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by jvanderbot 679 days ago
You can provide a lot of value to an organization (or a leader) without finishing a single coding project. As an engineer I hate it, but I have worked for good directors and awful directors and usually the good directors do a ton of talking and bitching and moaning. But they also are fortune tellers and crystal balls and expert C-suite anthropologists that make the work valuable rather than just busy.
1 comments
pelagicAustral 679 days ago
Yeah, I mean, I get it... but, how the fuck is this the normal state of affairs?
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jvanderbot 679 days ago
It's not just normal, it's desirable. You do not want your director / C-suite guy reviewing pull requests, filing bugs, or being obsessed with code library choices. That's what you get when you endlessly promote your busy/productive code-loving IC types.

You want someone who is a naturally fluent speaker, strongly outspoken, who holds strong opinions, and wants to focus on processes and long-term roadmaps and so on. All the stuff a dilligent IC disdains.

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andrewflnr 679 days ago
That's all worthless if they don't actually have good ideas, though. And I don't believe someone who is all talk actually has good ideas. You have to be rooted in good practice.
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jvanderbot 679 days ago
If you're free to define "all talk" as "not useful" then yeah - you've created a tautology. All I'm saying is some folks that are awful to work with side by side as technologists are super useful to an org in other places.

One person's 'all talk' is another person's 'all walk'.

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andrewflnr 679 days ago
Do recall that the reference for "all talk" in this conversation was

> never wanted to take on advice, always fought on really shady grounds, but he fought everything, almost like it was either his idea of what was on-point or nothing

Yes, you can be productive through communication, but if that's the kind of "talk" you want in your C-suite then I don't want to work in any company where you have influence.

It's almost like communicating effectively requires detailed knowledge of the real world, knowledge most often and most effectively gained by... doing things.

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