251–260 of 372 posts
This is far more simple than it sounds. Do what others cannot to deliver success to the internal goals of the business. It is always more about capabilities and delivery and it’s never really about hard work. These capabilities can include authoring new tools but most often are soft skills and better written communication. Many people will fail at this because they cannot perform or independently determine their own…
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> Don't put stock in business relationships. If this is your mentality, is it any wonder you aren't valued? People post things like this and I'm not sure they have any emotional intelligence whatsoever. Sure, your work/job doesn't have to be your entire life. But what about a little pride in what you're doing? Working with smart people towards a goal to do something useful? If your mentality is "just show up for work…
Has it ever occurred to you that you have it backwards? He has this mentality because he has never been valued, not the other way around.
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I am bad at this as well. I think part of it is to do with my upbringing as a poor, smart kid at a bad school. The way to be well thought of by teachers was to not cause a fuss and get good grades whilst the teachers concentrated on the disruptive kids. I shudder at the thought of becoming one of those gobshites that asks senior management questions in townhalls like "How do you stay so grounded with all the awesome…
I've tried the brag document but I just can't do it. "ooh look at me, so special" i hate that crap. I don't need 10x my salary, I just want to feel valued by my team. I have never felt that in my entire life, even though team members often mention that I save their bacon repeatedly in team meetings with supervisors. it's like no one hears it. unless i change who i am as a person i will never be valued at work. it's j…
For me, the motivation to move out of my comfort zone and become more "braggy" was to provide a better standard of living for my family. And also my ego - getting annoyed at seeing less talented people do better.
I feel like "useful" and "valued" are very poor terms for the situations described in the article. I think a much better explanation is that just because you may excel in one role (and be recognized as such) does not necessarily mean you'll excel in another role. And heck, I think it's important to recognize these qualities and limitations in yourself . Calling this being "useful" or "valued" puts an emotional/moral…
I actually don't agree, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise. I posit that there's an employer expectation that every employee will be "useful", but utility is a fungible characteristic and the majority of managers and employers treat job descriptions of standardized roles just like that. Employees in those roles are susceptible to both replacement and career advancement, depending how "useful" they are, and how…
First, what you are describing in this comment sounds very much to me like following the adage "be loyal to people, not companies", and to that I totally agree. It's definitely critical in your career to build trust and relationships with folks you work with, and be dependable.
But for an example of why I think this "useful" vs. "valued" framing is wrong, I can think of a colleague at a previous company who I think was great at her role - she was a relatively junior (i.e. a couple years of experience) front end developer. She was responsive, implemented features well, and always demoed her work well and was extremely prepared. People also loved working with her - she was friendly, had very little ego, and had an almost disarming way of interacting with folks that would instantly defuse tensions on her team. I would work with her again in a heartbeat, and she was a great addition to her team.
At the same time, after working with her a while it became clear that her developer skills were limited. She was a great taskmaster, but the didn't have a great "systems-wide" way of thinking. She would implement features as requested, but when she would give demos I remember there were a bunch of times that there were semi-obvious questions ("Wait, how would the user get to screen A if they click button B first?") that she didn't bring up beforehand and did't consider in her implementations. I could trust her to implement individual components and screens, but I couldn't really say "Here's a description of the user problem, and the general direction we want to go in - how would you solve this?"
So if you asked me, I would say this person was a very valued person on her team. In her role, I think she was great. But I also don't think I'd expect her to perform well if she was asked to go in more "strategic and ambitious directions", as taken from the article.
I feel like "useful" and "valued" are very poor terms for the situations described in the article. I think a much better explanation is that just because you may excel in one role (and be recognized as such) does not necessarily mean you'll excel in another role. And heck, I think it's important to recognize these qualities and limitations in yourself . Calling this being "useful" or "valued" puts an emotional/moral…
The notion of being “useful” is ironically useless. The only real measure is your pay: if the company pays you well, they consider you important. If you think you’re useful but your compensation doesn’t reflect that, you’re being exploited - and all that talk of “belonging” and “usefulness” is just corporate mind games to keep you emotionally captive.
The more useful, though more crude, metric I use in my career is to estimate how replaceable or disposable I am.
This is extraordinarily hard to evaluate at first because we all tend to look at our little domains of the code and imagine how they’d collapse without us. You have to have some humility and some business sense to start recognizing how critical you and your inputs are to the company’s mission.
Nothing brings this in focus quite like being in a meeting where a company is forced to cut budgets and lay people off. I know that’s not helpful because most people won’t get to see that directly, but you can start to imagine how that looks if you do the thought exercise enough times. Imagine the company had to cut some percentage of headcount to avoid bankruptcy. Would you be cut at the 10% threshold? The 50% threshold? 80%? I guarantee your first estimates are going to be too optimistic, but it’s a helpful thought exercise.
From the mentorship side, I frequently see people confuse being good at their job with being irreplaceable. When push comes to shove, a lot of companies can cut deeply, hire some entry-level people to put out fires, and coast for a year or two until budgets are good again. This leads to a lot of great but generic front-end, mobile app, devops, or other generic positions getting cut. The company will suffer a bit, but rarely does complete collapse occur (despite what we like to imagine).
On the other hand, there are roles where companies cannot cut without immediate and long lasting pain. Cutting lead developers of core products or kicking out the sales team isn’t an option. It’s always the people working on generic problems, side quests, pet projects, or acting as clean up crews for the main teams who are normally too valuable to put on the generic work who get cut.
It’s possible for work to be valuable but also be eminently replaceable, offshore-able, or be a top candidate for being paused or cancelled when the budgets suddenly get tight.
Yeah the company needs a website and needs front-end developers for it, but does it need to be you? Or even in-house at all?
What is also useful to keep in mind is the tendency to recreate your primary family life in the workplace. So if you had critical controlling parents who never valued you and everything you ever did was worthless, then you'll tend to select for those places and it is often done outside of awareness. Was your primary family spent being valued and appreciated? Then you'll select for that and when people start to not va…
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I'm not sure this is a reliable guide. I'm in academia, and the people who really can't be replaced are the administrative staff with hard-won institutional knowledge and connections--but they're valued far less than splashy big-name faculty with no institutional loyalty.
Yet the admin staff is the first to get fired and treated badly any time something changes. While faculty basically no matter how useless can never be fired. "can't be replaced" has two opposing meanings in your post.
I was valued. Then the company laid off the whole country and stopped hiring in that country. In the end it's just luck.
I avoided the first big round of layoffs at my last company. How? By being so overwhelmingly awesome and valuable that they couldn't afford to lose me?? NO!
I agreed to a smaller pay increase that year so a team member could get a much-deserved larger raise. I accepted more stock grants to help make up the difference. The next round of layoffs was based on stock packages granted to employees. More stock granted == more better, right?
Sheer luck I didn't get the notice that time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this is a reliable guide. I'm in academia, and the people who really can't be replaced are the administrative staff with hard-won institutional knowledge and connections--but they're valued far less than splashy big-name faculty with no institutional loyalty.
Why would administrative staff ever be valued over the people providing the core purpose of the institution?
Ask them all to take a month off and see which has greater impact and over which timescales.
Usefulness and value have different dimensions that can be orthogonal or even in opposition to one another. Many of us have worked in the presence of brilliant assholes and had to ponder that question.