I would have preferred the title, "Recognize who you're working with"<p>I have worked with many programmers and it's not always readily apparent who is better than me and who is not. And of course, some are better than me in some things but not others.<p>We don't always have the luxury of choosing who we work with, and have even less chance of only picking those better than us. So it's probably more practical to learn which habits to emulate and which to avoid in those we actually do encounter.<p>For example, that database whiz may suck at algoritms, so just because you learned one great thing from him, it does not necessarily follow that you should learn others. Also, I have often found a big difference between the perceptions of others (especially bosses and users) and my own assessment of their skills.<p>There is something to be learned from everyone. Just get good at figuring out "what" from "whom".
You see this phenomenon in Rock Climbing quite clearly. There are only maybe 30 guys in the world who have climbed routes graded French 9a+ or harder. Of those, more than half are from a tiny region in Spain.<p>You might think that this is some weird genetic thing going on, but if you go there to investigate you'll notice something strange: your climbing improves. A lot.<p>Suddenly you're thrown into a world where climbing 8a (a lifetime goal for most dedicated sport climbers) is something that pretty much everybody does, often within only a year or two of starting out. Your concept of what is "hard" changes, and suddenly it doesn't seem so outrageous to get on a route that should be way over your head. It gets in your blood. You train harder. You <i>climb harder</i>. Just because you're there.<p>It's not a fluke of grading, either. You can take that ability you gained back to your home crag and demonstrate for yourself that it's real by polishing off projects that you'd been working on for years. Then you can watch it fade away over the course of maybe half a year as you slip back into climbing with your old crowd.
"always be the worst musician in every band you’re in" -- GOLD!<p>FYI, the continue reading link either shouldn't be on the page, or it should take you to the rest of the article - not sure if I got everything or not.
Hey Chad, seems like a good post. . . not being one of those crazy typography guys, but it was very hard to read this post. I'm in Chrome, xp, and on a 21 inch monitor. The letters look like they are weighted differently in thickness. Maybe move to a more standard font? Anyways, just an fyi.
Excellent points on the spreading of behavior and emotions via social networks.<p>In "The Hidden Power of Social Networks" (an excellent book on social network behavior within large organizations), Rob Cross reports work looking at the effect different people had on energy. Some people, when you meet with them, everybody comes out energized ... others, you come away totally meh. Who's it more productive to associate with? I don't know of similar studies with startups, early customers, and partners, but I'd bet dollars to donuts there would be similar patterns.
I am pretty strongly affected by the environment that I'm in, so this post really hits home for me, but there's a conflict I can't resolve about always being the worst x in your collective noun:<p>Why would a collective that is better than you, which probably subscribes to this moderately common notion, hire you?<p>I guess Harpo had the same problem.
I agree with this premise entirely....however, in the .Net world, at least in my experiences, the smartest (in terms of raw mental capabilities and depth of knowledge) are also the people that write the most verbose, complicated code to do the simplest things...generally I suppose under the guise that it will be "more flexible" I suppose. Often times after enough frustration I've rewritten some of the code in question in one fifth the size, which handles more scenarios, runs faster, and usually even a junior programmer could figure it out.<p>I often read people making fun of the grossly overarchitected solutions in the java world, but I personally feel the same way about the .Net world, at least when it comes to code written by people who are in most ways genuinely the smartest, most capable developers I have worked with.<p>Any other .Net people feel this way or am I missing something?
When I click on 'continue reading...' it doesn't do anything. Is there supposed to be more to the article? The last sentence I got was :<p><pre><code> If you’re a teacher, go where the students care about what they’re learning.</code></pre>
"If behavior spreads through social networks, then working in a toxic or slow-moving corporate environment is really really bad for you."<p>1) I think working in a toxic or slow moving corporate environment is really bad for you for reasons much more direct than behaviors moving through a social network<p>2) Researches demonstrated that certain moods and obesity appear to be correlated in social networks - but they have not demonstrated causation or show that this applies to behaviors and moods in general. The fact that two nodes in a social network are likely to both be obese together only shows that obese people move in the same social circles, and there could be a wide variety of social and economic reasons why that are more directly causative than two people knowing each other.<p>Not to be a downer, it just seems to me that this article makes an unfounded leap there.
According to the papers cited about alcoholism and happiness, you are not affected by the behavior of your coworkers. For smokers, they only claim that coworkers influence each others' behavior within small firms, which makes sense because people are more likely to be friends anyway and there is more pressure to smoke socially. Even then, the confidence interval is huge; they claim smoking cessation by a coworker decreases your chances of smoking by 34% but with a 95% CI between 5% and 56%.
I haven't read the papers, and maybe they explain this, but I wonder what happens when more than one of your friends stops smoking; surely they can't decrease your chances of smoking by 34% each.