A sales person that consistently hits quota is useful. A rainmaker that keeps bringing in million dollar deals is valuable.
First, what you are describing in this comment sounds very much to me like following the adage "be loyal to people, not companies", and to that I totally agree. It's definitely critical in your career to build trust and relationships with folks you work with, and be dependable.
But for an example of why I think this "useful" vs. "valued" framing is wrong, I can think of a colleague at a previous company who I think was great at her role - she was a relatively junior (i.e. a couple years of experience) front end developer. She was responsive, implemented features well, and always demoed her work well and was extremely prepared. People also loved working with her - she was friendly, had very little ego, and had an almost disarming way of interacting with folks that would instantly defuse tensions on her team. I would work with her again in a heartbeat, and she was a great addition to her team.
At the same time, after working with her a while it became clear that her developer skills were limited. She was a great taskmaster, but the didn't have a great "systems-wide" way of thinking. She would implement features as requested, but when she would give demos I remember there were a bunch of times that there were semi-obvious questions ("Wait, how would the user get to screen A if they click button B first?") that she didn't bring up beforehand and did't consider in her implementations. I could trust her to implement individual components and screens, but I couldn't really say "Here's a description of the user problem, and the general direction we want to go in - how would you solve this?"
So if you asked me, I would say this person was a very valued person on her team. In her role, I think she was great. But I also don't think I'd expect her to perform well if she was asked to go in more "strategic and ambitious directions", as taken from the article.
“People don’t remember who went to grab drinks on a Tuesday, but they’ll remember who helped them close a million dollar deal and get a huge bonus”
Give your coworkers superpowers and opportunities will flow.
Outside of sales and senior leadership I don't agree with this statement. Maybe it is just because I've reached a time in my life where I could care less about the hustle and just want a job where it can solve interesting problems for no more than 8 hours a day. And then get home to my family.
For ladder climbers sure, but at some point relationships are more important than dollars. (As long as you have a enough to live of course).
And if you are struggling to make ends meet and you get a pat on a back for deal support, that feels more exploitive than anything else. Yay, I helped make someone else money.
Being a highly productive, easy to work with, solution oriented coworker is a super power in it's own right.
Sure. Who do you have a better relationship with: That engineer who drops everything they're doing to come help you with a gnarly bug when asked, or the dude who's always at happy hour but nowhere to be seen when you need something?
On the other end, there can be helpful but quiet people who makes me feel like I invaded their space when I ask a question.
Closing that million dollar deal as a sprint might be memorable, but being the go-to configurator for Azure cloud services isn't, and the difference between heroic level systems management and mediocre button clicker requires hard squinting if you're non-technical. Hell, I'm technical and would struggle to tell the difference just because IT isn't usually my domain.
And if the person you're working with has no appreciation of what an average performance is, any mistake will be seen as a defect even if what you're doing is otherwise heroic.
Meanwhile, I still do remeber the coworkers I viewed as helpful, or even just generous and friendly.
Yeah. I've seen a lot of ICs get stuck at the "senior developer" level rather than progressing to team lead, staff/principal eng, etc because they were too focused on being useful, by cranking through Jira tickets and features, rather than thinking strategic and higher level. This is a totally fine career choice, but there's only so far that "coding better and faster" can take you.
The counterintuitive part is increasing your valuableness often reduces your usefulness. As a mundane example, in early stage startups there may be one engineer who handles production deployments, schema migrations, and on-call duties. This is extremely useful! For this engineer to increase their value, however, they'll want to automate production deployments, teach others how to run schema migrations, and set up on-call alerting and schedules. By doing this, they become less useful, since others can now do their work, but more valuable, since they've been able to delegate responsibilities.
It really doesn't matter how much strategic thinking you do if nobody cares.
An engineer who does their job so well that they reduce everyone's workload by automating things and showing others how to do some of their tasks doesn't become less useful; in fact just the opposite, since presumably they will continue to need to do this as the landscape changes and not everybody will have their advanced knowledge of how to efficiently organize things at a high level.
> Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler, someone who delivers on tasks that have to be done but are not necessarily a core component of the company strategy.
I take this to mean "usefulness" is: you have a tactical role in the company, where you are able to perform necessary tasks. If you can perform them with little supervision, you are very useful.
However, "value" is eliminating those gaps entirely. Instead of being the on-call person who fixes every issue, which is undeniably useful, you fix the root causes so those issues don't happen. This does make you less useful, by definition, because fewer on-call issues means there's fewer reasons to keep you around. But assuming you also do an ok job of communicating what you've done, and your bosses aren't totally clueless, people will recognize this as valuable. The fact that you were able to identify a systemic issue and address it is what makes you valuable, and it will get you invited into broader technically strategic discussions. In theory, at least.
Again these are just my interpretation of useful vs valuable as far as the article's definition. I don't agree with the terms in a broader sense.
Who I have I seen that is more valued? H1B hires (QA > SW developer) and middle management. Even break room legal notices prove the former.
That's an entirely different set of metrics than determining "value". Being valuable means being a trusted strategic voice to some portion of the leadership, and being recognized for contributions that go beyond (horizontally or diagonally) the employee's job description. In many cases, this value = trust relationship is evidenced by how frequently senior managers bring former employees with them when joining new firms, or how small & tight knit the community is for specialty roles/functions.
Lots of fresh grads and junior staff focus 99% on being useful, but career advancement beyond the first one or two promotions depends MUCH more on being valued.