8 Career Tips That Don’t Require Competence

A few weeks ago, I posted my spin on the MacLeod Hierarchy and promised to follow up with a post addressing the kind of vacuous, non-strategic career advice that is often given in Buzzfeed sorts of formats.  I started, then, to type this post, but realized that a bridge of sorts was needed.  So I indulged a digression wherein I described the corporate idealist that typically solicits and follows this sort of advice.  (That post also became pretty popular, with a number of requests to pre-order my upcoming book, which you can now check out here on leanpub).  Now, having described the corporate idealist and his willingness to overwork in exchange for useless status tokens, I can go on to be clearer about why so much of the career advice that you tend to hear is so, well, frankly, dumb.

I started to write this just from anecdotal experience, including various comical, ham-fisted self promotion attempts that I’ve watched over the years.  But then I thought it’d make more sense to go out, do some research, and synthesize my experience with actual advice offered in these “Linkbait for Idealist” articles.  This is a list of the ones that I read as reference material.  (As an aside, I also stumbled across a few that offered fairly sensible, decent advice for how to advance meaningfully, so it is actually possible to find advice that isn’t silly)

• 12 Ways to Advance Your Career in 5 Minutes or Less
• 10 Proven Ways to Impress Your Boss
• How to Fast Track Your Way Up the Corporate Ladder (this one from Forbes is actually amazing because every point but one is complete drivel, and the one that isn’t encourages opportunism and essentially contradicts every other point… “work 90 hours, dress up, ape your boss, be a team player,blah, blah blah, but act like a free agent, too.”  This seriously might be the worst piece on career advice I’ve ever seen.  It’s epic.)
• Work Your Way up the Corporate Ladder
• 10 Tips for Moving up the Corporate Ladder (this one’s not the worst on the whole, but it does have the very worst (and, for illustrative purposes, best) bullet I saw: “avoid being too smart.”  Yeah, idealist, leave that for the opportunist — just wear your collared shirt, put in your 60 hour week, and don’t hurt yourself over-thinking this stuff.)
• Moving Up the Ladder

Read More

Lifting the Curse of Knowledge

public ActiveProduct(Product product, StringVersion driver, Side es)
{
    Side = es;

    try
    {
        if (product == null)
            throw new Exception("Can't create an active product from a null product");

        Logger.LogTimeStudyStart("ActiveProduct create");

        if (driver.IsEmpty())
            CurrentDriver = product.Driver;
        else
            CurrentDriver = driver;

        _Device = Session.Instance.DeviceManager.CreateHI(es, CurrentDriver.ToString());
        _Device.ConnectionStatus += Device_ConnectionStatus;
        _Device.BatteryStatus += Device_BatteryStatus;
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        ExceptionHandler.HandleException(ex);
        throw ex;
    }
    finally
    {
        Logger.LogTimeStudyEnd("ActiveProduct create", "ActiveProduct: Creating " + driver);
    }

    State = ActiveProductState.Simulated;
    Environments = new SortedList<string, Environment>();
    this._Product = product;
    _Options = product.AvailableOptions;
    AvailablePrograms = new ProgramSlots(this) { HIStartIndex = 0 };
    AccessoryPrograms = new ProgramSlots(this) { CanRemoveOverride = true, StartIndex = 4, IsAutoShifting = false };
    VirtualPrograms = new ProgramSlots(this) { IsVirtual = true, CanRemoveOverride = true, SlotConfig = Limit.None };
    SlotCalculator = new ProgramCalculator(this, false);
    VirtualCalculator = new ProgramCalculator(this, true);
    DFS = new DFSCalibration(this);
    Accessories = new Accessories();
    PowerBands = PowerBands.Unknown;
}

As most of you know, one of the biggest anti-patterns when you’re instantiating program slots is to forget to set CanRemoveOverride to true. But what you probably didn’t know was that the SlotConfig is — Just kidding. I lifted this from a post I wrote almost 3 years ago about legacy code I was working with then. I have little more idea than you do what any of that means.

Read More