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this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Not an academic, but this is spot on for how I’ve felt as a top performer getting nowhere. This realization helped me reorient my aspirations to what I find truly matters to me: my family and hobbies. I’m a solid individual contributor. Over the years, my work has saved us millions and been adopted across the country, which is reward enough. The speaking engagements and schmoozing, I’ll leave that to the extroverts in the boys club.
Same. It physically hurts to see talentless suck-ups play the bullshit game and climb the hierarchy, whereas you get punished and kept down for pointing out the bullshit. My best decision ever was to escape the hell that is the field of software development, and instead get into teaching. Now my reward for a job well done is seeing my students succeed and I love it so much.
I know that feeling all too well. Funny enough, I’d thought about going into software dev because I thought it’d let me work alone more comfortably. Along the way I found a way to learn dev but apply it to my job instead, making me pretty unique at what I do. It lets me innovate, do deep research, and work on my own while being pretty openly anti-social. Luckily I have a boss who sees the value in me.
I can’t tell you the number of once-interns and junior managers, stuck-in-a-rut folks, that I’ve quietly influenced to senior or higher positions. It really does feel incredible! I call it “leading from the back.” I’ve been wanting to write a book on it - the introverts and individual-contributors who quietly (and happily) influence without being seen.
+1 on the book idea. Sounds like a delightful read. I have a similar philosophy as well that's worked for me. I've never once cared about getting credit or props, I make my boss/team look like geniuses. That naturally tends to reward you as well. Great individual contributors are actually pretty rare. Out of hundreds of engineers I've worked with closely, only a few were brilliant in the way you described.
If you're looking for related reading, perhaps for inspiration, there's a great book called
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain.
I highly recommend it.
I would read this book! Even a blog post, I’d 100% be interested
For something that I really hesitated to post, that was really encouraging to hear. Thanks!
I work as an engineer for a huge financial company, so I relate. I was a scrappy upstart who worked himself through the lowest tiers of my industry towards the top. I'm also neurodivergent.
I can speak on for days about how bosses don't care who's doing the work as long as it gets done.
As a top performer, you're likely to feel that people should perform at the standards you set, and your natural first instinct is probably to try to train and educate your coworkers. You soon realize that they either don't give a shit or they're offended that you're giving them advice. No problem, we live in a hierarchical society, so you tell your boss about the problems you face, they'll have your back, right? Wrong. You're rocking the boat, and the boss' job is to keep the boat afloat.
Now, instead of rocking the boat, you start to wonder if you there's a way you can change the current of the water so the boat goes in the proper direction. That's where wisdom and skill meet. There's an incredible amount of depth involved in influencing people and change. I wish it wasn't the way of the world, but it is. Being brilliant is only half the battle.
@clearedtoland @fossilesque It makes perfect sense if you consider it. Imagine a closed system with two top performing components, where every other component is contributing to the system’s overall success. If one of these two top performers is able to connect and leverage all the other system components to amplify their work, but the other works in isolation, which is really producing more successful output when you measure the total system?
That's a pretty contrived setup. If the two top components are not factored into the performance of the whole and they are both defined by their ability to improve other components, then the one doing it's own thing is not, in fact, a top performer. It's task is to support others and it fails to do so.
And what if the loner's task is foundational? It doesn't have much direct output, but if he's gone and everything else goes to shit? Those ones are very hard to measure. I know, that's been my job for a good portion of my career. And things like that are common. Expecting a given performer, say an engineer, to also be good at public speaking has always struck me as impractical.
@maniclucky Yes, it's a contrived example. Its contrivance was to pose the point, which is:
Given two system components of comparable value, but different system impact, one still differentiates with regards to the surrounding system.
Also, given that the system itself is the body of recognition, the component with greater system impact is not only leveraged better, but also better positioned for being noticed doing it.
Also, a system can't see self-isolated participants. Not respectfully.
My problem with your example is that the loner didn't have comparable value. If it was supporting other things, then it failed. If it was doing something non obvious, it shouldn't be compared to the support. It feels fallacious, though I can't name one specifically.
System sight is itself an issue. Many companies evaluate an employee solely on some performance metric, typically tied to money. Because it's easy (and lazy).
I've had several positions where my task was to keep things running. I added no value, I prevented loss. And those positions get screwed because they're very difficult to quantify worth and very hard to see (and if it doesn't create money, they don't care). You only notice them when something goes wrong. Such an employee may keep everything running all year and get a "meets expectations" because there's an upper limit on how much contribution the system sees, and the system doesn't want to put in the effort to see better. I may have had to climb over an air handler to get to a transducer to calibrate, but that's not sexy and even if I report such effort, it's what I'm supposed to do (even if I wasn't, weekend nights are weird).
No one is going to write down "keep machine running 80% of the time" because people unassociated with the task will insist that 100% is the expectation, despite that being unreasonable.
A system built of people is not a black box. We can see them and evaluate them based on the task they're supposed to do, but the evaluators don't want to put in the effort to do their tasks in a way that means more work for them.
There's a comment to be made also about scope creep for a position so that a company doesn't have to hire marketing and engineering if they can get the engineers to do it. Despite them being suboptimal for the task. Something something down with unrestrained capitalism.
Ok. I've lost the plot at this point and made my point. Have a good one.
@maniclucky The issue I think that you're having here isn't that you're not making good points. Your points seem correct to me.
I think what's going on is that you're saying "there's nuance", and there clearly is, but I'm deliberately presenting a simple verbal model in order to be quick and to the point.
I do agree with you largely, but I think my point stands: two equal contributors to a system differentiate when just one contributor is friendlier to their host system. That becomes the edge.
What, my ~7 paragraphs isn't simple? /s
You're correct. I think I was chafing at the systems in question predisposing friendliness to mean modes that I personally am unskilled at or uncomfortable with despite my value.
@maniclucky It's chafing to me, too. I'm not very good at it, I'm sure that's kind of obvious at this point ;)
I just notice it a lot because, I guess, I wish I were better at it? Or better at being personable? But, it's so expensive for me in terms of effort, it wears me out so fast.