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Elon Musk
Edit: I mean, he does seem to be bossy and critical, but that’s more micromanagement than what this article describes, which is about being bossy toward people in a similar role in the company’s hierarchy.
These articles come out with some regularity, and yet no one ever says, "Yep! That's totally me! I'm a non contributing zero but I've made a living at making others think I add to the team!" Everyone knows people like this, but no one is one.
Yo. Ask me anything. Edit : I'm actually serious. I don't do most of the things in the article, or at least definitely not with the intent and detail - but I've been moved over time from being a pretty good and certainly respected hands on techie, to a middle to upper manager with massive imposter syndrome, and certainly feel I contribute less for more credit. Client loves me. My boss loves me. My team loves me. But…
Some of the symptoms the article gave are painful to read, because that can also be what it looks like when a person is blocked outside of their control (e.g., another team not delivering, or up the chain has a problem), and trying to fix it. Before trying to assign individual blame to a part, try to debug the actual system problems in team and organization.
> that can also be what it looks like when a person is blocked outside of their control (e.g., another team not delivering, or up the chain has a problem), and trying to fix it Near the end of the article there is a good antidote to this: "These things are a whole lot more transparent than the people who do them think they are" Yes, if you just look at one incident in isolation, it might be difficult to distinguish "…
A good antidote is giving frank feedback and working together to come up with a solution.
That word "people" is doing a lot of lifting. Some people will actually value behaviors like over-communication and other won't. It all comes down to culture.
Organizations whose management ranks have a lot of over communicating, bossy, self-promoting, nit-picking, blame-pushing, excuse-spinning, credit-grabbers will promote the same kinds of people to top positions. But people who actually do the work will see right through these behaviors for the obvious plays for promotion that they are.
Man the slackware clock thing is so common. “Is that in confluence?” burns me up regularly. Things like how to delete a file in git. Or revert a file. As the number of tools required to build software continues to grow there are more and more opportunities for people to play dumb and act dopey.
What is the standard way to set up the editor? How do people connect to databases? How do people generally reproduce an issue? What’s the attitude towards prod DBs? In fact, what is the expectations around asking questions?
Each of these questions has many different answers. Even a very experienced developer may never have seen other options and have intense expectations but not write them down because they’re “obvious”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some company had some standard way to do certain Git operations due to some possibly misguided internal tooling effort… etc
If you really don’t want people to ask questions like that, you need to have company specific documentation which is required reading.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that can also be what it looks like when a person is blocked outside of their control (e.g., another team not delivering, or up the chain has a problem), and trying to fix it Near the end of the article there is a good antidote to this: "These things are a whole lot more transparent than the people who do them think they are" Yes, if you just look at one incident in isolation, it might be difficult to distinguish "…
That’s not a good antidote. Some systemic problems don’t get fixed and consistently cause problems. They aren’t always explicable to a wide audience either. A good antidote is giving frank feedback and working together to come up with a solution.
That's true, but if you're in an organization like that, the fact that some people are unproductive but use the methods described in the article to obfuscate that fact is the least of your problems. Your real problem is that your valid warnings about systemic problems aren't being listened to. Often the only way to fix that problem for yourself is to change jobs.
> A good antidote is giving frank feedback and working together to come up with a solution.
If you're in an organization where this can work, you're in an organization where the people who matter can tell who is actually being productive and who is not, and aren't fooled by the tricks described in this article. Which means that those tricks actually aren't a problem that is worth worrying about, which is why I gave the observation I just described as an antidote.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First: there is of course an incentive not to admit this. Second: I do believe that many people on HN really deeply care about technology/hacking topics and have detest for office politics. On the other hand, the people that the article discuss are good at office politics/marketing themselves and often don't have such a deep knowledge about programming. Thus, I would indeed assume that the typical HN reader/writer le…
The average HN reader is highly overrated for other reasons. > have detest for office politics The problem is that many people on HN believe any interaction with someone with an MBA, marketing background, manager, etc. is “office politics.”
These articles come out with some regularity, and yet no one ever says, "Yep! That's totally me! I'm a non contributing zero but I've made a living at making others think I add to the team!" Everyone knows people like this, but no one is one.
Yo. Ask me anything. Edit : I'm actually serious. I don't do most of the things in the article, or at least definitely not with the intent and detail - but I've been moved over time from being a pretty good and certainly respected hands on techie, to a middle to upper manager with massive imposter syndrome, and certainly feel I contribute less for more credit. Client loves me. My boss loves me. My team loves me. But…
This is why people love you. You're massively underestimating the amount of spoon-feeding people desire. The alternative to people like you is for individuals to do the work of understanding and empathizing outside their areas of interest or domains of expertise and/or comfort.