Comment by superhuzza
1 year ago
Refusing to accept a culture of optics is tantamount to not understanding optics though. The reality is that if you work on any kind of product, optics do matter - the perception of something working is often just as important as it actually working.
It can't possibly be "just as important" - in some cases, I will accept "almost as important", but any situation where the optics are "it works" and the reality is "it doesn't work" is eventually going to come crashing down on someone's head.
If it doesn't need to work, then it doesn't matter and the optics also don't matter. Of course, it might be more important for your promotion that the optics are correct, no matter what the ground reality is, and the crash could come down on someone else's head instead of yours, but in this scenario someone who is against a culture of optics rather has a point.
Definitely just as important.
If you shipped and nobody important enough knows, then you haven't shipped in the eyes of the most important people.
I'm the first person to agree with you that it sucks that optics are important. But they are. You can definitely ship shit with great optics and get a promotion and be far away before that shit hits the fan.
But if you ship the greatest thing since sliced bread and nobody notices, then you might as well not have shipped at all.
Lots of things are popularity contests. It’s very difficult to escape when you’re in it, but they always fizzle out, leaving remarkably little behind. Your promotion at Enron has no meaning today, but at least the little string parsing library you wrote may still be in use and someone is happy about it, decades later.
The point is that your impact isn’t defined by a McKinsey trained head of HR who gamified a career ladder for you, or the opinion of “important people”. In fact, what impact means depends on where and (crucially) when you measure it.
Some professions have longer reward cycles than a human lifetime. Great writers, artists and thinkers are often recognized posthumously. Doesn’t mean everyone should write poems, but we shouldn’t exacerbate a culture where you’re useless if you can’t charm your closest mediocre middle manager. Life is more.
2 replies →