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0 pointsasciident5y ago0 comments

All the things the OP listed are real merits. It's not even a game, but being a professional.

Perception = you are good at communicating your work to others

Connections = you have a strong network and stay informed and know who to talk to for different tasks

Face time = you are easy to get along with

Ability to handle office issues = you are a lubricant that make the group dynamic work

If you don't do those things, then you could write fantastic code, but: no one will know about it, know to ask you about it, be aware you're doing it, and find you somewhat of a drag on the office atmosphere. Basically, your work is not useful to the company that is paying you, and you should be paid less because of this.

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danaris5y ago

It is certainly possible to achieve these things by the methods you name. I'm sure some good employees do.

But it is also perfectly possible to achieve good perception, strong connections, lots of face time, and ability to handle office issues, while also being really bad at your actual job, and without any of the positives you mention (except for the fairly bland "easy to get along with").

The real problem, of course, is that what office politics optimize for is extraversion over performance, so anyone who's introverted (which a disproportionate number of programmers still are) is going to come in at a disadvantage.

And, um...if you're writing the code that's required of you, by the people who require it, and you're writing it well and in a timely fashion, it doesn't matter if you brag about it to everyone around, it's plenty useful to the company. I don't know where you've worked where the primary work you've done has been code that you've come up with on your own, which you've then had to "sell" to your own bosses and coworkers, but that's definitely not the norm.

asciidentOP5y ago

I think you're projecting your idea of "person who is bad at their job but good at selling / office politics" into what I wrote. Of course you need to be good at your job, but how do you even know what's useful to the company if people don't find it easy to discuss problems with you? How do you communicate how long something will take if there is a dependency on another team? Unless you're just writing rote plumbing code, these are all things you need to know.

danaris5y ago

Well, first of all, I've seen people firsthand who get promotions and raises due to schmoozing who are demonstrably bad at their jobs (in and out of tech). I didn't think the existence of such people was in question.

Second of all, you seem to be looking at things in very black and white terms. Of course you need to be able to communicate project requirements and dependencies and whatnot, both within and between teams. That's nowhere near the same thing as "networking" or "making connections" in the commonly-understood sense, which is much more about going over to have a chat and a laugh with Steve or Patty down the hall...or, to take it a step further, going out for a game of golf and running into the CTO there, and just happening to have a chat about your upcoming review.

So, in short: yes, of course "being good at your job" requires communication and people skills, as well as (in our case) coding skills. But there are many places where the skills required to advance—both financially and in your career—are exclusively the people skills, regardless of the fact that the skills that are primarily relevant to job performance are the coding skills. This creates perverse incentives, results in unqualified people getting managerial positions, and massively disadvantages those who genuinely care more about doing a good job than "selling themselves"—especially introverted people—in the workplace.

tluyben25y ago

You have any actual backup for this? I know too many niche tech guys who do nothing of this but get work done (inc myself) and make sv money in the eu while the people who do do this make far far less as they are easy to replace by other ‘talkytalky’ people who talk and don’t get actual work done. I guess if you do both you are a winner but I have never met anyone like that; where do you find the time to network and write metric tons of code? Both take a lot of time but one of them can be done by a far greater % of people.

asciidentOP5y ago

Not sure how anyone would back up this. I manage managers so see this first hand. I think you're creating a false dichotomy between talkytalky and coding. Good developers will code and be professional at the same time. How do you know that the niche tech guys that you know are "getting work done"? They're doing this.

This is not about spending time chatting up people all around the office and networking. It's about responding clearly when people ask you questions, when you have your 1:1 with your manager, and in how you write your emails, etc.

tluyben25y ago

In your experience; mine is different. That does not matter; you were explaining in the parent comment that if you ‘do not do this you should earn less’; I am saying and living through for the last 30 years that people who do not do that make more. So just giving a counter example that your rules might not be holy ones. We can both be right: could be a culture thing or different circles (I work with embedded devs who make the big bucks and do not generally communicate well (the ones I know!); it distracts from work).

vincnetas5y ago

Yes but if you can do all these things minus coding, and your product is software this means that someone has to do the coding, and you are paid to convince (organize) these coders to do it for less, because the rest goes to you. By coding i mean software development in general.

And saying that if no one knows about you you should be paid less is so false. Because, everyone will know about you when you leave and things stop working. Im not talking about single point of failure. But say all non communicating developers are gone from software company one day, id say company would feel that.

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danaris5y ago

It is certainly possible to achieve these things by the methods you name. I'm sure some good employees do.

asciidentOP5y ago

danaris5y ago

tluyben25y ago

asciidentOP5y ago

tluyben25y ago

vincnetas5y ago

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