Habits of Highly Overrated People (2013)

>I remember having a discussion with a more tenured coworker, with the subject being the impending departure of another coworker. I said, “man, it’s going to be rough when he leaves, considering how much he’s done for us over the last several years.”

After list of what these supposedly overrated people do, the piece ends with

> If you’re thinking of doing these things, don’t. If you’re currently doing them, stop. I’m not saying this because you’ll be insufferable (though you will be) and I want to defend humanity from this sort of thing. I’m offering this as advice. Seriously. These things are a whole lot more transparent than the people who do them think they are, and acting like this is a guaranteed way to have a moment in life where you wonder why you’ve bounced around so much, having so much trouble with the people you work with.

Which isn't a very convincing plea, given that the author himself initially held the exact opposite opinion of a coworker engaging in these behaviors.

I’m in a process of leaving a company where I work at for way too many years (cause I liked the job and its tech samurai format, not even the money), because there is no person like you and the “management” actively refuses to hire one, while steadily degrading into communicating through incomplete, false and illiterate streams of consciousness and providing organizational help through lowest common denominator roles who basically return to you in a couple of days asking you to do their heavily miscommunicated job for them. Sometimes I helped people doing my own request not even realizing it, so perverted it became. Any issue harder than “we’re out of paper” isn’t worth reporting. Any new module or a process is a brainstorm between me and other roles on what “they” meant and how their words most likely correlate. The tragedy is that the team is actually good, just has no clue what we do and what the plan is.

Politics is when one person/group tries to sabotage/undermine another person/group out of self-interest, even though it harms the project and reduces value.

Their self-interest becomes their top goal.

My personal take is that there are two extremes of culture. One is dedicated to engineering and management excellence. Everyone contributes. Even if there's vigorous disagreement the engine runs smoothly and Things Get Done.

The other is a snake pit of back stabbing, drama, competitive ambition, and narcissism which spreads from the c-suite down. Things still get done, sometimes, but they're poor quality - or at least much poorer than they could be. If they make it to market they'll be overhyped and oversold. (Contempt for customers and employees alike is a good tell-tale.)

No org is 100% one or the other, but those are the competing tendencies, and - of course - they're very different to work in.