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What to Learn

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Re: What to Learn

#11

Post by itsmemattchung »

elliekelly wrote: post #3
WJW wrote: post #2

> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge posit…

What’s that saying? People don’t quit their company they quit their manager. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

So true.

I've been very fortunate to have mostly great managers throughout my 12+ year career, managers that actually care about their staff (as humans, not just fungible resources). In fact, that's why I joined AWS 5.5+ years back, a great manager (plug for @thomas_cantrell). On the flip side, I left because of irreconcilable misalignment with my previous manager.

Re: What to Learn

#12

Post by stonemetal12 »

elliekelly wrote: post #3
WJW wrote: post #2

> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge posit…

What’s that saying? People don’t quit their company they quit their manager. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

Yeah, but how much of that is your manager is the face for the faceless bureaucracy behind him? When your manager asks you to work overtime with unrealistic deadlines etc, getting angry at your manager is shooting the messenger, not the actual dumbass making decisions.

Re: What to Learn

#13

Post by ranit »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #12
elliekelly wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s that saying? People don’t quit their company they quit their manager. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

Yeah, but how much of that is your manager is the face for the faceless bureaucracy behind him? When your manager asks you to work overtime with unrealistic deadlines etc, getting angry at your manager is shooting the messenger, not the actual dumbass making decisions.

> getting angry at your manager is shooting the messenger

Well, a manager being (only) messenger (in this situation) is one of the traits of bad manager, isn't it?

Re: What to Learn

#14

Post by nojs »

itsmemattchung wrote: post #5

> All of us have strengths and weaknesses and we spend a lot of time talking about ‘areas of improvement.’ It can be easy to feel like the best way to advance is to eliminate all of those I struggle with this. All the time. I always find it difficult to strike a balance between leveraging my strengths and filling gaps in my weaknesses. For the large part of my career, my attention was directed on the latter: constant…

For a solo entrepreneur I would argue it’s more important to be fairly good at everything than e.g. really good at programming and having no understanding of other things like sales and marketing. Instead of perfecting your Haskell skills, you’re far better off learning the basics of how to construct a good sales funnel, even if it’s not a natural fit for you. Some knowledge is a lot better than none.

Re: What to Learn

#15

Post by _ea1k »

pm90 wrote: post #8
elliekelly wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s that saying? People don’t quit their company they quit their manager. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

That’s very true but it also represents one extreme of the spectrum. You may have an ok manager; they’re not that good but they’re not annoying either and you can generally work with them. Ideally you would want to work with a manager who can accelerate your career and learning and that’s not always easy to find. There are socially inept managers who might fail in most places but succeed at certain orgs, or vice vers…

I completely agree. The environment that your manager works in often matters at least as much, sometimes even more. I've been at places where manager churn was constant. Almost all of them were good to work for, but the environment for them was really toxic.

Re: What to Learn

#16

Post by borroka »

ksec wrote: post #10

>For example, this analysis of world-class judo players found that most rely on a small handful of throws, concluding1 >Judo is a game of specialization. You have to use the skills that work best for you. You have to stick to what works and practice your skills until they become automatic responses. >If you watch an anime or a TV series "about" fighting, people often improve by increasing the number of techniques the…

What about, and I say this as a long-term martial arts practitioner, the man who has practiced 3 kicks 3300 times each (with one rep to spare)? And I am not saying it provocatively, the one-10000, 10000-one is a straw-man of course, but how many techniques to add to your competition arsenal is not an easy question to answer. As far as I remember, Ono, one of the most successful judokas of the modern era, has maybe uchi-mata, seoi, osoto, tomoe-nage. Teddy Riner, who had dominated the heavy-weight category for more than 10 years, basically had only uchi-mata, plus refusing to engage, running out of bounds. I remember a clock-choke and a few pins too. On the other hand, in wrestling you had someone like Cael Sanderson, who won the gold medal in 2004 and had one technique, the ankle pick. Saitiev, who won 3 gold medals in different Olympics, had instead a big variety of technique.

Let's take judo. While nobody has, say, 15 competition ready techniques, a critical decision needs to be made between 3 or 5, say. So it is not as easy as saying: specialize! In addition to find the right (for you, considering your opponents) techniques to specialize in.

Re: What to Learn

#17

Post by xyzelement »

itsmemattchung wrote: post #5

> All of us have strengths and weaknesses and we spend a lot of time talking about ‘areas of improvement.’ It can be easy to feel like the best way to advance is to eliminate all of those I struggle with this. All the time. I always find it difficult to strike a balance between leveraging my strengths and filling gaps in my weaknesses. For the large part of my career, my attention was directed on the latter: constant…

Well, a weakness is a weakness only to the extent that it neutralizes your strength. Like - is it important to spell? If you become very successful in your field despite not spelling well, then spelling is a waste of your time. On the other hand, if that flaw keeps you from getting jobs/being taken seriously then you need to fix it.

Re: What to Learn

#19

Post by xyzelement »

I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is crucial.

The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT thing offsets everything else. You won't become better by "doubling down" on what you're already good at, but by fixing this flaw.

Another case - I used to manage a C++ developer. If you gave him a tight spec, he'd implement it perfectly. But the world we lived in required him to go talk to people to figure out what the real needs are, and he was bad at that. So his code always solved the wrong problem unless someone was helping him with this stuff.

Every year, his own developmental goal was to go learn the next C++ standard. And that would have been useless because he was already a great C++ programmer. Going from 97th percentile to the 98th wouldn't matter. The much bigger bang for the buck would be figuring out how to go sit down with a sales rep and say "OK, what's our client actually trying to do here?"

It sounds simple but I believe this held him back not just in work but in life. I happen to know that he didn't have great communication with his wife and kids either - solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life.

The thing is - we all have glaring things like this - obstacles in our own trajectory that if we fix, our existing strength would really shine.

Re: What to Learn

#20

Post by blacktriangle »

nojs wrote: post #14
itsmemattchung wrote: post #5

> All of us have strengths and weaknesses and we spend a lot of time talking about ‘areas of improvement.’ It can be easy to feel like the best way to advance is to eliminate all of those I struggle with this. All the time. I always find it difficult to strike a balance between leveraging my strengths and filling gaps in my weaknesses. For the large part of my career, my attention was directed on the latter: constant…

For a solo entrepreneur I would argue it’s more important to be fairly good at everything than e.g. really good at programming and having no understanding of other things like sales and marketing. Instead of perfecting your Haskell skills, you’re far better off learning the basics of how to construct a good sales funnel, even if it’s not a natural fit for you. Some knowledge is a lot better than none.

A bit paradoxically, being a generalist is a particular strength, and as the article points out one of the things you can do to do better at work is work in areas that best utilize your strengths. Ergo, if you're the kind of person who is good at quickly superficially learning a wide variety of topics, solo entrepenureship is possibly the best place for you.
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