Category: Career

Posted on

Surprising danger of being good at your job – Business Insider

All that leads to a problem: High-self-control people feel more burdened by their work relationships than their less-disciplined peers. They sacrifice more for the coworkers, the researchers found, even when those sacrifices come at the expense of their own goals. And that same dynamic plays out in romantic relationships. Being reliable is draining.Which doesn’t mean go-getters should stop go-getting. The benefits of high self-control still far outweigh the costs.But managers (and coworkers and romantic partners) should take note: If you take those high-self-control people for granted, you may risk losing them. While relying on go-getters might be a good short-term strategy — they’ll get stuff done — in the long run, Koval suggests, they “might become dissatisfied with this burden we’re placing on them.”Accordingly, it’s essential to recognize them for their (probably underestimated) efforts. They need to feel “a return on the effort they’re putting in,” she says.

Source: Surprising danger of being good at your job – Business Insider
 
 

Posted on

4 undeniable signs that it's time to quit your job

1. You’re too stressed and exhausted, it’s on a different level
While “stress” may be relative to each one of us, there will be jobs that are clearly beyond the workload you were expecting. You feel tired every day, and you dread waking up in the morning because you know what’s ahead of you, and it’s usually not good.
“Hey, you look tired,” says your college friend, who meets you on a Friday night for drinks. The litmus test to knowing if you’re too exhausted from your job is when people start noticing it – physically.
You get sick easily, you have adjusted to 4-5 hours of sleep everyday (heard of the Indian CEO who died, despite this deliberate lifestyle?), and you’re either losing weight (for not ingesting much proper food) or gaining some more (because of stress eating).
All the work stress is not worth it if you’re going to end up in the hospital anyway.
You may be one of those who are happily tired—folks who love their job and are addicted to the everyday adrenaline rush no matter how many items they cross off their list. But you may also be one of those who are simply tired because the demands are just too much, whether quantitatively or qualitatively.
Unfortunately, this is when you might have underestimated the job description before signing that contract or an organizational change burdened you to do more work. If you painfully think that you deserve (and can find elsewhere) a job that is more manageable and suited to your lifestyle, then you should seriously consider moving out.
Remember that your role in this world is to live a life through a job, not end it with one.
via 4 undeniable signs that it’s time to quit your job.

Posted on

Larry Page, Sergy Brin Are Lousy Coders – Business Insider

It turns out the developers most responsible for building the Google.com that quickly became the Web’s most powerful company are two guys you’ve probably never heard of.
The first is Urs Hözle. According to one early Googler quoted by Edwards, Hözle was “the key” to Google’s early success.
Edwards writes, “Enough engineers sang his praises that this book could have been written entirely as a hagiography of Saint Urs, Keeper of the Blessed Code.”
The second is Jeff Dean. Edwards writes that “Jeff pumped out elegant code like a champagne fountain at a wedding.”
“It seemed to pour from him effortlessly in endless streams that flowed together to form sparkling programs that did remarkable things. He once wrote a two-hundred-thousand-line application to help the Centers for Disease Control manage specialized statistics for epidemiologists. It’s still in use and garners more peer citations than any of the dozens of patented programs he has produced in a decade at Google. He wrote it as a summer intern in high school.”
via Larry Page, Sergy Brin Are Lousy Coders – Business Insider.

Posted on

Quit Your Job – The Atlantic

My friends sometimes approach me with career anxieties, under the false impression that writing about economics makes somebody a good career advisor. My counsel is typically something like optimistic incrementalism. Don’t quit your job, mastery comes with time, job satisfaction comes with mastery… that sort of stuff.
When the same friends ask my roommate, an entrepreneur building a financial services app, they’re whiplashed with radical optimism. Get the hell out of there! Quit if you have to! You’ll be happier doing just about anything else!
I never said it outright, but I assumed that my cautious approach was more responsible, even if it seldom proved more inspirational. But according to a new study of youth unemployment by economists Martin Gervais, Nir Jaimovich, Henry Siu, and Yaniv Yedid-Levi, my incrementalist advice, while appropriate for the worst periods of the Great Recession, isn’t so great, overall.
Instead, there is what you might call a “dream-job premium.” Jumping between jobs in your 20s, which strikes many people as wayward and noncommittal, improves the chance that you’ll find more satisfying—and higher paying—work in your 30s and 40s.
via Quit Your Job – The Atlantic.

Posted on

The unbearable B-ness of software | Michael O. Church

I’m not Jack Welch’s biggest fan. For one thing, he invented the “rank-and-yank” HR policies that literally decimate companies. I don’t disagree with the idea that companies would improve their health by letting go 5-10 percent of their people per year, but I think the discovery process involved is impossible and often politically toxic. There is, however, one thing he’s said that I think has a lot of value: “A players hire A players; B players hire C players“. His point is that if you have mediocre management, you’ll actually end up with terrible employees. I would say it’s not limited to hiring only. A players make more A players. They teach each other how to be better. Not only that, but they raise the potential for what an A player can do. B players don’t have the foresight or “ownership” mentality to mentor others, and produce non-productive C players.
via The unbearable B-ness of software | Michael O. Church.

Posted on

VC-istan 8: the Damaso Effect | Michael O. Church

A fun article. I also think that we have a similar effect in some of the people who go back home. Although we have the heroes who go back out of real love for the Philippines we also have the Damaso kind who just can’t hack it overseas and returns home to tell people who never left they are beneath him on some aspects. I am actually thinking of a specific person from one of our clients.
 

JANUARY 5, 2014 BY MICHAELOCHURCH
VC-istan 8: the Damaso Effect
Padre Damaso, one of the villains of the Filipino national novel, Noli me Tangere, is one of the most detestable literary characters, as a symbol of both colonial arrogance and severe theological incompetence. One of the novel’s remarks about colonialism is that it’s worsened by the specific types of people who implement colonial rule: those who failed in their mother country, and are taking part in a dangerous, isolating, and morally questionable project that is their last hope at acquiring authority. Colonizers tend to be people who have no justification for superior social status left but their national identity. One of the great and probably intractable tensions within the colonization process is that it forces the best (along with the rest) of the conquered society to subordinate to the worst of the conquering society. The total incompetence of the corrupt Spanish friars in Noli is just one example of this.
In 2014, the private-sector technology world is in a state of crisis, and it’s easy to see why. For all our purported progressivism and meritocracy, the reality of our industry is that it’s sliding backward into feudalism. Age discrimination, sexism, and classism are returning, undermining our claims of being a merit-based economy. Thanks to the clubby, collusive nature of venture capital, to secure financing for a new technology business requires tapping into a feudal reputation economy that funds people like Lucas Duplan, while almost no one backs anything truly ambitious. Finally, there’s the pernicious resurgence of location (thanks to VCs’ disinterest in funding anything more than 30 miles away from them) as a career-dominating factor, driving housing prices in the few still-viable metropolitan areas into the stratosphere. In so many ways, American society is going back in time, and private-sector technology is a driving force rather than a counterweight. What the fuck, pray tell, is going on? And how does this relate to the Damaso Effect?
via VC-istan 8: the Damaso Effect | Michael O. Church.

Posted on

Are Your Employees Quitting YOU?

I’m surprised by the quality of post on linkedin.
Google+ -> Awesome Pics and Tech Community
Facebook -> Vacation/Baby/Wedding Pics
Linkedin -> Career Related Stuff.
 
This is so true. A lot of people quit because they feel nobody s listening.

 
You may have heard the phrase before, or maybe this is the first time. Employees don’t quit their job, they quit their boss. It’s a favourite of mine because it’s packed with truth.
Think about it. When you’ve made moves in your career was it because of the job itself or a bad leader? It was the ol’ ball and chain, I suspect. (I do understand there are times when employees move on because they are faced with the opportunity of a lifetime, but in my experience this is the exception, not the rule.)
In my first HR job I had a heavy recruitment component to my role. I have to admit that after recruiting full time for 1+ years I was ready for a change. But I didn’t make the switch because of this alone. No, it was largely due to my manager. She wasn’t a horrible person but she lacked management experience and over time I decided she wasn’t someone I wanted to spend time with. So I moved on.
Could something have been done that would have kept me there longer? The answer is yes. Even though I was hitting the end of my learning curve with my existing duties there were other responsibilities I could have been exposed to. Plus it was a growing business so there would have been other opportunities down the road for growth and learning.
For those of you that are wondering if I left for more money, the answer is no. For a junior role, I was paid a pretty penny. I made more at that job than I did at my next two jobs. But I still left. The money wasn’t enough to hold me there. Nine times out of ten, when an employee says they’re leaving for more money, it’s simply not true. It’s just too uncomfortable to tell the truth.
So, what can be done?
via Are Your Employees Quitting YOU?.

Posted on

rePost :: ::Why Engineers Hop Jobs

Well I’m as unreliable, lazy, and entitled as the next guy, but that’s not why I’ve hopped jobs in the past. People in my generation have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and software engineering, in general, is a very high bullshit career. If you couple that with the standard load of bullshit you would get from a non-technical Harvard MBA type boss — like many CEOs that you find trying to get rich in Silicon Valley by hiring some engineers to “code up this idea real quick” — it’s no wonder that a good engineer will walk off the job after his one year cliff vesting.
As an engineer, you are told that you’re “lucky to have a job”, because there are “a hundred people lined up outside, ready to take it”. (As chance would have it, there are at least a thousand lined up to take the job of rich prick who tells people what to do). This backlash is the product of diseased thinking. A CEO who makes an engineer work 80 hours a week is a driven entrepreneur, but an engineer asking for a comfy chair is a prima donna. So, when we are up to our knees in golf-course, martini-lunch bullshit, don’t be surprised when we jump ship for a higher salary.
via Why Engineers Hop Jobs.

Posted on

rePost :: Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews – WSJ.com

soo true.

It’s time to finally put the performance review out of its misery.
This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who’s evaluated hates it. It’s a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus.

And yet few people do anything to kill it. Well, it’s time they did.
Don’t get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect.
via Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews – WSJ.com.