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2024-12-21
💼🪞 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.