this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Not an academic, but this is spot on for how I’ve felt as a top performer getting nowhere. This realization helped me reorient my aspirations to what I find truly matters to me: my family and hobbies. I’m a solid individual contributor. Over the years, my work has saved us millions and been adopted across the country, which is reward enough. The speaking engagements and schmoozing, I’ll leave that to the extroverts in the boys club.
@clearedtoland @fossilesque It makes perfect sense if you consider it. Imagine a closed system with two top performing components, where every other component is contributing to the system’s overall success. If one of these two top performers is able to connect and leverage all the other system components to amplify their work, but the other works in isolation, which is really producing more successful output when you measure the total system?
That's a pretty contrived setup. If the two top components are not factored into the performance of the whole and they are both defined by their ability to improve other components, then the one doing it's own thing is not, in fact, a top performer. It's task is to support others and it fails to do so.
And what if the loner's task is foundational? It doesn't have much direct output, but if he's gone and everything else goes to shit? Those ones are very hard to measure. I know, that's been my job for a good portion of my career. And things like that are common. Expecting a given performer, say an engineer, to also be good at public speaking has always struck me as impractical.
@maniclucky Yes, it's a contrived example. Its contrivance was to pose the point, which is:
Given two system components of comparable value, but different system impact, one still differentiates with regards to the surrounding system.
Also, given that the system itself is the body of recognition, the component with greater system impact is not only leveraged better, but also better positioned for being noticed doing it.
Also, a system can't see self-isolated participants. Not respectfully.
My problem with your example is that the loner didn't have comparable value. If it was supporting other things, then it failed. If it was doing something non obvious, it shouldn't be compared to the support. It feels fallacious, though I can't name one specifically.
System sight is itself an issue. Many companies evaluate an employee solely on some performance metric, typically tied to money. Because it's easy (and lazy).
I've had several positions where my task was to keep things running. I added no value, I prevented loss. And those positions get screwed because they're very difficult to quantify worth and very hard to see (and if it doesn't create money, they don't care). You only notice them when something goes wrong. Such an employee may keep everything running all year and get a "meets expectations" because there's an upper limit on how much contribution the system sees, and the system doesn't want to put in the effort to see better. I may have had to climb over an air handler to get to a transducer to calibrate, but that's not sexy and even if I report such effort, it's what I'm supposed to do (even if I wasn't, weekend nights are weird).
No one is going to write down "keep machine running 80% of the time" because people unassociated with the task will insist that 100% is the expectation, despite that being unreasonable.
A system built of people is not a black box. We can see them and evaluate them based on the task they're supposed to do, but the evaluators don't want to put in the effort to do their tasks in a way that means more work for them.
There's a comment to be made also about scope creep for a position so that a company doesn't have to hire marketing and engineering if they can get the engineers to do it. Despite them being suboptimal for the task. Something something down with unrestrained capitalism.
Ok. I've lost the plot at this point and made my point. Have a good one.
@maniclucky The issue I think that you're having here isn't that you're not making good points. Your points seem correct to me.
I think what's going on is that you're saying "there's nuance", and there clearly is, but I'm deliberately presenting a simple verbal model in order to be quick and to the point.
I do agree with you largely, but I think my point stands: two equal contributors to a system differentiate when just one contributor is friendlier to their host system. That becomes the edge.
What, my ~7 paragraphs isn't simple? /s
You're correct. I think I was chafing at the systems in question predisposing friendliness to mean modes that I personally am unskilled at or uncomfortable with despite my value.
@maniclucky It's chafing to me, too. I'm not very good at it, I'm sure that's kind of obvious at this point ;)
I just notice it a lot because, I guess, I wish I were better at it? Or better at being personable? But, it's so expensive for me in terms of effort, it wears me out so fast.