[bogrollben]

Work hard, don't be a jerk and you'll be fine.

A lot of ambition these days is misplaced in my opinion. Why don't you try crossing over some of these diversified interests? Some very interesting things can happen when you mix disparate interests and before you know it, you could be one of the authorities in something new.

Or if not, then at the very least just keep being a great employee. There's plenty of room in tech for people that are consistently good but average. Remember "average" means you're already better than half the people! Rockstars are way overrated but they get all the attention. Don't buy the hype. Right now in tech (and the economy in general - speaking of the US here), employers would give their right arm just for a solid worker that shows up consistently and on-time. Showing up is half the battle.

Also maybe lean into the boredom a little. Sometimes boredom can be a great motivator into doing something different, wacky or new.

[akudha]

Work hard, don't be a jerk and you'll be fine.

This doesn’t always work. I have seen plenty of assholes easily climb the ladder, make tons of money while good people are stuck.

Example: A guy was making 60k, his employer spent tens of thousands on tuition so he could get MBA from a world class school. He took a new job a month after getting his MBA, doubling his salary. That is just one example, I have seen more. One of my CTOs mistreated nearly everyone, still kept failing forward. I’ve seen sexist and racist people at top positions. And so on.

This is not to say that one shouldn’t be nice, but to set the expectation that being nice automatically brings rewards. It does not work that way always.

[saltcured]

I don't think "don't be a jerk and you'll be fine" demands an inverse "be a jerk and you won't be fine". It shouldn't matter if other people succeed even "without merit". AFAICT, none of your scenarios of a jerk explain why someone who is not a jerk cannot also get along fine.

If you define your success as relative to others, and if this sort of "undeserved success" bothers you, then I would say you do have a competitive streak. Seeing everything as a zero-sum game is a very competitive outlook.

[delaynomore]

Well, his employer should've increased his salary accordingly. Frankly, I don't think that's an example of the guy "being a jerk".

[rewgs]

> Remember "average" means you're already better than half the people!

Well, no. It just means you're part of the bell curve. Which is probably around 60 to 90% of people.

[sorry_outta_gas]

> Remember "average" means you're already better than half the people

not really

[marifjeren]

I disagree. Job performance is believed to follow either a symmetric normal distribution or an L shaped distribution. In either case, the mean is either very close to or greater than the median.

See e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-6570....

[jshorty]

> We conducted 5 studies involving 198 samples including 633,263 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and amateur and professional athletes.

It seems tough to take anything meaningful from that study, based on the job types it examined, and the tiny percentage of the workforce those jobs represent. Working in tech our job responsibilities are often quite fuzzy and performance is difficult to quantify.

PDF of article: http://www.hermanaguinis.com/PPsych2012.pdf