
Key practices for achieving large professional goals - tacon
https://nodramadevops.com/2019/12/key-practices-for-achieving-large-professional-goals/
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Havoc
>professional goals

This is missing one major ingredient: Office politics, image and associated
soft skills

Finding more and more that actual technical skill has less and less impact on
my professional career.

As uncomfortable as it makes me the conclusion is inescapable: playing the
game well is now front and center

~~~
mdorazio
This is a really hard lesson for a lot of people to learn. Networking, self-
promotion, and playing politics at large companies will generally get you a
lot closer to executive roles than just doing good work.

~~~
pbourke
Follow up: where can you do best based purely on technical/design/product
skills? Freelance/consulting?

~~~
philipov
Nowhere. With Freelancing/consulting, you're just playing -their- office
politics rather than your own. There is no place in society that allows you to
avoid developing interpersonal skills.

~~~
nine_k
This us true.

But different occupations need a different amount of interpersonal skills: a
CEO or TV host need more, while a surgeon or a fighter jet pilot need somehow
less.

It all depends on where you want to end up.

~~~
internet_user
Not entirely true. Pathology or radiology has nearly zero interaction with
patients, and they bill quite high.

You could probably coast along in surgery as well on almost zero interpersonal
skills.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
My eye doctor doesn't have great interpersonal skills. He made me feel like I
was wasting his time when I asked a question. He always answered them, though,
and he did cataract surgery _really_ well. I wasn't paying him for his
interpersonal skills.

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BeetleB
> And after nearly 20 years, I have finally refashioned my continuous email
> checking (distraction) habit into a daily schedule of:

> a quick check for urgent issues in the morning

> up to a 15 minute session before lunch

> a quick check for urgent issues ten minutes before finishing work

I've said it often enough on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13362603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13362603)

 _This is why in my interview I specified something like "Morning, after
lunch, and before I head home"._

Elsewhere:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21278969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21278969)

 _I 've told two of my bosses while being interviewed: Assume I'll check email
only 3 times a day. Is that workable?_

The response to that comment is amusing:

 _Sorry, but your inability to interact with your co-workers makes you a
difficult person to employ. A ton of folks don 't need this kind of special
treatment._

(Likely he was responding to the other content in my comment, but in the
spirit of this submission, I'd bet the author agrees more with my sentiment).

~~~
travisjungroth
I’ve been thinking about workplace communication like this a lot lately. I
think the “best” structure (most productive for most people) is a 3-tier
system on separate tools.

Alert system (pagerduty): 5 minutes (NOT normally used)

“Instant” message (slack): 2 hours

Email: 36 hours

Maybe that’s too much for you. But knowing I can get both get a response from
anyone within 2 hours, but don’t have to respond in less than 2 hours would
make me very happy.

~~~
BeetleB
It depends on whether people are colocated. For me, if the team is all on the
same floor, I just don't do IM.[1] If they need an immediate response or one
within 2 hours, they can just come to my cube. I don't mind being interrupted
for these, because I've noticed people are more likely to think their problem
through before getting up and walking - whereas with IM (and to some extent
email) they're happy sending off a query without much thought. So I'm
interrupted significantly less in personal than via email/IM.

If there are remote members, I usually respond to them on IM and try to ignore
everyone else. This is to prevent colocated team members from having an
advantage as I allow them to walk to my cube. I've toyed with having a
requirement from them that if remote team members IM me, then they have to
pick up a headset and talk live (similar to being interrupted in person). I
haven't tried it yet.

Email in 36 hours is excessive for me - I think by the end of day is good for
me.

Clearly different people have different preferences. My focus is to relieve
the burden of always checking/being available. It prevents deep focus. I think
this aligns with the author of the submission.

[1] Note that this is for IM in general. I've never used Slack - I've heard
Slack is more than just IM so perhaps I would find a good use for it.

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codeisawesome
Dear author,

This entire post over all is the perfect example of “things I wish I knew to
do in my 20s (or 30s)” and I love it.

Thank you for sharing your hard earned wisdom and happy new year!!

~~~
skuenzli
You're welcome! Thank you for sharing that; it means a lot because that's
precisely the kind of help I'm trying to provide. I wish you success in the
New Year and your career.

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omarhaneef
If the benefit of writing was primarily to focus your thoughts, I think
everyone would be enjoying this benefit. After all, we constantly send email
informing people of things we are about to do or have done.

Perhaps the benefit is closer to advertising. As Buffet is supposed to have
said, if you don’t write it’s like winking in the dark.

~~~
zarkov99
Only rarely do you write emails were the message is complex enough that
writing will force you to think it through carefully, which is the (very real)
benefit the author is referring to. Someone said writing shows you how sloppy
your thinking is, and math (and code to a lesser extent) shows you how sloppy
your writing is.

~~~
nsomaru
“Sorry this is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter”

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jay-anderson
I worked with the author at a past company. He was an ideal coworker. He's an
excellent communicator and was great at cutting through whatever else was
going on to help us get the important things done. I'm happy to see his
writing pop up here.

~~~
skuenzli
Thanks Jay, that means a lot coming from you. I hope we get to build great
things together again some day.

