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- Hacker News
- In a hierarchical organization, solving real problems almost always means “doing everyone else’s job,” so the author is right if your goal is to succeed inside organizations.
That said, I’d add one more point: in China, where I’m from, it is getting harder for individuals to even survive inside organizations these days, let alone succeed. In that environment, the rational strategy is often to do less, take fewer risks, and make fewer mistakes.
Hard not to miss the golden days.
by shinyoo - In corporations no good deed ever goes unpunished.by fabianholzer
- Someone literally said that to me when I did a thing. I'd never heard it before. But I'm careful about the things I do now because as soon as I touch or fix something I'm suddenly the owner of it for the rest of time.by hdjrudni
- This was just business as usual 50 to 100 years ago. People started at the bottom and worked their way up. There were no I've-got-a-degree shortcuts because degrees weren't about training for a job, they were about finding out about the world around us. It's interesting that things are starting to circle around, but I doubt any corporation will drop the degree requirements... unless AI CEO's start rejecting all human applications.by pythonRon
- As a high school dropout, with a GED, I can relate. Pretty much all of my education has been OJT and seminars/classes.
It's earned me lots of sneers, over the years, but the people that mattered, didn't care. I spent most of my career at one of the world's best optical equipment companies, working as a peer with some of the top people in the world. It was quite humbling, and extremely gratifying.
- > I believe that not only do 20% of the people do 80% of the work, but that all this work only achieves its ultimate goals thanks to the <5% of the people who do stuff that someone else is supposed to do, but won't, for reasons which are perfectly legitimate in the organization's view of reality, even though the cumulative effect of such legitimate reasons is the certain death of the whole place.
I don't know that I've ever felt so validated by a HN submission.
I am definitely one of those suckers that does extra work others will not do. It isn't altruistic, I just can't motivate myself to work at all if my tasks are stupid. The problem is that at any sufficiently large organization many of the tasks are stupid because hardly anyone is on the same page.
by randusername - This was refreshing to read. I’m a big believer in getting things done especially when some process or people get in your way. In my experience people usually understand “oh this person is trying to make things better so this arbitrary process should take a backseat here”. Even people only working the clock will work with you if you frame it well.by moffers
- The other powerful thing about being able to do everyone else's job is that you, personally, gain a lot of leverage, and in a lot of different ways. Someone else needs a favor? You probably know how to deliver. Something's on fire? You probably know what to do next, or at least who to call, no matter what's on fire today. Someone isn't budging on something? You might not have any bigger of a lever than anyone else, but you probably know exactly where to position yours, and exactly what it'll do when you apply a bit of force.
It's useful.
And then there's times like getting to charge your client $300/hour to drop stuff off at FedEx. Because you can do that and you're here and you'll get it done right -- no one needs to explain the idiosyncracies of this particular deadline or package contents; you've got it.
Even if that's not normally a senior consultant's job.
- LOL! My bosses used to tell me that I need to learn to be more `rude` and not just do what others says because I can. I have learnt a lot and one of the biggest is to say NO, in big Uppercase—I can do anything for work but I won’t do that, NO, I won’t do that.
Sometime, I still do and I like the fun and thrill of locking in a hotel room after a meeting and coming out in lot less days these days (pppppsssstt, because of AI) and get into the next meeting showing off what can be done that was discussed 48 hours ago.
by Brajeshwar - I tend to apply this to myself, within an organization (as opposed to those who like to generically try it all - fair enough). I've always been an enormous fan of touring the organization. Whether I join as a dev, or an exec, I always make it a point to spend some time with product, with support, and with marketing. It ends up providing me a unique vantage point. I encourage others to do the same, and when I 'control' onboarding, make it part of the process.
It's literally the fastest way to have someone get up to speed with the customer profile and product. They can play with it whilst listening in to support calls (if a thing). They can learn about pain points and "hard edges" that as developers we don't always come across.
by cik - any tips on how to go about such things? its occasionally hard to find excuses to go hang out at the other end of the building and talk to another team I dont know much about as a regular developerby RugnirViking
- I've experienced that being knowledgeable of the inner workings is a risk of getting dragged into every projects.
When scheduling onboarding, I try to enable touring without those drawbacks.
by nkapias - I disagree with the centralization thought. I'm working on a project to create a central AI platform for a very large corporation. As you can imagine, such a large company already has several different platforms made by different branches within it. Each branch has something they are relatively happy with. But corporate sees this redundancy as waste, so they want to consolidate it into one.
The problem with one is the same with any other single source: you are stuck with whatever they offer on whatever timelines they provide. You are sharing this with a hundred thousand other people, so it's not tailored to your use case, but either made as generic as possible, or full of irrelevant features. Both of these cases make it worse for you.
I have often made in house libraries either based on or completely replacing a free equivalent because the free one doesn't meet our needs and has extra complications we don't need. Yes, it comes with its costs, but sometimes it's worth it for something that genuinely meets your needs.
By forcing everybody to use the same common platform, you are either forcing them to work around the mismatch between the platform and their needs, or your are forcing the platform to provide for everyone's needs. Neither is efficient and it harms every other user.
If you are going to make your own, you had better have a good reason for it, but you shouldn't be forced into a single solution for everything - it can end up being more expensive than making a few special purpose applications.
by RevEng - As end user of one such platform, thank you giving me hope that at least some people are at least putting in an effort to make decent. We currently have a very weird mix of features applied to everyone and we are not all quite the same almost by definition.
- One of the things I hate about my current job is that it's impossible to do this.
Everything is locked behind multiple layers of permissions. It takes weeks to get the correct permissions set up even for my actual job (which I see any time changing roles here, or when onboarding new hires). Getting the permissions to jump in and improve some other part of the system that I don't officially own - even though I might get granted them if I ask nicely, because nobody knows who is actually meant to have what permissions - is so much higher friction than asking the "right" person.
by dmurray - Many many companies are like this. Most people are happy doing their very narrow range of things and put blinders on to everything else. They either don't have the time, interest, or energy to do more, and they learned to not really care what happens to the company beyond their own position... that's above their pay grade.
If you attempt to make it easier for yourself to do more, you might wear yourself out too. The organization has become a demoralization engine, and some can continue on this way for a very long time. Some people might even be frustrated that you're trying to do anything differently.
But sometimes you can make inroads, and you can make things easier for everyone. Through finding the right people to ask, you can start to document or at least remember how to avoid the friction, reduce it, and make things better.
- I worked at a company where you could do it, but some people take fixes as insults to their mother's honour, so all in all probably on a personal level it is best to avoid doing it.by LtWorf
- Companies underestimate how much this murders productivity. All friction compounds.by cm2012
- That org is too large for you. At large orgs when you see a problem you think you can fix, someone will tell you that's not your job. At small orgs when you see a problem you think you can fix someone will thank their lucky stars you offered to help.by phrotoma
- > If a manager doesn’t actually manage anything, this is fine as long as you can go to his people and effectively manage them
> but you can usually find people in his org who’ll work with you, on the theory that they’re supposed to.
In 100% of the cases where someone has tried this on me, both as the manager and the naive employee, the real reason was that they didn’t care about what the manager/employee was supposed to be doing. They were looking for easy targets who could be abused to do their team’s work. Most of the “manager doesn’t manage anything” accusations came from other teams who weren’t even trying to understand what other managers or teams did. If the other manager or team wasn’t actively working for them in some capacity, they thought the manager wasn’t doing anything.
> It’s true that many of them have long figured out that they’re really supposed to follow orders passed down the hierarchy and do nothing else, even if everything around them is on fire. But some never figure this out, and most managers fail to punish at least some of these slow learners of theirs, so they’re yours to work with.
The most generous interpretation is that this is taken idle employees and putting them to use for the greater good, but most of the cases I’ve seen in real companies are from one arrogant manager spreading their work across any workers gullible enough to do anything you ask of them.
I’ve worked with and hired a lot of really nice people who always want to lend a helping hand. They’re great, but many of them have a real problem handling workplace sharks like this who will saunter over to their desk (or DMs) and persuade them to work on something else, which puts them behind on their own work. When it happens chronically it gets so bad that you have to start checking in almost daily to make sure they haven’t been pulled into yet another team’s workload from a Slack DM or email.
Helping other teams when time is available is a good thing generally. You need to make your manager aware of the incoming requests and time spent, though. Don’t become the person who is working themself to the bone for everyone who comes over with a request but is holding their own team back because they can’t focus on their actual work.
by Aurornis - > the real reason was that they didn’t care about what the manager/employee was supposed to be doing.
This is true of course, but you say it as if it’s a bad thing. At the end of the day, everyone has to manage their own time. If everyone only cared about chain of command and scheduled priorities, overall efficiency would plummet. Simple wins that just require a small amount of coordination outside the official org chart would be killed in committees and program manager reviews.
I understand the exploitative dynamic you’re describing, I just think there are many failure modes for productive operations that have to be balanced in some meta way.
by dasil003 - I worked for a Japanese corporation, and a big part of their HR policy, was to move staff around the company. It was usually in 1- or 2-year stints (people would spend their entire careers at the company, so they could do this). Eventually, they would end up doing longer stints, where they would specialize.
They would couple this with things like standardized coding and documentation styles, common tools, etc. Training on these standards was a regular thing for all staff.
The idea was that they could rapidly move experienced staff around. It also helped staff to understand how their work was applied in an integrated system (having “blinders” on, is a fairly typical issue, with dedicated employees).
It generally worked, but relied on their particular culture, and introduced a fairly significant amount of overhead and rigidity to the system. It would also mean that it takes a long time to cultivate experts.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed learning new stuff (still do). I actually enjoy taking on projects that I don’t know how to do. I wrote about it here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
- This is what doctors do in Czech Republic - mandatory journey through hospital departments taking about 2.5 years.by tomaskafka
- My mom worked at Cisco in a non-technical role for 30 years, and they did this. She was an IC and then manager for 3-5 years at a time on a bunch of different teams.
- It also relies on lifelong tenure, which would be a huge cultural shift for both employers and employees. Employees are often used to quitting rather than having to fix business issues (easier to quit than make the business fix X), and businesses are largely used to mistreating their employees because they can be replaced.
We’re culturally very far from even being able to attempt that.
by everforward - In the 1990's UPS spent a lot of effort grooming promising junior employees to move up the ranks and become managers. They would then move the managers around to different locations, thinking that good manager can manage any dept. Many of these guys had moved up from being delivery drivers. It became interesting when they would get assigned to manage the IT division, which was developing and supporting internal and external software products, as well as various help desks.by jimmydddd
- If you’re part of what is known as the general career track (総合職) and are actually being groomed for (middle) management, it’s common policy to move people every 3 years, in theory it prevents building of fiefdoms while also giving you a chance to improve your network, know the ins and outs of your company/government agency and give you the opportunity to accumulate small wins along the way.
The silly policy also extends towards things like supermarket managers, midsized companies with a country wide branch network public school teachers and other nonmilitary civil service positions.
If you’re a primary school teacher, you likely won’t see your students graduate.
by SenHeng - > and most managers fail to punish at least some of these slow learners of theirs
False, they punish by not crediting that work as work.
Glue work, keeping things tidy, dealing with that annoyance that everyone else has been able to get away with suffering through (and ignoring), all of this will be worth approximately 0 at performance review time because your time is a zerosum game that is traded off with highly visible, political, and otherwise rewardable work.
It's been my experience that in larger companies you generally have to play in the framework.(I'd roughly draw the line at 1000+ employees), at quite small companies (or as a self employed / entrepreneur, roughly <200 employees) you should follow the path of highest EROI on your efforts regardless of who's job it is. In the gap you have to read the culture and management.
by maerF0x0 - If the company does not recognize its importance just LET THE DAMN THING FAIL. That is how management will pay proper attention to it.by esafak
- I can think of at least two people in my career who were, ahem, load bearing for the company. They did all of the BS, non-sexy work required to keep the place running. Never wasted time on vanity projects, just showed up day after day doing the actual necessary things.
They were criminally under appreciated by management. Their career trajectory significantly worse than those who engaged in the highly visible projects.
by 3eb7988a1663