[HN Gopher] Work on What Matters
___________________________________________________________________
Work on What Matters
Author : wholien
Score : 166 points
Date : 2020-09-24 18:26 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (staffeng.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (staffeng.com)
| hibbelig wrote:
| This seems quite abstract. What kind of career level is this
| article talking about?
| theptip wrote:
| This whole site is dedicated to articles on how to reach the
| Staff Engineer level (i.e. on the IC track, above Senior
| Engineer).
|
| From the site's front page:
|
| > The transition into Staff Engineer, and its further
| evolutions like Principal Engineer, remains particularly
| challenging and undocumented. What are the skills you need to
| develop to reach Staff Engineer? What skills do you need to
| succeed after you've reached it? How do most folks reach this
| role? What can companies do to streamline the path to Staff
| Engineer? Will you enjoy being a Staff Engineer or toil for
| years for a role that doesn't suit you?
|
| > The StaffEng project aims to collect the stories of folks who
| are operating in Staff, Principal or Distinguished Engineer
| roles.
| courtf wrote:
| I tried to do this sort of thing for many years, with mixed
| results. One constant is that no matter the outcome of my
| efforts, whether something I built made the company money or was
| a waste, there was seldom any kind of conclusion or major
| takeaway. Making an impact has rarely helped me, not with
| promotions or prestige or even with getting a raise. Impact has
| been disconnected from any sort of return almost everywhere I
| have worked.
|
| What does get rewarded is your social network and your ability to
| present yourself in a pleasing manner. Even the concept of
| "career growth" seems like a relic from a bygone age, as if it
| were possible to measure a human's value to their company on some
| linear scale, when in fact the vast majority of "growth" along
| that scale simply results in a schedule packed with inane,
| endless meetings. Meetings in which social network and
| presentation come to dominate a structure that can be accurately
| described as a primitive pecking order. The value of expertise
| rapidly decays in rooms where no one actually does anything
| anymore.
|
| The advice in this article seems to be that if you just keep your
| head down and focus on making these impacts, someone, someday is
| sure to notice. It might take 20 years of being a doormat for the
| politicians, but you'll have retained your dignity (just perhaps
| not your keen sense of irony). And on that fabled judgement day,
| when at last your patience and diligence are recognized by a
| panel of wizened software elders, you will have earned passage
| into programmer Valhalla (another dev job, almost certainly
| reporting to another politician).
|
| My advice, would be to completely ignore all the performative
| speeches given by HR and others up in the hierarchy about values
| and goals and whatnot, because what tends to win the day in any
| group of humans larger than a handful hasn't changed in thousands
| of years: power. You either have it, or you must ultimately
| become a sycophant. Anyone outside that binary can be safely
| ignored, regardless of their impact, and plenty of companies do
| indeed blunder along on pure momentum, essentially forever, happy
| to ignore or absorb any accidental impacts originating from the
| fringes.
|
| As the article itself states, few care about company-wide
| success, only about whether they will personally benefit in some
| manner. It's a boring, reductive game in the end, but the good
| news is that it's really no one's fault, this is just how humans
| operate. Rather than appealing to the better angels of our
| nature, as this article nobly attempts, I posit it is better to
| accept the situation for what it is and make your peace with
| being stuck at whatever position in the hierarchy you can stomach
| sleazing your way into. The author would rather have you be an
| idealist, forever searching for the right group of leaders that
| will value your principles and your hard work. Feels a bit like
| titling at windmills to me, and perhaps as though the author is
| fluffing up their portfolio of "leaderly things I have said" in
| preparation for their next presentation.
| yboris wrote:
| Sounds very related: https://80000hours.org/
|
| 80,000 hours is roughly how much we'll spend in our lives at
| work. If we focus that energy and attention well, we can
| accomplish a lot of good in the world.
|
| See: Effective Altruism
| mooreds wrote:
| This was a great post. I think it is tilted more toward engineers
| in larger orgs, where there are many teams, but I still
| appreciated all of it.
|
| The preening and snacking advice was spot on.
|
| However, the last paragraph was a bit jarring. You'll be judged
| by:
|
| > your prestige, the prestige of the titles you've had and
| companies you've worked at, your backchannel reputation, and how
| you present in your interview process.
|
| But only the third one (backchannel reputation) is affected by
| all the other advice. You can be a preener at Uber or Google and
| you'll probably have a better chance of being hired at a FANG
| than someone like me who has worked for smaller companies most of
| his career.
|
| That said, my goal after two decades is to find a company where
| I'm happy rather than clawing after the most prestige, so perhaps
| I'm misreading what he's saying.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I believe part of the magic of the FANG process is that it
| actually doesn't matter where you come from for likelihood of
| hire. It probably matters because they can level set but for
| hiring you have to knock out the interviews, which are the same
| whether you've worked at Google or Billabong Valley Software.
| majormajor wrote:
| Yeah, the focus on the specific interview in the moment has
| both upsides and downsides. It can be frustrating and
| arbitrary but it also avoids some traditional in-group
| shenanigans and unfairness that is common in a lot of places.
| "I have to study all this crap even though I've done X, Y,
| and Z already" on one hand; "I can study independently and
| prepare for this interview even though I don't currently work
| at Google" on the other.
|
| That said: names still help - if someone's on the fence then
| saying something like "they didn't do that great but based on
| their projects at Google I think they probably just had a bad
| day" isn't uncommon - but it's far from a requirement, which
| is a good thing.
| jennyyang wrote:
| At my previous company, I worked on high impact, very low
| visibility work. I was working directly with operations teams
| around the world in order to enable features that needed to be
| tweaked globally. It was vital for teams in their specific
| geography to work properly, but no one beyond those teams and my
| direct manager understood what I was doing. I enjoyed it because
| it was literally enabling functionality across countries around
| the world which was great for our customers and our company.
|
| During that time, the team around me dissolved due to severe
| attrition, leaving a skeleton crew of developers and I was the
| last remaining developer working on this specific project. During
| performance review time, I was told I wasn't performing at an
| adequate level because the number of code reviews I performed was
| very low. When I pointed out that I was the only person on my
| team, so no one came to me for code reviews their response was
| that I should have sought out code to review on my own.
|
| I quit soon after.
| hiimtroymclure wrote:
| this hits home. I worked on a team that wasn't high priority. I
| had issues getting our teams features prioritized cause every
| team had about 6-8 dependent teams in order to ship something
| and when I had these discussions to get our work on other teams
| backlog's, I was told they didn't have the bandwidth to do work
| for low priority teams.
|
| I needed my bosses help getting my teams work prioritized on
| the global roadmap. He informed that our team just wasn't high
| priority enough this quarter. Then fast forward too performance
| review he said I didn't do enough to get work prioritized.
|
| I quit 3 weeks later.
| ditonal wrote:
| One of the reasons I find your story relevant is that advice-
| pieces like the OP kind of assume a ton of factors are in place
| that are actually often largely out of your control. It kind of
| paints this clear career trajectory path for engineers when I
| think the real world is infinitely more chaotic and random.
|
| For one thing, just the existence of titles like Staff Engineer
| seems to have exploded in the last 5 years or so, at least from
| my perspective. My first few jobs out of school, it seemed like
| the progression was Junior, quickly to just "Software
| Engineer", eventually to Senior, and then nowhere particular,
| maybe management. I guess everyone in the industry can't help
| but steal Google's structure so these new levels of Staff,
| Senior Staff, Principal seem to have grown in popularity, but I
| think it's a more recent idea than not. I'm glad that
| standardized IC tracks are growing but it's hardly a given and
| the first factor is that your company offers them in the first
| place.
|
| Still, it's incredibly unstandardized. Having insight into both
| companies, I know a place like Twitter, Staff Engineer is
| handed out more lightly than a place like Google and can be
| more reflective of political prowess than engineering impact.
|
| A dynamic I've seen over and over again is orgs expect more
| senior engineers to work on more senior stuff but inevitably
| there is a massive amount of work that's individually low
| impact but collectively high impact to be done. In a dream
| world you'd figure out ways to automate it but that's not
| always feasible. So often times there are political wars fought
| over access to high impact projects which are perceived as
| necessary for promotion, while core, critical work that's less
| sexy but critical to good product gets left undone. If you want
| to know why a lot of tech companies that pay engineers massive
| amounts can launch shiny new things with ease but struggle with
| the basics, look no further.
|
| One of Google's approach to this problem is to create a
| massively complicated ladder system of engineers, where you
| have employees that would be labeled Software Engineers at any
| other company by nature of their job responsibilities, but at
| Google are called something else and are specifically boxed out
| of more desirable projects by nature of their non-SWE title.
| And of course the contractor vs full-time distinction exists as
| well.
|
| Another dynamic that can happen is that you have huge
| engineering impact but your company's product strategy fails so
| its all for nought. You can impact your company's chance of
| success but ultimately a company works in a given industry on
| certain problems and if for whatever reason the company's big
| picture strategy fails then that has a high chance of
| undermining and overshadowing your individual impact.
|
| Or you were born in the wrong country or run into major health
| issues that block access to high impact work.
|
| Overall, I just find advice like "work on high impact stuff,
| don't snack" to be oversimplified to the point of pandering
| when, there's so many variables outside the scope of your
| control as to whether you'll even get access to the opportunity
| to do high impact work in the first place. And while, of course
| there's almost certainly a correlation between strong
| engineering IC career trajectory and skill, work ethic, and
| good career decisions, there's also undoubtedly a massive
| amount of all sorts of bias that make me skeptical of a
| cookbook on how to get there.
| JimboOmega wrote:
| Can't upvote this enough.
|
| I think the origin of "Staff, Senior Staff, Principal" came
| from an attempt to create an IC track. You've been around a
| while, and you can execute stuff well on your own, where does
| your career go from there besides manager?
|
| The fact that the assumption was manager is why we have a lot
| of these problems, tbh. I hate managers who hate managing but
| that's a separate discussion.
|
| Also funnily enough I was just having a discussion how my
| company's career ladder explicitly says (in bold!) that
| promotion is not a reward. If it's not, what is it? What _is_
| the reward for hard work and growth, if it isn 't that?
|
| Ultimately what I see underlying this article and many like
| it is an assumption that, at least at an "enlightened"
| company, politics don't matter. If a company prioritizes low-
| impact high visibility, that's a stupid company... Yet I've
| never seen a company free of politics. There will never be a
| company where your personal assessment of impact of your work
| matters more than your boss's or their boss's.
|
| We also can't pretend like the amount of work at any given
| level matches the number of engineers at that level (or who
| want to be at that level). It just never will. So there will
| be jockeying for position.
|
| You shouldn't be playing politics all day (a trap I sometimes
| fall in) but you can't ignore it either. Politics often means
| justifying your work up the chain, being aware of priorities
| of those above you etc - it's not just kissing up. Ignore it
| at your peril.
| divbzero wrote:
| I sympathize with situations like this.
|
| If anyone reading is in a similar boat, asking for positive
| written feedback from the teams you work with and including
| that in your performance review is one way to get recognized
| for high impact low visibility work. It sucks that you have to
| go out of your way to gain recognition and it won't always work
| but that can be how it is in large companies.
| dasil003 wrote:
| This is good advice, I'll add one more thing: make sure your
| manager values what you are doing. If they do not then you
| are headed for trouble regardless. In fact, I'd go so far as
| to say that your manager relationship is probably the single
| most important factor to optimize for in any job. If you
| don't have mutual trust and respect it will lead to
| distortions, and in the worst cases can create long-term
| psychological corruption leaving one cynical and unable to
| trust their own better instincts.
| jaggederest wrote:
| I go maybe a step further: I send out project-specific
| surveys that have things like impact metrics (How significant
| has the impact of Project X been, in terms of dollars, hours
| of effort, or deals won), classic NPS type questions (If a
| similar situation arose in the future, how likely would you
| be to reach out to me/my team for help?), and questions that
| dive into how the project went, how it was organized, and
| more.
|
| I really should turn that into a business now that I think
| about it.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| It's through cases like this that you realize that what
| actually matters to the world is whatever gets the most
| attention.
|
| If you are doing amazing work that benefits hundreds, thousands
| or even millions of people, but nobody is paying attention,
| then it will be really hard to justify it.
|
| Conversely, shallow stuff that might only benefit a few but
| gets tons of attention, is easy to justify and keep going.
| Aperocky wrote:
| That's why there should not be a hard metric set by people who
| don't even know how to code. Performance review should be
| conducted by people who have a direct understanding of what is
| being done, and if that's impossible, at least people with a
| capacity to understand what is being done.
| soared wrote:
| I was effectively forced to accept a new job due to not being
| able to pay my rent after COVID. This role is entirely snacking
| and preening, so it is mildly fulfilling because I get to close
| ~7 jiras every day. But, I haven't learned much and am never
| challenged.
|
| While it slows my career trajectory, I am now able to spend way
| way less time on work and way more time on other things. What the
| other things are.. time will tell.
| azhenley wrote:
| I sometimes wonder whether I would enjoy having a job like
| that, rather than one that takes all my mental and creativity
| energy, even if it means less pay and prestige. I could stop
| working at all hours and potentially do creative endeavors like
| write a book.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I had a job like that for a long time (I was a manager). Since
| I didn't have a "shower clause" in my employment contract, I
| was free to do a _lot_ of open-source work.
|
| It came out nicely. The work I did has become a worldwide
| standard.
|
| Now that I'm out of that position, I have returned to doing
| what I want to do. There has been some "snacking," except it's
| really healthy snacks, because every project I do -even the
| experimental ones- is done in "ship mode."
| oilman wrote:
| This seems like great advice, and it resonates with me. I've seen
| people make a big impact by following this path.
|
| > It's ok to spend some of your time on snacks to keep yourself
| motivated between bigger accomplishments, but you have to keep
| yourself honest about how much time you're spending on high-
| impact work versus low-impact work. In senior roles, you're more
| likely to self-determine your work and if you're not deliberately
| tracking your work, it's easy to catch yourself doing little to
| no high-impact work.
|
| In my own personal experience, that boost of actually
| accomplishing something right now instead of slowly starting the
| process of impactfully pushing another rock up a hill is very
| tempting.
|
| Does anyone have any experience or recommendations for
| effectively tracking your own work and putting yourself in the
| right headspace to tackle these more long lived impactful tasks?
| This mental game seems to me to be one of the huge factors that
| determine outcomes.
|
| I tend to have some challenges with attention at the best of
| times. My interests tend to run hot and cold. I can make a huge
| impact and move a project significantly forward when I get into
| it and hyperfocus on it. But other times managing to focus my
| attention on a tasks that I know would be high impact is mental
| torture.
| methodin wrote:
| I've found focusing on the hardest problems first when
| enthusiasm is high nets the best results as the difficulty over
| time of remaining tasks coincides with waning enthusiasm and
| fatigue. Focusing on small tasks first and delaying large
| problems has the opposite effect - unless there's not enough
| context to complete the larger tasks without completing smaller
| parts first.
| theptip wrote:
| A couple strategies that I've employed, that have helped me:
|
| 1. Do a start-of-week plan, and end-of-week review. Pick a few
| milestones that are achievable this week. Hold yourself
| accountable and check in with yourself to see if you completed
| them. If you didn't, review why not. Did you snack too much?
| Did you get pulled into lower-priority meetings? Did you work
| on some other urgent stuff that is actually OK to drop your
| tasks for? Keep any insights at the top of your "weekly plans"
| doc so you can remind yourself of them and try to avoid making
| the same errors repeatedly. Breaking your long-term goals into
| milestones also gives you some "snack-like" satisfaction before
| you get to the finish line and earn the big payoff.
|
| 2. Every day, pick a task that you're going to do "hell or high
| water". Try to get that done before you snack. Typically this
| is (a piece of) one of your weekly tasks. If your calendar is
| prone to getting filled up with meetings, block off some "maker
| time" on your calendar to get this task done. I find it helpful
| to preemptively schedule timeslots for my project work at the
| beginning of the week even when my calendar is likely to remain
| open; it keeps me honest.
|
| 3. Timebox your snacking. If you feel like you need a break
| from longer-range tasks, you want to get an energy boost, etc.,
| set a timebox, say "1 hours refactoring these tests", and try
| to return to your hell-or-high-water task after that timebox. I
| find it easy to go down the rabbit hole when I start snacking,
| especially if I get deep into the flow state. Flow is good! But
| it can lead you astray from your longer-term goals if you're
| flowing on something that's not your #1 priority.
|
| As for the mechanics of tracking your work, I have used a
| personal Trello, todo.txt doc, Roam, GDoc, pen & paper -- this
| is immensely personal but just having a single place where you
| can go back and remind yourself what you were supposed to be
| working on is really helpful.
| surfsvammel wrote:
| This is great advice. I do something similar and it's been
| working. The only thing I dont fully agree with is the
| tracking of work. I've found that tracking work has very
| little value to me, so I just don't spend time on it.
|
| The only time when tracking work has been really useful was
| when the Icelandic banks went bust during the crash of 2008.
| Having a log of work-done helped a little in trying to get
| paid after my client went down. But, in other cases, I've
| found that the result of the work is the log of work done.
| jakub_g wrote:
| I didn't use to track my work and I noticed that at yearly
| review time it's been pretty difficult to remind what I
| actually did for last year. I'd go through merged PRs in
| the main projects, but it's only a tip of the iceberg.
|
| Some time ago we moved daily standup to Slack, and since
| then I have a pretty good history of what I did each day. I
| created a wiki page where every 1-3 months I try to
| summarize all the stuff I did in the quarter (code shipped,
| dashboards created, docs written & non code work done, like
| helping X ship Y -- with screenshots, links etc.) and then
| it gives me a bit of confidence boost during the perf
| review time.
| wholien wrote:
| Definitely agree on snacking being very seductive - it makes
| you feel useful and doing stuff, but when you zoom out, it's
| usually very inconsequential
|
| The mental game is very important. Definitely hard to work on
| the things that actually matter - they are usually difficult,
| new, more intricate to setup, etc. What I've found to work is
| to "just start on it" - starting is the hardest part. Telling
| yourself you'll do 15 minutes of it or something, so you will
| actually start. Usually, when the 15 minutes are up, I won't be
| stopping. The inertia goes from "not going it" to "doing it"
| and it's hard to change ha
| jakub_g wrote:
| Trick that often works for me: create a ticket in JIRA,
| explain well what has to be done, how, document gotchas etc.;
| assign to yourself; if it's a code ticket, create a local
| branch with ticket number.
|
| I usually procrastinate when it's not clear what exactly has
| to be done and how, and writing it down somewhere helps
| immensely.
| dt5702 wrote:
| Checklists are useful for breaking a task down and providing
| incremental steps to progress through.
|
| During my PhD I would write down what specific task I was
| working on in a work journal every half hour or so and it would
| help me refine the specific problem/question I was working on.
| At the end of the day I would have made a steady progression
| through a relatively abstract problem which might not have been
| apparent at the beginning.
|
| I take the same approach with working on the various projects
| now as a software engineer. I find the act of documenting my
| progress/thoughts as I go extremely calming. There's a balance
| to be struck here - I only take this approach when developing
| something new and I have to record all the things which didn't
| work.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Ah, the last company I worked for had a lot of people optimising
| for low-impact-high-visibility work... in fact, it was probably
| often negative-impact. A lot of people who were just trying to
| protect their turf, try to establish insane and counterproductive
| "standards" for all teams, constantly reinvent the wheels instead
| of trying to look for mature, off-the-shelf solutions (I'm not
| against rolling your own where necessary, but you can really
| overdo it), etc.
|
| Just one example was that they had this one template for Spring
| Boot projects that you weren't allowed to deviate from; in
| particular, you weren't allowed to fundamentally change the build
| process, which was one of the most insane things ever: it would
| pull in other scripts from other git repositories at build time,
| which in turn would transitively pull in other scripts etc.,
| which just led to a build you didn't understand anymore and some
| settings were impossible to override. Also, you could only build
| the project with an internet connection and from within the
| office network... I'm sure whoever wrote that thought they were
| being really clever.
| mdifrgechd wrote:
| It's interesting, I think I would broadly characterize a lot of
| the preening work as administrative type tasks, like writing
| down a process for something as you say, or making a style
| guide, or a maintaining a table of something, etc.
|
| And what I have observed happens is that some people (higher
| ups) assume that this kind of administration is actually
| "management" or "leadership" and promote people, who themselves
| think that administration is leadership, etc.
|
| The solution is probably to work somewhere else, but I think
| the root cause is the bundling of admin or coordination type
| work with seniority and leadership, where somehow it is assumed
| that because you're a better administrator that e.g. technical
| direction should also rest with you.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| I don't think I agree with the "Stop Snacking" advice. We all go
| through times where we need a boost to our sense of
| accomplishment, it can put the wind in our sails to address
| bigger problems. Sometimes snarfing up a bunch of snack tasks can
| make all the difference in the world.
|
| Yes, you shouldn't solely be a snacker, probably, but I think
| it's counterproductive to think of engineers as highly
| autonomous, robotic units that can view each task selection in
| total isolation. Previous, unrelated tasks can influence your
| ability to complete your current task. The weight of future tasks
| can pull you down.
| apetresc wrote:
| I think the author specifically addresses your point:
|
| > It's ok to spend some of your time on snacks to keep yourself
| motivated between bigger accomplishments, but you have to keep
| yourself honest about how much time you're spending on high-
| impact work versus low-impact work. In senior roles, you're
| more likely to self-determine your work and if you're not
| deliberately tracking your work, it's easy to catch yourself
| doing little to no high-impact work.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I save my snackers for the end of the day when my brain is shot
| during time that wouldn't be useful for my bigger tasks. I see
| the author's point though and broadly agree.
| Swizec wrote:
| My favorite quote to think about: What's the biggest problem in
| your field and why aren't you working on it?
|
| Hamming knew how to make you think
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(page generated 2020-09-24 23:00 UTC)