The other half of this strategy that the blog post left unwritten is: 1.) learn how to sell that dirty work and connect it back to the successes your high-growth company enjoyed in the marketplace 2.) apply to other high-growth companies who want someone willing to do their dirty work 3.) get a competing offer and 4.) negotiate that into a higher salary or stock package.
You can't clear a market without competition. All of the other career advice, whether it be "work for a profit center rather than a cost center" or "impress your boss" or "do the dirty work" or "take credit for other's success" or "don't take credit for other's success" means nothing if there's never a reason to give you a raise because you're going to keep working for your employer regardless of the terms.
In my experience that hasn't worked out. Being invaluable just means more pressure gets piled on you, and any reward or leverage you think you might be getting in return doesn't materialise. The credit you earn doesn't translate into anything tangible.
Managers just don't take into account the fact that you can and most likely will leave. The project ends up screwed but that's no longer your problem. I've seen it happen multiple times at multiple companies.
But it also puts me in a spot where my manager feels he has to micromanage me. If I up and quit, it’ll pretty much derail the project many months. And I do feel like quitting. Not because of the amount of work but because I have this micromanager breathing down my neck every day.
You have no obligations even if it feels like that. I've had the same exact situation so often and it always felt bad until I started drawing the line
A firm I know fired their lasts Perl developer, purely to cut costs. Their payments system was written in Perl. When it stopped working, they asked my friend to step in.
He refused, said management should take responsebility for their decisions, and his manager got all pissy. Soon my friend left the firm too. The management is still earning bonuses and promotions. Nobody cares.
What "invaluable" really means is "a cost the company doesn't currently want to incur". That only works as leverage for as long as the company would rather acquiesce to the employee than incur the cost, and the employee doesn't generally know where the line in the sand is.
I think people tend to see themselves as invaluable when they really aren't. I've seen "invaluable" people quit or get fired, and it causes a rough patch, but the business recovers. Someone else learns, or the business decides they can do the same thing another way or decides that that system isn't actually as important as they thought.
> 1.) learn how to sell that dirty work and connect it back to the successes your high-growth company enjoyed in the marketplace
This is an incredible amount easier to do with flashy work. If someone leads a revenue-generating product, they can say "I lead this project that created $XM in new revenue". If someone made on-call less crappy, it's hard to quantify that. "We got 70% less on-call pages" is neat, but not really something the business cares about in isolation. You'd have to quantify higher stability on the product leading to not losing revenue, or reducing turnover to have a comparable metric.
Doing dirty work is appealing to other engineers, but it's a cost center for the business. They'd happily have a crappy on-call rotation unless you can demonstrate some kind of financial downside to it.
In my experience it hasn't panned out like that.
We desperately want to believe it, because we see how valuable we are to the business. But the reality is that the people making decisions rarely understand the value of the dirty work because they, themselves, have no interest in it. It could be absolutely critical to the business but they will happily walk away because they have no interest in understanding the work you do or its ultimate importance to their own goals.
What if the team (or its product) gets cancelled?
Doing all the grungy work means that a.) you can describe what grungy work needs to be done that a potential new employer and b.) you can describe the solutions you took to these problems. Basically, you can pass all the bullshit filters that savvy employers put in place, because you are not actually bullshitting.
You still make your money in the transaction, that point where you actually get an offer letter from an employer and negotiate a compensation package. But the input to that compensation package is based on how much value your new employer expects you to add to them, and a primary input to that is how much value you added for your past employer, and how much your new employer believes your claims of that.
It's how everything works.
> it's not rational nor fair
Life gets a lot better once one accepts and deals with reality and stops getting wrapped around the axle about fairness.
Suppose you lived in a universe where there was no fairness, ever. It was maximally unfair at all points and times. You would drink water and it would turn to sand in your mouth. You would wake up and spears would pierce your eyes. Every action you took to help ease your suffering would instead maximize it, in the most unfair way possible. That sounds like a description of hell to me. I would beg for death in such a universe.
Of course, what you actually mean is that you shouldn't care about fairness so much, you shouldn't "bend yourself out of shape" over it. Getting skipped over for a promotion isn't nearly as bad as burning in hell, obviously. If you don't whine about unfairness and instead just focus on your work, you might end up getting that promotion soon after anyways. In other words, it can be valuable to trade a little unfairness for a lot of "good stuff" (whatever exactly that means in the situation).
I think this might be true, but it sets a really bad precedent. The issue is not accepting unfairness when it is happening to you, but when it is happening to someone else. Imagine telling a coworker who thinks that they're being discriminated against due to their race that they should "accept the unfairness and just deal with reality". IMO they should NOT just learn to accept that. It is deeply unfair and unjust and cannot be worth whatever you get by being quiet.
Finally, it's definitely not how "everything" or even only all businesses work. There are plenty of businesses that are doing their best to promote fairly and honestly, it's just a really hard problem to solve. Maybe unfairness will always find a way to creep back in, that doesn't mean that you should just blindly accept it.
But not always… when you’re the shepherd you should spend emotional energy on fairness. But when you’re the sheep you should not. When you’re the sheep you give a little BAaaa and then move on.
The key is knowing which moments in life you’re the shepherd and which ones you’re the sheep.
Wigs are an option, although I'd be more inclined to own it and lean into it, shaving it outright. I'm not bald yet, but hair loss runs in the family, so I'll likely be dealing with this at some point. Skin care becomes important - sunscreen will help keep skin smooth and ward off UV damage over the long term. I worry somewhat about self inflicted scar tissue from the exuberance of my youth, but I'll dynamte that bridge when I get to it.
> glasses
Contacts or lasik may be an option. While my vision is good, I get nasty migranes from squinting too hard in the sunlight, so I keep a pair of sunglasses glued to my face most of the time.
> Life gets a lot better once one accepts and deals with reality and stops getting wrapped around the axle about fairness.
Life gets a lot better if one is forewarned, and knows what they're getting into - when one has agency and choice about the tradeoffs they make, and can embrace their choices, fair or not, with both eyes open. While you're right to warn against obsessing over fairness, karaterobot certainly didn't appear to be obsessing so. In that context of replying, intended or not, your words can come across as a suggestion to discourage - if not outright ignore - the topic of fairness and it's consideration. This is a great recipe for getting taken advantage of - fucked over through apathy or ignorance when you didn't need to be, through failure to advocate for oneself or for those whom one cares about - and this is unlikely to make life better at all, and which is what I suspect what some people are reacting to.
Neither extreme - obsession with fairness, nor utter apathy towards it - are particularly great. It's fine to embrace and accept what can't be helped - but it's also fine to acknowledge, be aware, and perhaps even fight to fix what can be helped.
Proper diet, sleep, stretching, and exercise can apparently still add an inch or two for an adult. While it's perhaps not much, it's not nothing either, and perhaps worthwhile for the other health, mood, and quality of life benefits anyways. Before 25, it's even more critical - malnutrition can make those with even the tallest-trending genetics short, lack of physical exercise can reduce the amount of growth hormones your body generates, and even generally "good" diets can be missing some nutrients. Platform shoes are also a thing, although quite possibly counter-productive if seen as "overcompensating," as fucked up as that might be. Perhaps worth experimenting with to see how much the extra height helps - or doesn't help. Perhaps on your next vacation, if you're worried about how it'd come across to your social circle. People aren't the same height everywhere across the globe, either, if you want to see what being relatively taller might mean.
Because this is all predicated on height being both the problem and the solution - and that's almost certainly too simple. Money, fame, intelligence, kindness, confidence, wit, good humor, bad humor - there are many ways to win hearts and minds, and different things will work on different people. Some of those are easier to improve upon than others, and what's easy for who varies. Nobody has every advantage, and everyone has their weaknesses.
And while I'm incredibly hesitant to recommend any kind of serious surgical procedure for "cosmetic" purpouses - with all the potential risks and costs - limb lengthening surgery is a thing. At the very least, I'd experiment with some of the options involving fewer knives before considering surgery, to see just how much the extra height would help, and verify - or refute - if the "benefit" would be worth doing all of that.
Working on excellent posture can add an inch.
Sarcasm should beget sarcasm, yet grief should beget earnest sympathy, and there's maybe some 1% chance I'm being entirely too uncharitable and you're being earnest all the way through, not taking the piss out of me at all, which would imply your dad is dying, not dead, yet without any mention of under what circumstances. Yet something so nausiatingly generic as to cover all that - perhaps "I'm sorry for your struggles" - feels like it would come off as insincere.
> who do you suggest I take the issue up with to get the unfairness resolved?
There are plenty of people one can try to blame for those whom have died. God, the medical system, the political system that created the medical system, the society that created that political system, the insurance companies that failed to step up and meet their contractual obligations, the people whose negligence or malice lead towards death... and while trials, wrongful death lawsuits, insurance payouts, holding people accountable, and social safety nets - won't make one whole - and won't make things fair - they can at least make things a little less horrifically unfair. Or, if improvements are made, can make things a little fairer for the next victim of life. But I doubt you would be asking your question, sarcastically or not, if there was someone so easy and convenient to blame - or even scapegoat. It would lose it's biting edge.
Another benefit is that no one has a clue how old I am. No gray hair or receding hairline if you cut it off.
Kidnap, restrain and shave the competition. Make the whole world bald!
The best advice I can give is to be invaluable to your management and your company. Seek out and take advantage of the higher profile opportunities so you can gain the exposure you need for your career.
Hah yeah but this is just the reality of ML. "Engineer who only codes up awesome new ML algorithms" isn't a real job. For every 1 person coming up with exciting new algorithms, there's 500 people dealing with data pipelines, cleaning, maintenance, and operations. A while ago I got hired by a large SF tech company as a "machine learning engineer" and my team spent nearly all of their time writing Javascript web wrappers on top of scikitlearn. Thrilling stuff.
I've done this with mixed results as far as career satisfaction goes.
To be honest, getting pigeon-holed isn't always a conscious choice and once you realize that's what happened it's really hard to make a transition out of it. Sometimes the best approach is to play the cards you've been dealt.
As long as one does work which is personally meaningful, intellectually challenging, and which pays "enough" and has some stability, that all makes the sting of status-envy less of a bitter pill to swallow.
On the other hand there's no shortage of obsessively status-focused people out there. There's a guy on youtube whose channel is all about getting promoted at FAANG's, specifically, Amazon. That's it. Just practical deadpan advice on getting to "L7" (https://www.youtube.com/c/ALifeEngineered). I guess it's fine if that's what one _really_ wants out of life, but it seems like a recipe for profound meaninglessness for almost everybody.
This is unfair to DEs, not to mention inaccurate as of 2022. The statement assumes DEs are yearning to do "real ML" while suffering in their "data job" and waiting for a chance to move "upwards". Data engineering is a terminal career path by itself which may or may not support a dedicated ML function. In fact many of my DE colleagues switched from DS/ML/DL citing "model fatigue".
Now, "ML engineers" spending 90% of their time producing a workable dataset to get to the "real ML" is a different discussion.
Performance counts for 10% of your career progression; Image counts for 30%, Exposure for 60%.
Obviously whoever came up with this adage plucked the numbers out of thin air, but the point stands.
First search hit on duckduckgo for your convenience: https://arrowheadconsulting.com/2021/02/24/the-p-i-e-theory-...
At big tech the unsexy areas are the money makers. Everyone wants to work on the money losing parts. It's not actually clear to me which is better for a career.
Your observation that doing the dirty work makes me invaluable for the team but has been really bad for my career is 100% correct. I've had this role for about 4 years and I wish I'd understood this earlier. I've been trying to leave for a few months now. The fact that I work in a profit center doesn't make your observation any less true.
As a corollary also do the same in Personal life. You want to be chasing the 10x gain things. Not regular stuff.
In the days of the old this used to be called Do not sweat the small stuff.
>>Yes, it makes no sense, and it's not rational nor fair, but that's how business often works.
It is perfectly fair. If you were constructing a new building by definition its likely to have more life and last long than maintaining an older building. No matter how heroic your efforts maintaining the latter are.
Ideally work on something the CEO or another bigwig has passion for and understands to some degree.
I’d say the hardest part of that advice is the identifying where you want to go and when you’re there, then allowing yourself to simply enjoy it rather than seeking the next thing. It’s easy to overshoot if you’re ambitious. I’m at the point of having overshot personally and trying to figure out how to walk my career backwards to where I was happiest.
You want to be as close as possible to critical aspects of big money.
I automate jobs. But my company sells products. Is that profit?
It seems like a cost, but we eliminate head count.
Hmm saying it out loud. We make profit, just not revenue.
The best of career growth advice I've seen work consistently is: be working on a profit center rather than a cost center.
You can be the best employee in the world, but if you're on an unsexy, money-losing area of business, you will likely watch people get promoted around you, because they worked on the thing that gets all the attention. Doesn't matter if their contribution to the success was insignificant, or that the one project was necessary for the other to succeed. It's just the halo effect of being on a winning team that does it. Yes, it makes no sense, and it's not rational nor fair, but that's how business often works.