Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The annoying habits of highly effective people

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 230 posts

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#91

Post by a_imho »

manigandham wrote: post #62
phakding wrote: post #3

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…

You're focused on the actions rather than the results. Common mistake. People become leaders by creating and commanding change that positively affects the company. Land a major deal or create a new product line that doubles revenue? You're getting to the top. Working harder than the others is part of this process, and sometimes that means you come in at 5am, but it's not a requirement nor is it something that anyone…

Land a major deal or create a new product line that doubles revenue? You're getting to the top.

From my experience this does not happen at all. Not to underclass developers at least.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#92

Post by manigandham »

a_imho wrote: post #91
manigandham wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're focused on the actions rather than the results. Common mistake. People become leaders by creating and commanding change that positively affects the company. Land a major deal or create a new product line that doubles revenue? You're getting to the top. Working harder than the others is part of this process, and sometimes that means you come in at 5am, but it's not a requirement nor is it something that anyone…

Land a major deal or create a new product line that doubles revenue? You're getting to the top. From my experience this does not happen at all. Not to underclass developers at least.

At all? I don't know what you mean by "underclass" developers but it is common to see many devs who spearhead projects get higher titles and progress faster. There are many such examples just in SV companies.

Part of it is making sure contributions are measured and noticed. People can't act on what they don't know.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#93

Post by CalRobert »

manigandham wrote: post #62
phakding wrote: post #3

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…

You're focused on the actions rather than the results. Common mistake. People become leaders by creating and commanding change that positively affects the company. Land a major deal or create a new product line that doubles revenue? You're getting to the top. Working harder than the others is part of this process, and sometimes that means you come in at 5am, but it's not a requirement nor is it something that anyone…

I remember when I was early in my career and fixed an enormous flaw in ad allocation for a large online publisher. It led to easily over a million extra in revenue that year.

My boss was delighted to take credit for it while also ensuring I stayed on message that it wasn't actually a result of him screwing up and being generally incompetent. I eventually figured I had nothing to lose and talked to his boss (politely of course) just saying how successful that had been and that I had plenty of other ideas for improvement. It was not well received.

But I hear my old boss is doing quite well these days.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#94

Post by theshadowknows »

manigandham wrote: post #92
a_imho wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land a major deal or create a new product line that doubles revenue? You're getting to the top. From my experience this does not happen at all. Not to underclass developers at least.

At all? I don't know what you mean by "underclass" developers but it is common to see many devs who spearhead projects get higher titles and progress faster. There are many such examples just in SV companies. Part of it is making sure contributions are measured and noticed. People can't act on what they don't know.

I started out at my company building HTML emails. I started seeing places things could get better. Better code base so I built it. More sophisticated tooling and build chain so I built it. Problems with the Econ site so I helped find and fix them. Possible places to integrate and become more efficient so I helped build them. 3 years in, 3 raises (I’ve more than doubled my starting salary) and 3 promotions now I’m a Systems Architect. I recently presented to the owner of our parent company and (feel at least) that I’m valued and make real contributions. I work on big projects and am seen as a leader. So it can happen.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#95

Post by andrewaylett »

UpshotKnothole wrote: post #32
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bo Burnham on getting into showbiz: "Don't take advice from guys like me who've gotten very lucky. Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner saying 'Liquidize your assets! Buy Powerball tickets! It works!'" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U )

Ah Taylor Swift, she didn’t really win the lottery though, or if she did, she was able to start off buying a loooooot of tickets. Her father worked for Merril Lynch, from three generations of bank presidents. Her mother worked in finance. When she was 14 her father moved the family to Nashville and worked for Merril Lynch there, and invested in a record label called Big Machine to the tune of $120,000. This was the c…

Even with all those advantages, success isn't guaranteed. I think you're reinforcing the parent's point, which I read that Taylor Swift was given the opportunity to follow her dreams and that worked out really well for her; that doesn't make it good advice for other people to follow, especially if they don't have the advantages she had.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#96

Post by bryanrasmussen »

pandapower2 wrote: post #54
phakding wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I don't even know what a cto does. I have been in many meetings with them, but besides making high level decisions and asking for status, I don't know what they do. Besides I was born in poverty and needed lot of efforts to be able to socialize with people born upper middle class. I can only imagine what else I need to learn to socialize within upper echelons. I can't explain it to you fully. Thanks for asking t…

>I don't know what they do. In my experience all C level executives do a very good job of seeming like they know what they are doing. That seems to be a huge part of the job. Seeming like you know what you are doing, seeming like you know what is going to happen in the future (despite that being fundamentally unknowable) and being vaguely intimidating. Beyond that they select from the set of possible projects that co…

I agree that is what it looks like from the outside to people who have no experience at it, but I doubt that is what it looks like at all from the inside. Just as from the outside a programmer might look like a sweary toddler who keeps you from messing up his toys out of pique.

I may have told this anecdote before, if so here I repeat it:

There was a Friday meeting at a place I was consulting at, the C-level executives were outlining the way projects would run to the end of the year. It seemed in some ways less than optimal, they then in a rare bit of insight into their processes said 'I know this looks less than optimal but the reason why we are doing this is ---blah blah blah 3 sentences of finance technobabble'.

It was quite clear the suboptimal process had been chosen to maximize available moneys for projects due to accounting decisions and specific legal regulations. Although exactly how eluded me.

I was pretty sure that most of the people there understood as little on the matter as I did but everyone did that expression on their face to signify they did understand that people generally use with me when I describe how stemming/decompounding works and why this means we will have to take another way in structuring our data for the search engine.

But yes most of the time I would look at those people and say that they don't do anything.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#97

Post by skrebbel »

rconti wrote: post #70

So the article starts out by saying that you won't be successful just by emulating Tim Cook (rises early) or Jeff Bezos (putters in the morning). Shouldn't the author have just ended it there by concluding that neither one of these habits is necessary in order to be successful, rather than going on complaining?

Yes, but the Economist probably pays them for a certain minimum length.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#98

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

gitgud wrote: post #71
enraged_camel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Being a CEO is hard Not necessarily. It completely depends on the company and the industry.

Well, regardless of the industry. Most people would consider the tasks of: -leading a company -dealing with finances -constantly making important decisions As a hard job.

A stable company with good people will run itself. There may be execution issues, but the good people should be able to handle those.

The value-adds from a good CEO are outstanding strategy, positive corporate brand creation, and investor/shareholder relationship management.

The first two aren't hard in the bureaucratic sense, but in the creative sense. A lot of CEOs are terrible at them - see the long list of companies run into the ground by very poor decisions.

The last one is helped a lot by having the correct class background. It's nightmarishly hard for outsiders, and can be anywhere from not hard at all to equally nightmarish for insiders.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#99

Post by Broken_Hippo »

matwood wrote: post #28
mamon wrote: post #10

I always laugh at this obsession with early rising. Many factory line workers wake up at 4:30 am every day, because their shift starts at 6:00 am, and somehow that does not make them billionaires.

Getting up early is a sign of discipline, but it's only a start. It's a mentality of going after every day with a sense of urgency. Obviously not everyone can become billionaires, but most people can better themselves by adding more discipline to their lives.

Getting up early is only a sign of discipline if you need to get up that early. Getting up early with little sleep is self-sabotage: Getting up early when you are more productive later in the day is ignoring self-knowledge.

If you simply want to get up early because you are more productive that way doesn't require more self-discipline than staying up late for the same reasons. There is nothing "urgent" about it - you can very well do the same thing waking up at 8am or even noon (admittedly, noon has its drawbacks, but 8 or 9 am gets folks by with the greater world most times).

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#100

Post by lukeholder »

theshadowknows wrote: post #94
manigandham wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At all? I don't know what you mean by "underclass" developers but it is common to see many devs who spearhead projects get higher titles and progress faster. There are many such examples just in SV companies. Part of it is making sure contributions are measured and noticed. People can't act on what they don't know.

I started out at my company building HTML emails. I started seeing places things could get better. Better code base so I built it. More sophisticated tooling and build chain so I built it. Problems with the Econ site so I helped find and fix them. Possible places to integrate and become more efficient so I helped build them. 3 years in, 3 raises (I’ve more than doubled my starting salary) and 3 promotions now I’m a S…

That's great and I am in no way diminishing your achievements; but a work of caution for others reading too:

It's most likely that you were severely underpaid in the first place, the raises have just slowly brought you up to industry standard, just spread over 3 years.

Your title increase is also great, but keep in mind, having you feel like you are a leader is also a great retention tool for you to keep working for them, producing good work.

I recommend looking in the marketplace for a new job to really see where you can be in your 4+ years. Don't feel like they have been so good to you that you couldn't increase your salary again by 30% by switching employers.

Post reply on HN