I like the luck surface area analogy for this.
Take a rectangle. Side A is "Quality of work". Side B is "How many people know about it". The surface area – A*B – is your luck and opportunity.
If you do amazing work and nobody knows about it, your luck is zero.
If you do terrible work and everyone knows about it, your luck is zero.
A square would be equal balance of A and B, which is okay but not to everyone's liking. You can get the same surface area with 2A and 0.5B. You can get a huge surface area with 2A and 1B.
For HN types, optimizing for big A and just enough B is easiest. We tend to err on the side of not enough B.
In this case, you also get the benefit that both of you can get credit for the same work. Everyone will know them as "the guy who knows people who get things done" (i.e., good manager/leader) and you'll get credit as a great individual contributer. There's no competition for credit here.
It gets even better if the few people who know you as "their guy for X" are social supernodes--while we're all only 6 degrees of separation from each other, it's actually because a small percentage of us know tons of people, while the average is much less. If you become the "guy for X" for one of these supernodes, you're basically the "guy for X" for anyone who would ask them "hey, do you know a guy for X?"
In my career, I've had two of those types of people know me and my work--and between the two of them, they have generated almost every opportunity I've had in the past 10 years.
I could spend 50% of my time networking, and I doubt it would generate as much value as adding just one more social supernode that knows my work.
The other is a sales guy / stoner type, who always seems to have been to every new bar and restaurant and already know the owners by the time I've heard of the place.
These descriptions are just the two I know--but you get the idea. They genuinely value people, so it's not a chore for them to know people, and they never really "network". They just like people.
There's actually quite a lot of people with these kinds of traits. The trick, which is harder, is finding ones you respect and get along with, so you (the relative introvert) will keep up your end of the relationship.
A lot times, I see skilled specialists look down on the more generalists/people-oriented people as being some form of incompetent. Compared to the specialist in their field, they always are. The thing that makes these 2 special to me is that they're humble about their limitations in a way that makes really respect them. They're definitely not blowhards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network#Network_ro...
I don't agree. The problem with "how much you self promote your work" is that if you're not good at promoting your work then you'll still be at, or near, 0. Whereas "How many people know your work" focuses on the outcome. Nearly everyone is promoting their work, not all of which gets noticed. How will you do it in a way that gets noticed?
A perfect example of a -2 X 5, zero work done but great presentation, now the guy is infamous in our circle and no one would recommend him to be hired anywhere.
Knowing what should and should not be implemented (where to go) may be more important than being able to move in random directions.
Once requirements are clear, the implementation becomes easier.
Perhaps, the guy should be in the product team, not in devs.
Amazing work requires focused effort over time, first to complete, and then for lots of people to discover it.
And the time dimension is not linear, but has an acceleration. The more amazing the work, the longer it will take to complete, and during this time acceleration of people knowing about it will be near zero.
But once completed and made public, the more amazing it is the faster the acceleration of discovery.
Well, really, it’s less than zero, since now you also have a bad reputation you’ll need to dig out of. :)
But I don't think that implies the type of marketing social media apps gets you is valuable. For instance, I'd think that giving talks at conferences would be much more valuable than trying to become a LinkedIn influencer. I think you can work on networking and marketing in a way that limits distractions.
in summary:
know. Your. Audience. Let them know , but speak to them in their terms. Communication is not a display of hubris, it’s a two way street
Later I started being more assertive about my time.
Meeting request in the middle of my core work hours? Decline as busy, suggest to move it to a lunch meeting or offer to call the person after working hours (Everyone chooses lunch meeting instead of after hours).
People tapping me on the shoulder to ask a question while I'm wearing headphones? Before they can speak, I politely say that I'm in the middle of something I need to finish and ask if it's urgent. It's rarely urgent, but people quickly learn that it doesn't pay off to interrupt me.
Constant deluge of Slack messages? I set a status that I was busy but would be available to chat during certain hours. When I'm pinged, I quickly respond that I'm in the middle of something but I'll get back to them later.
The key was to realize that taking charge of my own time didn't have the negative consequences I thought it would. In my mind, I thought declining people's meeting invites or refusing to prioritize other people's demands would end my career, so I let people walk all over my schedule. Reality couldn't have been further from the truth. Nearly everyone was very understanding and very few people interpreted my responses as rude. Obviously you need to be polite and professional, no matter how aggravating the interruptions are.
Carving out dedicated meeting and socializing time was also important. It's unlikely that I'm going to sit in one place for 8 straight hours anyway, so allocating two blocks of time each day for meetings and catching up was helpful. Making it predictable and communicating it to others made it easy for everyone else to understand. I even marked it on my shared calendar.
You can often shorten this to, “can you come back in fifteen minutes?” This is less likely for them to try to pick your brain about whether their problem is urgent or not.
Of course it depends on who is asking. If the head of IT is standing there, and you don’t usually hear from IT, then it could be something bad. If your intern looks like they just set the building on fire, also might be important.
The chain was basically:
a) ping them over IM. Do not grenade them with your problem. Ask first if they have time to help you:
No? Try fixing your problem on your own for another 20-30 minutes.
Yes? Be short and to the point. If its a coding issue, list all of the solutions you've tried first and what the issue is.
Allow the person you are asking to set the parameters of the help:
a) how fast can this be done? Can I do this over IM?
b) does this need a webex or meeting to figure out?
c) how much time will the meeting require to solve problem? Estimate and go from there.
d) do any of the previous infringe on your current work? Have a person set up a meeting for later in the day and then leave them alone.
It was literally taboo to go to someone's desk and ask them for help. It was hammered into people that work comes first and any distraction costs time and money. Even when you go over and tap someone on the shoulder? They have to mentally disengage with their work to speak to you. That's precious time they are losing. Same thing after they've completed even a 5 min conversation, they have to get back to whatever they were doing which also takes time. There was some study that said just a handful of these interruptions can cause a company millions. When you're at a startup, every dollar wasted costs the bottom line.
This wouldn't work with me. I don't respond until I know what I'm saying yes to.
If you prefer to eat lunch alone, adjust accordingly. I was providing loose guidance, not a strict prescription.
The hard thing is that it's not easy to explain critical job' result to the team. Most people simply think that's [my] job.
The very annoying thing to me is that people tend to ask via PM. Why don't they just ask question on common group where there are a lot of people in the team can help? Oh... that's then Slack @here and @channel are problems. They are using that too much, and people don't care anymore lolz
My rule of thumb is 15 minutes. I also never send "Hi XYZ" alone and then form a question. "Hi" is part of question message (Shift+Enter ftw!) and often while forming the question sentence with some guiding information I manage to find an answer too. No message send, win-win.
My company has several of those "works late, comes in late" employees, and none of them are seen as lazy.
We have managers that recognize and re-enforce to the other teams the work that we do and the people we unblock and the wins that we're able to make.
I just completed one of my own reviews where I was lauded loudly as a person that unblocks other people - while my own official tasks are relatively light because my primary task has become unblocking others - and a coworker was recently promoted due to her weird, off-hour work.
Why? Management understood our strengths and re-enforces them, protects us from nay-sayers and rejoices openly about the work that we do.
That way, we can keep working in the areas we're good at, in the way we're good at it, and we're given the recognition for our work through our managers.
With a good manager, you shouldn't have to be constantly trumpeting your own skill, they should be revealing it for you.
Managers, and I'm sure many of you are here on Hacker News, this is one of your many, many jobs.
https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly
[0] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/harry_s_truman_109615
Those who do better networking tend to be onto those trends. They will find out about opportunities where 10 minutes of focused work will net a large [sale, or other win for the company] for the. 10 minutes of the right work can be far more valuable than a whole month of deep focused work. (though that 10 minutes probably builds on - and takes credit for - someone else's months of deep work)
There is no clear win here. However if you like to be a deep focus person you should force yourself to spend some time every week figuring out the pulse of the company so you are at least doing useful work.
"I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."
This is what I like about work from home. I can use the distracting and busy day to sleep and deal with admin tasks like email and work until 3AM instead if I really need to get stuff done.
Haha, I feel so called out. I have been up for 2 days straight at this point, and it has been incredibly productive.
Sometimes I wish I could summon my ability to do deep work during the day, but it is just so hard with all the meetings and ideations (I love them too, but can't stay up 24x7). My body can't take this kind of late-night abuse anymore, so I feel like I am running on borrowed time.
Hopefully I will learn to do focus work in the day at some point. Has anyone here successfully made that transition ?
But as a team, the answer "I can't reach the expert because they secluded themselves" is not acceptable. Because as a senior figure on a team, you job is to become a force multiplier for others, not a solo force. Not to do work that magnanimously benefits others, but work that makes others better.
You need occasional deep work time, sure. But the whole "I must disconnect from everything, always" thing does not work for any social endeavor - and most meaningful things are of a scope that requires a team.
I wish I had a better answer here, because I too like thinking quietly for long times - but I also see that I fulfill a useful function when I'm reachable, and ultimately, you get paid for usefulness to the larger endeavor.
(This points strongly towards solo/entrepreneur tracks if isolation is your only useful mode of work, but even then, you'd be well advised to find a partner who handles the people parts)
Over the years I’ve come to realize it is not as clear cut of a trade off. Teams can be coached to be self-reliant and to distribute knowledge effectively, so that they have fewer urgent questions. I try to proactively take myself out of the critical path as much as possible. Documenting thoroughly is one way. Another is to use channels for question-asking and encouraging the use of the channel instead of dm. There’s a higher chance a person can answer who is not interrupted, and because everyone passively follows the channel the knowledge is shared more effectively.
Decision-making is always the tricky part. Junior devs need constant handholding and it is more about a lack of lived experience than a lack of knowledge. You need enough senior devs so that the load of constant micro-decisions for the juniors can be spread around.
The thing is that getting to the point where there is enough time for deep work is a process that takes time and that is easily undone by team churn. IMHO the only way to sidestep the matter entirely is to have a lieutenant who handles all the urgent matters, but I’ve only had that once and in retrospect it was hardly a fair situation.
It's not that I disagree with the premise. Rather, I believe as a society, we've largely taught ourselves helplessness and failed to document properly how things are supposed to work (both when requesting features and checking how existing things work, both functionally and in code). Add short tenures onto this, and it makes for a system which needs a lot more synchronized "are you available" time than need be.
Additionally, maybe I'm biased, but many juniors don't need as much mentorship as the average senior dev here likes to claim once they're settled in. Again, it might be backfiring in terms of learned helplessness, where they won't try and solve their own problems first. Furthermore, it stimulates not documenting processes in a way that newcomers can learn, where seniors become glorified encyclopedias. Most juniors I come across stumble here: not when the problem can be found online, but when the problem is a piece of domain knowledge / in-house framework documented extremely poorly, and requires an extensive amount of time to communicate.
Combating this may cut down required mentoring significantly. Now imagine you might be able to cut down regular mentoring to a 1-2h window. On a regular 8 hour day, that leaves a whole 6-7h to plan at your own convenience. This could have different setups as well (two days with high accessibility, three days of access only in critical cases). Most of all, as long as we don't make the deep dive and continue our existing ideas, we're only setting ourselves up for a selffulfilling prophecy. It's only after we try, we can accurately make such bold claims.
For example, what about "being reachable" four days a week, or 7 out of 8 hours a day, or using the toilet?
Bright line rules like these are usually fake and promoted by people that benefit from them.
Ultimately, talking to the team, scheduling 'busy' times on your calendar, or letting people know in the morning that you need a day to focus on something can really make a difference. Also, setting up expectations on how long can it take for you to reach back in matters that are not urgent. And urgencies that are critical for the business always have a preference over deep work, but if the team knows you are busy, they can think if they really need you to solve it or give instructions.
Nice noise cancelling headphones, schedule a chunk of 1-1.5 hours, go "do not disturb" in chat and don't check mail during this time. You can get decent amount of work done in one block. Try to get 2-3 of these blocks during the day, that would be pretty decent.
You could use a Pomodoro timer app if you want to track the blocks.
Manic time is also a great app, it keeps track of all the windows you have active, so then you can go back and tag the chunks of your time and do an analysis on when you went down a rabbit hole and for how long.
I do feel like a lot "distractions" in work hours are avoidable. Some of them are just habit or a dopamine fix or procrastination - kind of like checking Facebook or Twitter on your phone when something else isn't focusing your attention fully.
At most organisations I've been part of I've adding some of, if not the, highest value on projects, ideas etc by far. However they never see that and focus on the stupid morning stuff so often.
But I really can only blame myself for this.
Was easy too, 'can we meet at 4:30' 'Hmm, I come in pretty early, and like to get out the door by 3:30, can we do it earlier?' was a typical exchange.
Also, depending on your office arrangement your team-mates just know you get in early when they always see you in the office when they get in. But, ymmv, I am sure it varies from workplace to workplace.
I used to do the stay up late thing, and while work did get done, it's nowhere close to what I get done in the morning.
The challenge was that there are very rarely obligatory early morning events. There are often late day events and issues.
If I wake up early, I can't stay until 9PM without being miserable. But something requiring me until 9PM is far more likely than something at even 8AM.
Now, I consider 5-6AM early and that's when I typically wake up - haven't used an alarm in years.
Also, if your waking hours are say 0800-2300 then you can easily work late and move your leisure time to the morning without changing your sleep schedule.
Not necessarily. Early birds like me find it difficult to work in the evenings, despite being technically awake. I find it way easier to get up early than to stay up late, which can actually feel like torture sometimes.
As for the split, I've read it's more like 10% for each extreme with the majority in the middle, though I can't find a reference, and I suspect it's very hard to actually know.
I've found that it is possible to do during the day, but you kind of have to put your phone away, and also clamp down on browser.
HN is unfortunately a distraction!
Make yourself 'feel' like it's a Monday or Friday Holiday, where nobody is in the office, so they can't bother you, but it's not a 'weekend' either. Those days are productive.
Better ways such as keeping your phone in another room. Building the discipline to not be checking email or other sites frequently throughout the day (on phone or in the browser). Muting notification sources. And ultimately, taking control of your time.
The people that struggle with deep work are the people that struggle with unplugging, and/or live with a fear of missing out. Conquer this, and cultivating this skill becomes a much more manageable and achievable challenge.
Literally just had this on my year end review. I won't go into the useless stack ranking the company I work for uses, but none of my project work was ever late (it was actually either right on time or early) but because I'm a night owl and do a majority of my work off hours, I'm considered "unavailable" when other regular folks need to get a hold of me because I'm not online at 7am like everyone else. Yet any issues are resolved in a timely manner regardless.
I literally got a lower rating because my manager said there was a "lack of effort" during business hours and that other team members said I was "aloof" and "not present" during long managerial meetings.
I had to spend most of this week refuting what my manager wrote on my review since if I decided to move departments, other managers will look at it since its a typical process managers to do when hiring internal candidates. Pulling in copious amounts of documentation to refute what he was saying cost me a days work, but in the end, I had no other choice.
I'm still bitter about the whole thing.
That said. I feel and connect with your rant at a personal level. For reasons I won't share on this post.
I know you didn't ask for any advice and yours is just a rant. Based on your review and what you say i.e you had to spend a day just to refute it. It would be wise to increase interviews with other prospective employers and other professional opportunities.
Your efforts are much better spent where they are valued a bit more than this.
People absolutely have natural tendencies one way or the other, but if you want to change you can. Too many people approach it as if they're stuck in one or the other.
That's not a night-owl (midnight I mean, 1am might barely be).
The elephant in the room question is - "what are you doing during the time that is allocated for work?"
I think deep-work is then a secondary thing. The person needs to solve other more important problems first.
1) are you over-commiting? 2) Should you be more assertive with taking up more work? 3) Are you able to set expectations of people that wait for your work and then also communicate when there are delays? 4) Do you have problems delegating work? 5)...
For me, it was the other way around: inability to do deep work during the day (due to all the distractions already mentioned) forced me to cultivate a 10h-19h work schedule, with the accompanying sleep schedule (roughly from 01h-09h).
> The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted.
So I don't think that solves the problem if everyone in your office is still awake during your (later) prime working hours, although it does solve the waking up later issue.
cite? Your implication as stated above I believe has not been proven. Doesn't Cal go into some detail about people who have cultivated this skill; perform deep work, and then only do it for "normal" (or even more often, far less than "normal") work hours and thus have the rest of the working day to do whatever else they enjoy?
And in fact, you can do deep work at morning a much as late, there is literally no one in tech startup at the morning.
The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. Then they come in late because they need sleep like every one else. As a consequence, deep thought workers are seen by their immediate and responsive counterparts as obtuse, eccentric, or worse: lazy and unable to manage their time.
This really comes down to the workers dilemma. Do you spend your time marketing your self to others and letting people know your accomplishments, or do you spend the time doing work that will benefit others? Deep thought workers will bias heavily towards work that will benefit others. This benefit is often non-obvious deep thought workers will run the risk that their peers, that are more connected and more reachable, will take the credit for the results.