What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?
Here, mid to big company ULPT. I&#x27;ll never let my name be next to this:<p>- <i>Get a reputation as a guy who wears everything on his sleeve</i>. You fucked up? You&#x27;re going to say &quot;I fucked up. Give me a chance to fix it. Thanks for your help so far. If you can find the time, I&#x27;d appreciate if you could also help me with Y&quot;. Likewise &quot;this is fucking retarded&quot; if you see something fucking retarded. Use the word &#x27;fuck&#x27;. People love &quot;straight talkers&quot; and people especially love the kind who swear because they see them as honest people. Don&#x27;t use it in an angry manner, more in an obvious bemusement at the state of the world. It&#x27;s fucking retarded that some machine has a locale different from the rest and we forgot to specify the character encoding for bytes to string so that machine misinterprets UTF-8. No individual is fucking retarded. You&#x27;re not pointing fingers at anyone but the universe for this having happened. Then you fix it. Rarely, but at crucial moments, exploit this with lies.<p>- <i>Always try to punch above your weight</i>. Your organization is in shambles. The new product isn&#x27;t taking off, your boss is leaving, your boss&#x27;s boss is leaving. You&#x27;re asked to take over your boss&#x27;s responsibilities. No one else wants this. They can&#x27;t guarantee success. Take it. Take your boss&#x27;s boss&#x27;s job if he&#x27;s gone. If they&#x27;re hesitant, use words like &#x27;interim&#x27; and &#x27;acting&#x27;. People suck at firing and you can always Marissa Mayer your way through (&quot;the patient was dying; it&#x27;s a wonder I kept them alive this long&quot;). This is all opportunity.<p>- <i>When you do the extra thing, make it visible</i>. Someone fucked up and your site is dropping a fifth of traffic. You were planning on taking it easy that weekend: drop some acid, go with your friends to listen to Lane 8, maybe go home with a girl you met there. Don&#x27;t do it. Instead fix the site but make it visible. Tell your boss, &quot;I&#x27;m going to take a couple of days off. Last weekend really finished me off.&quot;. Make sure you make everyone look good, updates all the time on company Slack. &quot;Oh shit, turns out our health check didn&#x27;t detect this condition for one of our five servers. <i>That&#x27;s</i> what it was!&quot; See, no blame, &quot;we&quot; made the mistake. Then put in a protective layer around that. Improve the health check <i>and</i> take the server out. Now go have some fun. Do this early and you&#x27;ll get a reputation as a hero. Live off of it.<p>- <i>Always be bold</i>. Make strong assertions. Then back them up. If you&#x27;re convinced of the opposite of your original assertions, correct it as soon as possible. Go back to the guys you told the wrong thing to, uncorrect them clearly. &quot;Guys, I fucked up. There&#x27;s an edge case where JSON isn&#x27;t valid YAML and we hit it&quot;. No one is making a decision on a particular engineering problem and the meeting is drawing to a close? Use the words &quot;All right, looks like we don&#x27;t have much time here but I think it&#x27;ll be useful to leave with a default option just so we can scope future discussions. How about we consider X our default&quot;. No one&#x27;s even going to fight you on that. If they do, they&#x27;re forcing indecision.<p>- <i>Make others look good</i>. They made a mistake? No, <i>we</i> did. Sometimes maybe it was even <i>you</i> who failed to spot the mistake. Together, you all made something nice? No, <i>they</i> made something nice. They&#x27;ll be obligated to say &quot;Yeah, I only did X, you did all the Y&quot;. Accept that with grace.<p>- <i>Be likable</i>. Dress nicely. Be friendly. Be unassailable, for instance: Curmudgeonly coworker makes a disparaging remark about your code? If it&#x27;s right, don&#x27;t silently eat it with a &quot;Addressed comments&quot;. Hit them with the &quot;Thanks for the detailed review. Made the changes requested. By the way, also found article X that describes a general principle for this&quot;. Positively framed. You retain your dignity and portray security (irrespective of how insecure you are). In software, people <i>adore</i> &quot;plucky guy who learns&quot; because they imagine that he&#x27;ll be good at the asymptote. Exploit it.<p>- <i>Stick your neck out in low-risk situations</i>. Some dude in Sales wants a quick feature and the cost is going to be felt by an engineer far in the future? Do it, even if you have to do extra hours. Then coast on your reputation as a doer. Someone else will pay the price. You can double down by &quot;I don&#x27;t think we should generally do it, but if it will really help I can do it but it&#x27;ll take me some work. I need you to not go tell all the other sales guys that I did this, though&quot;. They&#x27;ll tell the other sales guys that you do things but not what. Perfect. Now in their heads those guys think you made magic.