screen shots into a word document..

If you automate that process - maybe spit the screenshots into weekly emails or a dashboard - and people start working specifically to improve those numbers then you just might have a greater aggregate impact on revenues than the 1/size_of_your_team you presumably have now [1].

[1] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-tools-a...

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