What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

Have the courage to stand up for what you believe in, even if it terminates your employment status. I'm only unkeen to have my name on this, because I haven't done it, and I wish several times in the past, I had. I respect the person who did this early in his career in one ISP immensely: it was stunning to watch somebody say "you're full of shit" to the new CEO, and walk out. (he was btw, full of shit)

Article comments and comments in this thread seem to miss the point of the title entirely. Here&#x27;s some actual advice I don&#x27;t want my name on, but seems pretty effective based on working at a lot of different Big Cos:<p>- Always go for prestige over purpose. Have a choice between a shiny project with very little actual impact to the company and a behind the scenes project that will actually make lives better for employees and customers? Go for the shiny project. It will look better on your resume and to executive teams, and will get you promoted faster.<p>- Learn the art of looking busy and practice it often. If you <i>look</i> busy all the time, people will assume you&#x27;re productive and also not give you a bunch of extra work for no extra compensation.<p>- Play politics. A lot. Especially throwing other people under the bus. The key is to align your politics with the right power players in your org. You&#x27;ll get promoted faster, get more bonuses, and be able to get away with more things in general.<p>- Get the scoop on what&#x27;s actually going on at executive levels by making friends with the office managers&#x2F;personal assistants. You&#x27;ll get an early notification of problems coming up, people to avoid, opportunities to take advantage of, etc.<p>- Loyalty is for chumps. Play the game for yourself. If you get a better offer somewhere else, take it. If your boss is an asshole or putting a glass ceiling over you, leave. If you need time off, take it. If your team isn&#x27;t being effective, throw them under the bus and move on.

- When trying to decide on a new career direction, go onto career websites such as Indeed.com and look up what is the highest paying and most desirable. For example, whenever I go for a certification, I do a search for it on Indeed. I look at how many hits come up, how much it pays, etc.<p>- Dress just a little bit nicer&#x2F;more formal than everyone else in your workplace. People who don&#x27;t know you will assume you are more important than you are and people who do know you will unconsciously associate you with upper management and you&#x27;ll be more likely to get promoted. Management promotes people they &quot;see&quot; as management material. If you look the part, they&#x27;re more likely to see you that way.<p>- Take audio recordings of your meetings with your coworkers and boss. Use the recordings to take notes that you may have missed at the meetings. Particularly in a new position, going back and listening helps to pick up what people emphasize.<p>- If people can see your computer screen, do all your non-work bullshit on your phone, where people can&#x27;t see. Keep only work stuff on your computer screen and you will look productive.<p>- Don&#x27;t ever tell anyone at work anything personal that could be even slightly controversial, including political beliefs. People like to talk shit and if they have something on you, it will get spread around most workplaces. Gossip is cache for people and they&#x27;ll use whatever they have to make themselves more likable.

It&#x27;s interesting that nearly all of these pieces of advice are fairly non-controversial. What&#x27;s the point of posting stuff anonymously if it&#x27;s the same stuff that most people would be happy to attach their name to?

Work is irrelevant beyond a paycheck. Don&#x27;t stress out over anything if it doesn&#x27;t involve you getting fired. Work as little as possible. Get as much done as you can working as little as possible as long as it doesn&#x27;t stress you out. Never lose sleep over work. Never work unpaid overtime unless you&#x27;ll lose your job over it. Never care if your bosses are angry or unhappy as long as it doesn&#x27;t affect you having a job. Don&#x27;t let their emotions affect yours. Nothing is important enough at work to go out of your way for. There are others along this line I&#x27;d advice. Obviously this doesn&#x27;t apply if you are a doctor but for most jobs it does.

&gt; When you’re in college... Your time is less valuable<p>This really jumped out at me.<p>As a college student, I&#x27;ve never had so many opportunities available to me at once -- nor so little maturity with which to take advantage of them.<p>That said, I certainly agree with taking care of low-level health problems, the sooner the better.

Chaos is opportunity: If you want to learn a lot of things and gain a lot of responsibility quickly, work in an organization or area where the roles and processes are poorly defined. You&#x27;ll be given responsibility for anything you take on and don&#x27;t screw up, and you can use that experience to either move up in the organization or move to another organization that&#x27;s maybe a little less chaotic.

&gt; * Gain the trust of people who have a lot of influence. One big benefit of working with such people is that you can learn a lot; another is that if you do good work, they come to respect and trust you — and that can be crucial in getting the best jobs.*<p>Best advice in that article. Find the people who are clearly the thought leaders and ask them to mentor you.

Consider your choice of field carefully. I loved programming and yet doing it for a living and climbing the ladder made me start hating it. IMHO the tech field is overrun with young, bright, energetic people, most of whom are dreamers with their own private techno-utopian fantasies who secretly harbor the belief they&#x27;ll be multi-millionaires or billionaires in a few short years. Dreamers are mostly innocent but there are lots of cutthroat assholes and psychopaths (as there are in many fields). The blood (money) in the water attracts some seriously disturbed people. Greed is everywhere, and in many forms.<p>Do something you love that doesn&#x27;t require you to compromise your morals.<p>I wish I had been a musician. I wish I had focused on finding the right mate instead of so many nights programming, even though it brought me some fame and some money. I&#x27;m a little fucked up because I chose tech over loving the right person, and they are gone now.

Trying to answer the question as written:<p>1. When people discuss politics at work, it is far, far better to say nothing than to say anything that goes against the prevailing politics of your company.<p>2. There is never a circumstance where you should question any program designed to help groups that your company has deemed are underrepresented, no matter how unfair you feel it is that those same opportunities aren&#x27;t available more broadly. Not only are these efforts frequently highlighted publicly, they are often lead by VPs with buy-in all the way up the executive chain. There is zero upside here.<p>The correct approach is to talk to your leader about how you could incorporate similar training&#x2F;learning into your career plan.

This fell short, I was looking for something edgy.<p>For example: It pay$ to change jobs early in ones career. If you stay longer than 2 years out of some missplaced loyalty youll miss out of some quick dollars. Tons of caveats but in general it works. Now caveat it seems to peak around your 5 or 6th switch.<p>Source: All my mates and I have switched at the cadence and weve averaged a 15% increase in salary

&quot;HR does not operate with your interests at heart, do not talk to them.&quot;<p>-- Anonymous

Most programmers invest a lot of time in coding and related activities (learn the newest framework) but this thread is again a proof that most neglect all other aspects of their career (e.g., regular salary negotiations).<p>I worked as a programmer for several years and now I run a tech recruitment consultancy (coderfit.com). Programmers come to me daily with various problems. I am writing up all the individual solutions <i>that lead to more money</i> in a book. It covers career growth, interviewing, job search, and salary negotiation; please have a look here: “Coderfit: Make more money as a programmer”: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gumroad.com&#x2F;l&#x2F;cdrft" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gumroad.com&#x2F;l&#x2F;cdrft</a>

It&#x27;s actually very useful to try to visualize the social relationships that underpin the people you work with every day. Make a diagram and identify people who are supportive, people who are forthright, people who are untrustworthy, people who are obstacles, who are their friends, who are their adversaries, etc. Update it from time to time. When you want to push an agenda, you&#x27;ll have a better understanding of the political context and can plan accordingly.

Never see a job as a career.<p>The ONLY PATH for wealth is to work for yourself by starting and building your own business.<p>Make no mistake... You are always building a business, and if you&#x27;re not building YOURS, you are building THEIRS.

Make friends with people who have keys. Janitors, secretaries, maintenance guys. Win the trust of people who are trusted with the keys to the company. You never know when you might need a favor.

In large businesses there are channels of money flowing through the organization like blood vessels, some small, some unbelievably big. Find one and plugin a straw. If it goes dry, take off, and find another.<p>(this is basically the ugly side of consulting)

When I was an intern at an Aerospace org, I had a mentor that was the head of engineering of several smaller companies at once emphasize one point - Always align yourself positively with people 2-3 levels of leadership above you. That is, if necessary, skirt around your direct report(s) if you have something to bring to the table for higher up people. It is how you move up faster, but of course, strains your short term relationship with your direct report. Haven’t had the chance to try it yet, but maybe others can chime in?

Someone should <i>actually</i> write the article that goes with this headline -- it&#x27;d be super interesting.

1. Get a disease something like migraine&#x2F;sinus where quick medical treatment not possible and symptoms not visible. If you tell people that you need urgent leave to attend some function, they feel like cheated. Instead use this disease and take leaves you want. They feel compassionate.<p>2. Always show your in hurry to manager. You can do this by running with laptop when meeting colleague for chit-chat.

Unless required by law in your profession: Don&#x27;t go to college.

If the company&#x27;s one way of making it to the next payroll&#x2F; funding round is to fire you, they will. Don&#x27;t be more loyal to the company than they are to you. Learn to be a mercenary when it comes to salary talks in reviews.

A slacker who can kiss butt and play politics will almost always beat a hard worker who can&#x27;t when it comes to most metrics that matter, like salary, work life balance, lack of stress at work etc.

Not controversial IMO, but useful.<p>Most companies are stuck in the dark ages, despite what you think after browsing HN. A lot of money to be made in consulting if you can market yourself well.

Value all parts of compensation that you cannot easily sell at zero. Options? Zero. RSUs for a private company? Zero. Promises for future raises? Zero. Actually: any promises - zero. (Promises on signed paper may <i>sometimes</i> be worth more than zero)<p>Always remember that the place you work at has no (and owes no) loyalty to you. Calculate accordingly.

Determine who the most savvy executives are in your line of business. When they start jumping to other opportunities, it’s time to sharpen your resume.

Use the foulest language you can in passwords. Makes it unlikely it will get shared.

Move jobs after a year or so for more money regardless of whether you like your employer.<p>Circumstances change. Your salary stays with you long after that great manager has moved on.

The following is (very?) controversial advice. Depending on your situation, it may be bad advice. There are too many downsides to list, so please use your best judgement.<p>Before voting or commenting please remember this HN guideline:<p>&gt;Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that&#x27;s easier to criticize. Assume good faith<p>...and for what it&#x27;s worth, I absolutely wouldn&#x27;t want to work with the person I&#x27;m describing below.<p>1. Lie strategically.<p>When looking for a job&#x2F;project, lie about what you know, what you&#x27;ve done, who you know, what you can do for the company, etc.<p>Many times you are never actually called on to prove these things.<p>If you are sure you&#x27;ll be called on to prove them, still lie, but study them as much as possible beforehand.<p>2. Do what matters for the people the matters.<p>Figure out what metrics count. Ignore or give away everything else.<p>Who controls your next promotion? Who could potentially refer you to your next job?<p>These are the people you need to please before anyone else. If you have time to please people who won&#x27;t advance your career, don&#x27;t. Look for ways to improve your relations with those who matter -- or ask them to introduce you to others like them.<p>3. Extract value from everything you do.<p>Look at every opportunity you would normally pass on and figure out how you can use it to your advance. Maybe you can refer someone, maybe you can take it on and subcontract it out.<p>Never pass up any opportunity without first asking how you can extract value from it.<p>4. Everything is negotiable.<p>Your severance package? Negotiable. Your working space? Negotiable.<p>Figure out what matters to the people who you interact with and use those levers to push for your desires.<p>The threat of a lawsuit, or an actual lawsuit, can be used in negotiation, even if the lawsuit would be unfounded.<p>5. Take as much data with you as you can.<p>When employed, you have access to an incredible amount of valuable data, resources, and tools. Take full advance of these while employed, but also remember that you will move on from your position at some point.<p>Back up whatever you can without being noticed. Who knows what can come in handy in the future.<p>---<p>Caveats:<p>Most of this is unethical. Some of it is illegal.<p>Understand your risk tolerance. Understand your environment.<p>Doing any of these can, and likely will, burn bridges. Many industries are tightly knit. People talk. Be smart.

A great lesson to learn as early as possible. Your boss may be good in a very niche space but a horrible, demented human being and functional alcoholic. Get away from him&#x2F;her as quickly as possible. You will lose years of productive growth trying to &quot;solve&quot; them for the good of the business and relationship.

If you don’t know something, say „I don’t know, but I’ll check”. Find the answer&#x2F;solution and share it publicly. People will notice your knowledge and remember thing you know. It will open doors later.

Here, mid to big company ULPT. I&#x27;ll never let my name be next to this:<p>- <i>Get a reputation as a guy who wears everything on his sleeve</i>. You fucked up? You&#x27;re going to say &quot;I fucked up. Give me a chance to fix it. Thanks for your help so far. If you can find the time, I&#x27;d appreciate if you could also help me with Y&quot;. Likewise &quot;this is fucking retarded&quot; if you see something fucking retarded. Use the word &#x27;fuck&#x27;. People love &quot;straight talkers&quot; and people especially love the kind who swear because they see them as honest people. Don&#x27;t use it in an angry manner, more in an obvious bemusement at the state of the world. It&#x27;s fucking retarded that some machine has a locale different from the rest and we forgot to specify the character encoding for bytes to string so that machine misinterprets UTF-8. No individual is fucking retarded. You&#x27;re not pointing fingers at anyone but the universe for this having happened. Then you fix it. Rarely, but at crucial moments, exploit this with lies.<p>- <i>Always try to punch above your weight</i>. Your organization is in shambles. The new product isn&#x27;t taking off, your boss is leaving, your boss&#x27;s boss is leaving. You&#x27;re asked to take over your boss&#x27;s responsibilities. No one else wants this. They can&#x27;t guarantee success. Take it. Take your boss&#x27;s boss&#x27;s job if he&#x27;s gone. If they&#x27;re hesitant, use words like &#x27;interim&#x27; and &#x27;acting&#x27;. People suck at firing and you can always Marissa Mayer your way through (&quot;the patient was dying; it&#x27;s a wonder I kept them alive this long&quot;). This is all opportunity.<p>- <i>When you do the extra thing, make it visible</i>. Someone fucked up and your site is dropping a fifth of traffic. You were planning on taking it easy that weekend: drop some acid, go with your friends to listen to Lane 8, maybe go home with a girl you met there. Don&#x27;t do it. Instead fix the site but make it visible. Tell your boss, &quot;I&#x27;m going to take a couple of days off. Last weekend really finished me off.&quot;. Make sure you make everyone look good, updates all the time on company Slack. &quot;Oh shit, turns out our health check didn&#x27;t detect this condition for one of our five servers. <i>That&#x27;s</i> what it was!&quot; See, no blame, &quot;we&quot; made the mistake. Then put in a protective layer around that. Improve the health check <i>and</i> take the server out. Now go have some fun. Do this early and you&#x27;ll get a reputation as a hero. Live off of it.<p>- <i>Always be bold</i>. Make strong assertions. Then back them up. If you&#x27;re convinced of the opposite of your original assertions, correct it as soon as possible. Go back to the guys you told the wrong thing to, uncorrect them clearly. &quot;Guys, I fucked up. There&#x27;s an edge case where JSON isn&#x27;t valid YAML and we hit it&quot;. No one is making a decision on a particular engineering problem and the meeting is drawing to a close? Use the words &quot;All right, looks like we don&#x27;t have much time here but I think it&#x27;ll be useful to leave with a default option just so we can scope future discussions. How about we consider X our default&quot;. No one&#x27;s even going to fight you on that. If they do, they&#x27;re forcing indecision.<p>- <i>Make others look good</i>. They made a mistake? No, <i>we</i> did. Sometimes maybe it was even <i>you</i> who failed to spot the mistake. Together, you all made something nice? No, <i>they</i> made something nice. They&#x27;ll be obligated to say &quot;Yeah, I only did X, you did all the Y&quot;. Accept that with grace.<p>- <i>Be likable</i>. Dress nicely. Be friendly. Be unassailable, for instance: Curmudgeonly coworker makes a disparaging remark about your code? If it&#x27;s right, don&#x27;t silently eat it with a &quot;Addressed comments&quot;. Hit them with the &quot;Thanks for the detailed review. Made the changes requested. By the way, also found article X that describes a general principle for this&quot;. Positively framed. You retain your dignity and portray security (irrespective of how insecure you are). In software, people <i>adore</i> &quot;plucky guy who learns&quot; because they imagine that he&#x27;ll be good at the asymptote. Exploit it.<p>- <i>Stick your neck out in low-risk situations</i>. Some dude in Sales wants a quick feature and the cost is going to be felt by an engineer far in the future? Do it, even if you have to do extra hours. Then coast on your reputation as a doer. Someone else will pay the price. You can double down by &quot;I don&#x27;t think we should generally do it, but if it will really help I can do it but it&#x27;ll take me some work. I need you to not go tell all the other sales guys that I did this, though&quot;. They&#x27;ll tell the other sales guys that you do things but not what. Perfect. Now in their heads those guys think you made magic.

Don’t take a job unless you know what job you plan to take afterwards.

Non-controversial, manufactured advice that pretends to be insightful.

Get an Adderall or Vyvanse prescription. There are plenty of doctors who will prescribe it without grilling you too hard for a legitimate ADHD diagnosis.

Lost causes exist. If you’re in one, run.

Sell hard drugs at work! (Jk jk!)

Be female. The pendulum is swinging back and overcompensating. At my workplace women are given opportunities and preferential treatment that men are not. And I work in defense software.

There is nothing here that I wouldn&#x27;t mind attaching my name to.<p>So here is my (very?) controversial advice.<p>Depending on your situation, it may be bad advice. There are too many downsides to list, so please use your best judgement.<p>Before voting or commenting please remember this HN guideline:<p>&gt;Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that&#x27;s easier to criticize. Assume good faith<p>...and for what it&#x27;s worth, I absolutely wouldn&#x27;t want to work with the person I&#x27;m describing below.<p>---<p>1. Lie strategically.<p>When looking for a job&#x2F;project, lie about what you know, what you&#x27;ve done, who you know, what you can do for the company, etc.<p>Many times you are never actually called on to prove these things.<p>If you are sure you&#x27;ll be called on to prove them, still lie, but study them as much as possible beforehand.<p>---<p>2. Do what matters for the people the matters.<p>Figure out what metrics count. Ignore or give away everything else.<p>Who controls your next promotion? Who could potentially refer you to your next job?<p>These are the people you need to please before anyone else. If you have time to please people who won&#x27;t advance your career, don&#x27;t. Look for ways to improve your relations with those who matter -- or ask them to introduce you to others like them.<p>---<p>3. Extract value from everything you do.<p>Look at every opportunity you would normally pass on and figure out how you can use it to your advance. Maybe you can refer someone, maybe you can take it on and subcontract it out.<p>Never pass up any opportunity without first asking how you can extract value from it.<p>---<p>4. Everything is negotiable.<p>Your severance package? Negotiable. Your working space? Negotiable.<p>Figure out what matters to the people who you interact with and use those levers to push for your desires.<p>The threat of a lawsuit, or an actual lawsuit, can be used in negotiation, even if the lawsuit would be unfounded.<p>---<p>5. Take as much data with you as you can.<p>When employed, you have access to an incredible amount of valuable data, resources, and tools. Take full advance of these while employed, but also remember that you will move on from your position at some point.<p>Back up whatever you can without being noticed. Who knows what can come in handy in the future.<p>---<p>Caveats:<p>Most of this is unethical. Some of it is illegal.<p>Understand your risk tolerance. Understand your environment.<p>Doing any of these can, and likely will, burn bridges. Many industries are tightly knit. People talk. Be smart.

If you find yourself alone around a woman you work with, leave the room, building, or do whatever you can to not be alone with them.

Know where the skeletons are buried.<p>Punch back, especially upwards.<p>Know an analyst at the investment bank with the largest holding in your company.

tl;dr - express dark triad behaviour<p>This thread leaves me in despair.