Comment by Seb-C
3 months ago
What you say makes total sense. But for some personal reasons the social part of the job has always been my weak side and I'm just not interested in playing that game.
I've had fairly positive successes in the past when being a contractor. I feel like it's easier for me to have legitimacy and influence over the project that I'm doing this way.
> Lastly, make sure whatever it is you work on truly matters to the business, and understand how it ties back to the business and your customers. It can be fun (or necessary at times) to be off in the weeds on something that is technically interesting, but really unimportant to the bottom line and ultimately to advancing your career.
That's something I have also learnt from experience, and I am more often than not the one pushing for boring tech against the last fancy trends. But I have difficulties with the fact that focusing on the business means most of the time being the fastest possible, to the point that businesses would rather save 2 hours of implementation time now, even if it costs weeks of technical debt down the road.
I can try to expand on this a bit, and respond to your thoughts.
> What you say makes total sense. But for some personal reasons the social part of the job has always been my weak side and I'm just not interested in playing that game.
I don't mean to imply playing politics or empire building. I've probably capped my career in some ways by not playing into that either. However, in roles I've had, I've built up good capital by being very helpful, jumping into incidents, etc. There are ways to build that social muscle without it being negative or selfish.
> That's something I have also learnt from experience, and I am more often than not the one pushing for boring tech against the last fancy trends.
I think this is valuable, and it has worked for me as well. Though the eternal struggle of taking on debt for speed is fundamental. By building up some of the social capital and trust, I think it makes navigating these discussions easier and being able to negotiate in time for projects to do things right. That's the only way I've found this piece to be successful.