Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles • Hacker News Board

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#171

Post by throwawaysleep » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:33 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #57

throwawaysleep wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I little reorganization yielded a $385,000/yr cost optimization. And your reward for that was? Were you rewarded? Did they give you 30K as a bonus? Or was it just the weasel words of "this will be considered favourably at performance review time." I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job…

I'm curious, would you say any of your motivation and feeling of reward in your job comes from doing a good job, or helping your organization achieve it's goals? Or does your motivation and reward (what gets you out of bed, what makes your job tolerable or enjoyable) come mostly/only from maximizing your paycheck? Or other things?

None of my motivation comes from doing a good job as defined as "increasing company profit."

I care about two things:

1. My own pile of cash. I will work until I die, as I like the technical puzzles. But I also want the ability to casually walk away at any time.

2. The technical puzzles. I care about the code and doing fun things with it. Whether it goes to prod? I do not care. Whether it brings in new revenue? I do not care. I will push interesting new tech I want to learn and find some reason to make a case for it, even if it is not a sincere case.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#172

Post by idopmstuff » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:34 PM UTC

bartvk wrote: post #125

idopmstuff wrote: post #63

This is a great article, and my only issue with it and my only issue with it is that I think it's too limited. This isn't just a tech thing - the world we live in is one where having more context in a professional environment is almost always useful. If you spend time learning about how HR functions, it'll help you understand how things like promotions work. Spend time with marketing, and you'll learn lessons about h…

I have the feeling that I'm missing something here. Reading the headline, I expected a real, genuine and directly applicable advantage for a software engineer. But I couldn't find it. While it leads to an interesting life for sure, I don't see how the writer's suggestions (or your suggestions) make for an unfair advantage for any particular role in tech. Your examples also don't map to a direct advantage in a tech ca…

Well, I'd get rid of the word "unfair" - that's not actually true.

But putting that aside, I would guess that maybe you're in a very large company? I think the more siloed and specific your role is, the less helpful this sort of thing would be. I work at a ~20 person startup, and an engineer who can think with a product mindset, talk directly to customers and write good user-facing documentation is much more valuable than someone who can just write code to spec. At a 20,000 person company, that's likely not the case.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#173

Post by slt2021 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:36 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #92

inanutshellus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're letting something irritate you that's not wrong. It's like getting mad when someone says "I had noodles for lunch" when you know perfectly well they had /spaghetti/, and if they'd said /spaghetti/ you could get irate because they actually had /ragu/ spaghetti (meat in the spaghetti sauce). Using the abstract word it still "fine" if that's the level the speaker wants to give.

I don't think that analogy captures my problem with those words. My problem, really, is that they devalue what they refer to. "Consumer" devalues people, and "content" devalues creative effort. Saying "noodles" doesn't devalue spaghetti.

"Consuming content" is term used by VCs, because when evaluating startups they are mainly concerned about dry, dehumanized, KPI type metrics, like:

1) attracting XXX eyeballs/consumers per quarter

2) producing YYY amount of content for consumption

3) monetizing consumers for $ZZ/mo

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#174

Post by maximinus_thrax » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:40 PM UTC

Why is this an 'unfair' advantage? It's just being curious and learning more about other roles so that you'll be more effective in your job. You may or may not come out ahead, depending on the organization or on whether or not your boss figures it out and as a result will drown you with work so that you'll stay in your lane.

Do you want a real unfair advantage? Befriend your management chain. That is truly an unfair advantage.

This article is cheap productivity porn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32335165.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#175

Post by slt2021 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:41 PM UTC

stocknoob wrote: post #70

JohnFen wrote: post #15

I don't "consume content". I read, watch, and listen to a wide variety of things, though, and highly recommend that practice. My apologies. "Consume content" has become a pet peeve of mine. It's a dehumanizing and overly reductionist phrase, and isn't even technically correct (the best kind of correct).

Agreed, it’s like describing an eating meal as “ingesting calories”. It’s an impoverished viewpoint.

when discussing diet and exercise with your dietician/trainer - you will calculate calories intake and expenditure, instead of describing what you had for dinner.

The goal of consuming content is not to enjoy listening to other people, enjoy reading, or enjoy writing/talking.

The goal of consuming content is to absorb and internalize information, and broaden knowledge base.

To me, the usage of the term "consume content" is perfectly fine

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#176

Post by kridsdale1 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:42 PM UTC

SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #150

hinkley wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I have to disagree, on the grounds that many companies mistakenly label indirect profit centers as 'cost centers' and end up cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They strangle R&D and get outclassed in the market. They strangle infrastructure and get nasty surprises that tarnish their reputation. And then there's mistaking users for customers. If you're a McDonald's customer you might think their…

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It can surprising why a business actually exists. It can be counterintuitive(i.e. the mcdonald's is actually a real estate company conundrum). Even the "Product Engineer" guy who can probably talk up a storm about the financials of what he is doing, but in a Fortune 500 business does he really understand how that rolls up to the company's strategy? Is it a side line, is the lan…

I used to work there. At one point, I guess the worker population got large enough that they calculated the odds of insider trading or leaking data got too big (I think they were right) and nearly everyone lost access to the dashboards that would give insight into that kind of question. Despite this, the FEC enforced trading windows persisted.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#177

Post by kridsdale1 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:43 PM UTC

mediaman wrote: post #132

ghaff wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be a bit surprised if a sizable portion of engineers at a public company didn't have at least a rough notion of how their companies make money. It's right there in the quarterly and annual earnings reports. (And while reading SEC filings at a very detailed level is a skill you need to learn, the basics are pretty straightforward.) But maybe a lot of engineers just can't be bothered by any of that stuff. What is a…

My experience (not specifically with engineers) is that very, very few people read the 10K, 10Q or other public statements of the company they work for. A friend of mine used to be a management consultant for one of the big firms. On one memorable project she worked with senior executives of a large ($1b + revenue) non-tech company that had retained the consulting firm, to do an operational diagnostic. It became incr…

It may be the case that those managers had no reason to care about the health of the company as long as they were able to extract personal short term value before it all blew up. I think that applies to most tech company employees over the last 15 years.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#178

Post by cyrusatjam » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:45 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #169

nickvanw wrote: post #5

I would put it even more simply: just knowing Engineering isn't enough if you want to excel past a certain point, unless you're going to go extremely deep and become a subject matter expert in something (storage, hardware, etc). That is something most people are not going to do, because it requires dedication and to be extremely intelligent. Instead, you can go very far by understanding a job one "hop" from your own…

"because it requires dedication and to be extremely intelligent." I'm a dumb-dumb. Being a dumb-dumb in two domains isn't very helpful either. Everyone wants experts.

I see a stronger argument in a similar vein: "instead of spreading your knowledge thin, focus on your improving your ability in the domain you're paid to be good at."

But I'd counter that this doesn't mean you must permanently focus on one domain. On the contrary, every area of focus has a learning curve. And as many jaded HN commentors will point out, being exceptionally good at CS does not translate to being paid well, or being good at your job.

Naturally, even if you don't care to learn about Sales, Design or Product in the course of your Software Engineering career, you will still have to learn more than just pure Maths and CS. Simple skills: estimations, task breakdowns. More complicated skills: interfacing with other teams, juggling priorities, assigning work and pipelining tasks between teammates on 2+ person projects. And obviously, negotiating for compensation is entirely-unrelated to your work yet very impactful on your salary.

P.S. Nobody wants experts, people just want someone who can get the job done. Often times the hardest problems in an organization are not technical problems--they are communication problems. Having an understanding of multiple domains helps you bridge that gap and communicate at eye-level with other stakeholders.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#179

Post by kridsdale1 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:45 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #145

mindcrime wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company I've worked for, from startups to Fortune 500, it was very clear what products the engineers contributed to, and what that product portfolio revenue stream looked like, and what it meant to the business (right down to the product margins). This sounds quite remarkable to me, and definitely does not match my experience. I've found that most engineers have an incredibly vague notion - at best - of how the…

Or it's just damned uncomfortable. I don't think Microsoft could just make Windows and Office and survive this long. So if you're not on those teams your chances of actually making money directly instead of being expensive advertising dollars are negligible. Similarly if you're not working on adtech at Google. Your job doesn't actually make money. If you think about it too much you might not be that happy with how yo…

I work at Google on user facing product. I’m aware that my job is to make people like going to our website enough that they make searches for things that are sometimes ads. It’s the same as writing for a sitcom on tv. My whole purpose is to attract people with entertainment so they can be suggested to engage in some commercial activity.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#180

Post by kridsdale1 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 11:48 PM UTC

flangola7 wrote: post #164

throwawaysleep wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I little reorganization yielded a $385,000/yr cost optimization. And your reward for that was? Were you rewarded? Did they give you 30K as a bonus? Or was it just the weasel words of "this will be considered favourably at performance review time." I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job…

It really is strange that the people doing the actual work don't automatically get most/all of the profits. If 10 of my friends were to dig, plant, and maintain a garden and then I gave them only them a small portion of its fruits and kept the rest for myself they would rightly be very upset with me.

I think you just described capitalism. Or feudalism.