[fellowniusmonk]

Totally agree with everything you've said, brain train for the actual job by doing the actual job and immersing in it as thoroughly and consistently as you can, do things others find boring or difficult.

In case the author IS young, I would also add this: Stay away from startups with capricious, absentee or already wealthy founders, find the most productive, stable environment you can.

If you work in an environment where personal production and job security are orthogonal you might find yourself getting rug pulled where effort/contribution are fully decoupled from reward.

Unless you achieve financial escape velocity or end up in an increasingly rare engineering "jobs program" at a large entity, you will get rug pulled at some point due to founder/manager proclivities or due to other macro economic issues.

You are probably screwed if this happens to you young enough as it fucks up motivation, it's why among the older programmer crowd you see some former HS dropouts that started professional work way too young (in the early days of the digital revolution) for a toxic company just completely burn out and fuck up their reward circuitry (it's also part of why 2 round leukemia kids have worse longterm outcomes than 1 round or non-leukemia kids).

You want to already have experienced patterns of good faith behavior and delay your first rug pull as long as possible.

[Aurornis]

> If you work in an environment where personal production and job security are orthogonal you might find yourself getting rug pulled where effort/contribution are fully decoupled from reward.

This is a great point.

When you find yourself in a workplace where job security is based more on vibes than production it creates a false sense of security. You think your personal productivity doesn't matter and that you can vibe your way into the good graces of people making decisions.

When jobs security is decoupled from productivity, the winds of the company can and do change frequently. Other people are going to be better at playing the vibes game than you are. Vibes-based companies are overly vulnerable to politics.

It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect.

[ClumsyPilot]

> When jobs security is decoupled from productivity, the winds of the company can and do change frequently.

But that is always the case, and the "productivity=security" environment is artificial and unnatural.

The large forces beyond your control dominate the world, and the whole companies get hit by redundancies because the market changed, AI ate some section of the market, or the banks were too busy playing with mortgages and collapsed the whole global economy.

My experience indicates that it's more important to be working on the right thing, than to be super productive working on the wrong thing.

[MichaelZuo]

This seems like a tautology, by definition forces on a global scale are far beyond the average person.

If they weren’t, then they would cease to significantly affect things on such a scale.

[ClumsyPilot]

Exactly, and even beyond control of company management. In which case why is everyone so obsessed with productivity?

[tkiolp4]

> It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect.

Not in my opinion. These kind of companies ask you to give 100% of yourself every single day. This may sound normal and natural to everyone, but I don’t like it. I cannot work in an environment in which they ask me to be a high performer, and anything else is “below expectations”. It’s just not worth it.

Much better to have job (in)security detached from productivity: in any case, companies are not to be trusted, and one should be ready to switch at any moment.

[dasil003]

> Not in my opinion. These kind of companies ask you to give 100% of yourself every single day.

No, I understand can understand how someone would come away with that conclusion based on common patterns in the industry, but I think you're conflating two things.

First, companies want teams that deliver value. If evaluation is based more on vibes than actual output, that's a management failure. Its nuanced, because bad vibes can really hurt teams a lot, so it's not that vibes don't matter, but if the source of the vibes is that management is clueless and doesn't understand the pain points on the front lines, then that's the bigger issue. As a junior engineer it can be hard to distinguish, but just understand that good management exists and is out there, it's not all pointy hairs (even if the language is sometimes the same, after all pointy hairs have to cargo cult off of someone).

Second is how much a company asks of you. Once you rise up the ranks in any sizable company you'll realize an incredible amount of effort is wasted just due to the overhead of coordinating many individuals. In these types of environments it's more about focusing on the right things rather than overall effort. As Steve Jobs said, "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do". Entire teams can be net negative because no one calls out the elephant in the room. While it's true, that if you are successful in a high performance org, more will be asked of you, it's also true that good leaders value solid contributors even when they set some boundaries.

So there are really two strategies in a large org: one is to do the bare minimum and keep your head down, in that case avoiding high performing orgs is probably a good idea. But at the end of the day your entire job and career is at the mercy of the beancounters waking up one day and realizing you are dead weight. Alternatively, you can adopt a growth mentality, do your best every day, and see where it takes you. The latter path does mean you might need to set some boundaries and say no to people at times. Sure it's awkward, but in the grand scheme of things this builds a stronger network and sets you up for long-term success far better than playing defense because you see the employer-employee relationship as fundamentally adversarial. I think that worldview makes sense from a physical labor workforce, but it's really self-defeating for software engineers because at the end of the day our output is what our code does (hence every IC is "managing" the tech output), not how much time we put in creating it.

[badpun]

> It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect.

It’s best to play to your strengths. If you’re better at playing office politics than at doing the actual work, working for a company that values competence will produce subpar results for you.

[portaouflop]

I’d rather take vibes based than some artificial productivity measure. “Far from perfect” is laughable- they aren’t even close to measure anything that is rooted in reality.

I would argue that all productivity metrics are even more vibes based than just going after vibes.

[Aeolun]

> Stay away from startups with capricious, absentee or already wealthy founders, find the most productive, stable environment you can.

I don’t think this is necessarily true. The job I learned most was one where I was the only tech person working on a product that had a more or less absent founder. I had to teach myself of course, but if you are self motivated you can learn a lot there.

Just don’t expect to get rewarded for it. See it as being paid in knowledge instead of money.