Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014

Tenoke

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

From personal observations

"Do your job and do it well"

most emphatically does not top the list. Certainly you have to do an adequate job, but your success in a corporate environment depends on your interpersonal skills more than on anything else. You depend on other people to get noticed and promoted, so you need to be good at playing the game. If you haven't taken a Dale Carnegie course or similar, do so. Toastmasters are useful, too. In general, learning to project a bit more status and competence than you think you merit likely means that people would go along with it.

Just to give an example, I have seen a few competent but unexceptional engineers become CEOs and CTOs over a few short years in a growing company, while other, better engineers never advanced beyond a team lead, if that.

If you are an above average engineer/programmer etc. but not a natural at playing politics, consider exploring your own projects. If you haven't read Patrick McKenzie's blog about it, do so. On the other hand, if striking out on your own is not your dream, and you already have enough drive, social skills and charisma to get noticed, you are not likely to benefit from whatever people on this site can tell you.

Perhaps we could be more specific about the social / political skills. I am probably not good at these skills, but here are a few things I have noticed:

Some of your colleagues have a connection between them unrelated to the work, usually preceding it. (Former classmates. Relatives; not necessarily having the same surname. Dating each other. Dating the other person's family member. Members of the same religious group. Etc.) This can be a strong emotional bond which may override their judgement of the other person's competence. So for example, if one of them... (read more)

1Lumifer12y

Being a manager is a radically different job from being an engineer. In fact, I think that (generalization warning!) good engineers make bad managers. Different attitudes, different personalities, different skill sets.

10benkuhn12y

I'd beware conflating "interpersonal skills" with "playing politics." For CEO at least (and probably CTO as well), there are other important factors in job performance than raw engineering talent. The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles, but they might have just decided that their CEO/CTO needed to be good at managing or recruiting or negotiating, and the star engineer team lead didn't have those skills. Second, I think that the "playing politics" part is true at some organizations but not at others. Perhaps this is an instance of All Debates are Bravery Debates. My model is something like: having passable interpersonal/communication skills is pretty much a no-brainer, but beyond that there are firms where it just doesn't make that much of a difference, because they're sufficiently good at figuring out who actually deserves credit for what that they can select harder for engineering ability than for politics. However, there are other organizations where this is definitely not the case.

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Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014

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You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

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Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014

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You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

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