Ah, the classic "work even harder and do things you're not paid for with zero guarantee that someone will appreciate what you're doing while the company reaps the benefits". What a novel thought, I am so glad I clicked the article, especially since the author isn't even speaking from experience so he has nothing to back up his blogpost with.

Listen, you don't have to do this and are free to disagree.

However, this method has worked and will continue to work. Lots of people are fine just doing their shift and leaving, that's ok. Some people are not satisfied with that and want more, and there are strategies to do more work and get paid to do so.

Both of these comments have a kernel of truth.

Yes, you must do more than average to get promoted.

But also yes, if you do more and more and don't get the rewards you want, don't just continue. Either scale back again, or modify your strategy, or apply this strategy elsewhere.

I'm seeing widely opposing takes here; my experience is that the advice is correct depending on where you are. I've worked in places where someone who works 130% is seen as company's profit. But I'm currently at a place where making an extra effort is definitely rewarded with promotions.

I've literally never gotten a promotion without taking on the additional responsibilities first. I wouldn't expect a promotion for just doing time at a company like a prison sentence. If they didn't promote me then I would have immediately moved on.

There's a matrix, with each cell being weighted differently.

Do free work. Do good work. Be liked by your superiors.

And sadly "good work" is weighted the lowest. And if you are liked enough by your superiors, that's often enough.

And you are actively disliked by your superiors, it does not matter how much work you do or how good it is. You will plateau.

And the advice is not (necessarily) "work extra, unpaid hours".

Exactly, working harder doesn’t mean putting in extra hours. It means taking on projects with larger scope, impact and ambiguity during your normal working hours

It's almost as if it depends on the context and there isn't a simplistic bumper sticker approach.

Not to diminish your skepticism, but your reply comes off jaded in a way that might be hurting you. The author's suggestion for employees seeking promotion is to operate on a higher level than they're asked to and keep operating in that fashion for a sustained window of time. Show growth, in other words.

This reads to me like you translated GP’s cynical post into something more palatable to the politically-minded. You’ve said the same thing.

They're both correct, in different contexts.

Some workplaces see people going above and beyond and reward that. Promotions come from operating at the level you want to be promoted to.

Some workplaces see it as a signal that they don't need a promotion because they can get the higher level work from you without the need to pay you more.

Know which one you're in before you decide how to approach it. If you've been there a while you should be able to figure out how things work. It's important to see how they actually work and not how you think they should work, otherwise you can end up doing a bunch of extra work for free.

It’s a lot easier just to do enough to talk the talk and get another job…

This just comes across as extraordinarily whiny.

The core of what the author is saying is true, I've experienced it myself (not a promotion, but a raise).

Taking on more than your responsibility is one way to do it, another (with some overlap) is to become indispensable.

In some cases, this means doing more work than your job entails, but not always. It can be something as simple as automating a task that someone else was doing by hand.

When you start stacking up little things that make you more valuable to the company, it's in its own best interest to find ways to keep you (via promotions, raises, benefits, etc).

There isn't a guarantee of anything here, but it definitely sets you up for success.

A thousand times more than sitting around whining that something isn't your job or that the company is being mean.

You should work harder and do things you aren’t paid for. In my 30 year experience across 10 jobs - everything from small lifestyle companies to BigTech and currently working as a staff consultant - it’s not to get a promotion at your current job, it’s to have a story to tell at your next job.

Speaking of BigTech specifically, the first company I worked for with a real promotion process that meant anything, the promo process is brutal and then you still get paid less than someone coming in at the same level.

The best bet is to get another job at another company at a higher level (or even at the same level that pays more).

Felt like AI slop. I used to do what it recommends, and it got me nowhere other than more stress and higher expectations from senior management.

I was reprimanded at three different software companies for doing exactly this, and not "staying in my lane" or "trying to do the senior person's job". So it only applies if you're already ahead of schedule on all your assigned work (difficult if they keep increasing your backlog), and the manager likes you but sees you as non-threatening, and people aren't territorial about RFCs.

Part of growing up is also knowing WHEN to do the extra, thinking about whether this will undermine people who dont like to be undermined, and then more fundamentally, what the hell am I doing in such a politically toxic place?

Its not just about going above and beyond. Its going above and beyond exactly where it will get you the best outcome and nowhere else.

The number of times I've been praised for going "above and beyond" has been absolutely dwarfed by "stay in your lane". Turns out, a lot of people don't appreciate you trying to prove you could do their job.

I mean is it not clear that companies are just an abstraction for a network of people, and you obviously must be be good with those people, ie seduce them into promoting you. And is it not clear that on the other side, you must keep your options open such that you find an alternative (job) if they are weird / toxic / dont like you / you dont like them?

Reads like of those things people post on LinkedIn.

Same. If anything it only welded me in my position, because I was just very valuable doing what I was doing. Absolutely crap advice, IMHO.

Were you simply doing more of the same or were you actually doing the job of the level above you? Those are not the same.

I tested both. None worked.

It is a little bit like “it’s not what you know, is what you can prove”: I mean: “it’s not what you do, is what the boss of your boss sees”. And I emphasize “boss of your boss” because him is who you have to impress (or somebody 2 levels above, anyway).

Also in moderately big to big companies, is all about contacts and personal marketing, which could (and typically is) orthogonal to your actual work.

> Also in moderately big to big companies, is all about contacts and personal marketing, which could (and typically is) orthogonal to your actual work.

As you go up the levels that is exactly the job (for better or worse) so doing that is doing the work at the next level. You are organizational glue that connects people and ensures your team has proper visibility. If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.

It does not have to be so, and in some companies is not so, notably the ones which thrive and meritocracy rules. Is a big fallacy to think all is politics, IMHO.

Between the most junior developer and the CTO, and all in between, is about taking good decisions, communicating clearly, and owning errors. If it is a healthy company with competent management, there is no need to make a powerpoint of every fart you shoot. Now the reality is, big companies are run typically by incompetent people with "cover your ass" mentality, with lots of internal and external corruption and nepotism. See Dilbert. It doesn't mean is the only model.

> If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.

Big no. I totally knew and saw that, clear as day. But if when the position is open the nephew of the boss'es boss is looking for a job, you are just out of luck. Also if your boss is constantly talking bad of you anytime anyone internally asks for you.

It actually worked for me, got my last promotion that way (IC -> EM)

I don’t consider a line level manager a promotion. I consider that the fifth level of hell.

The pay bump was nice, but I totally get where you're coming from. I'm actually thinking about moving back to IC

My biggest issue with line level managers is that they don’t control budgets or have any real authority - raises, promotions, etc.

I love managing initiatives - just not people. But anytime I have been bought into a company where I was responsible for major company wide strategy, I made sure I reported directly to someone with authority - a director or a CTO. It was mostly small companies.

Even now where as a staff level employee where I do report to a line level manager (who is at the same salary band as I am) who I like and respect very much, I am making sure I have visibility and the ear of my skip manager and my CTO about things I care about - without stepping on my managers toes.

It uh.. was kind of weird that a junior dev wrote.. an.. rfc? I sense that this is a company that has somewhat adapted that concept for some kind of internal communication, or it's AI slop. All the jobs I'd ever had would probably call something like that a "design proposal" or similar.

Maybe this is a folksy anecdote about a junior developer working for John Email designing the protocol for trinary morse code over a token ring of twisted pair barbed wire. An RFC for that kind of project would be natural.

In the spirit of this, I propose we start calling things like flowcharts, SVG images of digraphs, UML diagrams etc "articles of war" just to spice things up.

It says "more junior engineer on the team" which could mean senior vs stuff, or regular vs senior. At least that's how I understood it.

I've almost always been promoted by doing this. If not, I'm able to use the paid training to get another higher paying job at a different company.

after uBlocking the feed on LinkedIn the Kool Aid slop is now here as well ...

It amazes me that people nowadays know so little about piracy that this is somehow touted as a solution.

GP wasn't being serious.

I've seen this sentiment repeated enough times on reddit that I no longer can tell the difference.

GOG is no different, you're still renting licenses and GOG still has the right to revoke your license, effectively making your "offline installer" no different from a game downloaded from myabandonware or a similar website.

Pretty different, actually. You don't have to worry about possible malware, and you get to support the developers of games you like (aka "vote with your wallet"). Also even if you get your license revoked it's not such a big deal as in other stores, where in some cases they may even delete the game from your devices remotely, without warning. The offline installer is a guarantee for you as a consumer.

Malware is easy to avoid if you know where to download from and if you engage in the herculean task of uploading the .exe to something like virustotal.com in case of any doubts. Not like it matters much anyway seeing how there are examples of GOG games using cracks from the internet anyway.

Supporting developers is a weak argument considering that GOG's claim to fame is that they're selling old games where the development studio no longer exists or has been bought out by a corporate entity like EA.

Revoking my license isn't a big deal? I paid real money for the game.

The offline installer is about as much of a guarantee of anything as a pirated ISO is.

I genuinely don't understand what people think "own" means here. Downloading from Steam you "own" it in exactly the same way as if you install it from a CD: you have a license to the game. There's nothing to own in any case, unless you literally own the copyright to the game which of course you don't.

Also Steam doesn't apply any DRM unless developers add it, so backing up your Steam library folder to an external drive should be fine for your personal preservation at a platform level.

That's true, the CD is a license in the same way steam is. But practically it's different, because in many cases there's no mechanical way to revoke the license from that CD; it'll keep working after music rights expire or the game producer gets cancelled on Twitter or whatever. The game won't just evaporate like it can on steam

The main difference is that the license you get when you buy a CD is transferable, that is you can sell it to someone else when you are done with it, while Steam explicitly disallows this.

Transferable licenses create a second hand market which keeps prices in check, which of course publishers don't like at all.

You can just back it up though.

Different, because GOG provides good customer support.

In general the level of discussion here took a huge nosedive in the last few years. I know that complains about how HN is turning into reddit goes back to early 2010s but this year it really feels like stepping into /r/programming or a similarly low quality discussion forum.

Why ask here instead of the support team of X.com or whoever else is responsible for this stuff? There's no one on HN who would be able to help you with your problem.

This is a complete nonsense given I have video games with virtual currencies in them that I've purchased for real money and the currency is still sitting there well over a decade later.

I'm not accountant, but I read that explanation a lot of time.

I guess in the game, you already bought the fake-gold-coins and you can "enjoy" having them even before exchanging them for fake-bread or fake-swords or fake-whatever.

I'm not an accountant either, that also makes sense.

If instead the exchange had been of real world money for N months of prepaid subscription, that was consumed after N months had passed, that'd be a little different but also presumably quite acceptable to accountants.

Suppose the exchange had been of real world money for N months of prepaid subscription credits that could be stored indefinitely and only consumed if the player chose to actively play during a month. That might turn into an accounting nightmare if those subscription credits didn't expire (maybe cannot recognise the revenue while they are unused, becomes liability on the balance sheet).

I wonder how the accounting rules work for stuff like Eve online where there is an game consumable item (PLEX) that when consumed extends your subscription, can be traded inside the game's economy, and can be purchased with real world money

That also makes no sense given I can add real money to Steam and Steam will never "expire" that money either.

Why contribute if you have nothing to say? What even is this reply?

It could be a hard problem, no?

>What even is this reply?

I mean if you take a look at GP's username, it's arguably just tastefully subtle satire.

Anti-cheat systems in multiplayer video games. It seems like every multiplayer game out there eventually gets overrun with cheaters and that cheat developers win every time.

"Friciton" in this case is just plain old laziness and I don't think that it should be encouraged.

I think that the whole point of the discussion forum is to talk to other people, so I am in favor of banning AI replies. There's zero value in these posts because anyone can type chatgpt.com in the browser and then ask whatever question they want at any time while getting input from an another human being is not always guaranteed.

You're like the 9th out of the 10 top-level replies I've read so far that says this, with the 10th one saying it in a different way (without suggesting they could have asked it themselves). What I find interesting is that everyone agrees and nobody argues about prompt engineering, as in, nobody says it's helpful that a skilled querier shares responses from the system. Apparently there's now the sentiment that literally anybody else could have done the same without thought

Whether prompt engineering is a skill is perhaps a different topic. I just found this meta statistic in this thread interesting to observe

I do think it would be useful to normalize pasting a link to the full transcript if you’re going to quote an LLM. Both because I do find it useful to examine others’ prompting techniques, and because that gives me the context to gauge the response’s credibility.

What did we used to call it? Google-fu?

This is probably the first time I see the term "prompt engineer" mentioned this year. I though that this joke has ran its' course back in 2023 and is largely forgotten nowadays.

A silly name, but I’ve definitely watched peers coax sensible results out of braggadocious LLMs… and also watched friends say “make me an app that enters the TPS report data for me” (or “make fully playable Grand Theft Auto, but on Mars”) and be surprised that the result is trash.

Yeah, I guess that exact wording was meme of the year 2023, but have you not seen the sentiment that e.g. developers need to learn to work with LLMs or get left behind? As though it's some skill you need to acquire

Initially I was alarmed but then I've noticed that this sentiment is being repeated only in some weird places on the internet and seems to be non-existent in the job offers, so there was no real reason to give it any attention.

I mainly work with .NET and I did a search for the term "prompt engineering" on one of the biggest website for job adverts in my country. Out of almost 800 offers only 9 mention the term "prompt engineer". Changing that to "AI" produces around 200 results, but many of these are typical throwaway lines like "our company uses the newest AI tools" that doesn't mean anything.

Maybe it's different in other regions or tech stacks, but so far I am not seeing anything that makes me feel I need to take any of this seriously.

Possibly a distinction needs to be made between raw llm output, raw google output (like lmgtfy), or any other tool's raw output on the one hand, and a synthesis of your conclusions after having used these tools together, on the other.

Obviously cut&pasting the raw output of a google search or pubmed search or etc would be silly. Same goes for AI generated summaries and such. But references you find this way can certainly be useful.

And using spelling checkers, grammar checkers, style checkers, translation tools or etc (old fashioned or new AI-enhanced) should be ok if used wisely.

> There's zero value in these posts

Source?

You might be surprised by the tremendous amount of value in AI posts. AI considers context NI doesn't.