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2024-12-21 | 💼 Work | 🕸️ Web
💼🪞 Work Reflections
A very rough draft
💡 A new (to me) mental model for work.
⚙️ How work works.
❤️ “Get a career you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
🤔 Perhaps not the full story.
💻 I love engineering.
🧠 My understanding of my role as an engineer and the path to success has evolved.
➡️ I used to go to work, eager to do great engineering. 👷 That’s what I’m here for, after all. 💰 That’s what they’re paying me for, right?
❌ Wrong.
🤝 All employment, regardless of profession, is about society.
🥇 Priority number one is always to please the manager. 🙇
📈 Success in employment is about job security and advancement.
🎯 A manager has goals and feelings about their direct reports. ❤️🩹
✅ Success in employment starts when your manager feels good about you. 😊
🔭 In the pursuit of success at work, every decision should be viewed through this lens: what will make my manager feel best about me? 👍
⚖️ Meritocracy is a nice idea, but humans don’t implement it well.
🎉 When optimism is in the air, managers may meet to decide who to promote. ⬆️
🤩 In this meeting, you want everyone, and especially your manager, to feel very good about promoting you. 🥳
📉 When pessimism looms large, managers may meet to discuss who to lay off. 😭
😨 In this meeting, you want everyone, and especially your manager, to feel very bad about letting you go. 🙏
🎮 That’s it. Work is a social game. 🕹️ People have power to control resources. 👑 Gaining favor and influence with those people is the whole game. 😎
🤯 This was the critical flaw in my understanding of my role as an engineer.
❌ My job is not to do great engineering. 😇 My job is to make the boss happy. 🥰 Engineering is just a tool. 🧰
💯 Your competence is the feeling your boss gets when they think about how good you are at helping them accomplish their goals. 🏆
🤨 Your idea of competence doesn’t matter if your boss disagrees. 👎
🗓️ Today, I view success at work as a function of the political, business, product, and engineering value I provide, in that order, as judged by my manager, their peers, and their manager, in that order. 💯
🚫 It’s not enough to do great work. ✨ 🚫 It’s not enough to build great products. 🧱 🚫 It’s not enough to delight customers or maximize profits. 😄 🚫 It’s not enough to do what your bosses boss wants. 🚫 It’s not enough to do what your boss tells you to do explicitly, or to do what you think they want, if they don’t ultimately feel good about you as a result. 😥 The bosses feelings and goals trump everything else because those are what determine your job security and prospects for advancement. 💼
🤔 Value is subjective. 💖 Humans are emotional. 🧠 Brains see patterns. 🐇 We leap to conclusions. ➡️ When A precedes B, we assume A caused B, consciously and unconsciously. 🔗 The strongest patterns we see correlate events and emotions on short time scales. ⏳