I agree -- the career advancement bent of this article is the most off putting aspect.

It does matter though. I also find it off-putting, but in the same way as lots of other stuff that I don't like about the reality of human society. The trick (I think) is to strike a balance between being open-eyed and realistic about unpleasant truths like "career advancement matters" without losing yourself to cynicism and self-interested gamesmanship.

I read this article as striking this balance pretty well. (Though it's certainly reasonable to quibble with it.) The one I struggled with was the one about not doing glue work just out of helpfulness, to conscientiously make it legible work instead of a personality. I hate this! This is totally my personality. I like being helpful and I like doing this kind of work and I really don't want to think or care about how it is reading to upper management.

But I also think he's pretty spot on about this. It's a very rare personality that can remain content in being the glue holding things together somewhere deep in the leaf nodes of a big organization, while seeing everyone around you graduate to bigger and better things because their work was more legible than yours. Very few people manage this without becoming bitter.

So I read Osmani's advice on this more as avoiding a common pitfall of resentment more so than as cynical careerism.

(Another unpleasant truth about "glue work people" like me, is that we aren't actually holding everything together, and the rest of the team can easily pick up the slack once it is documented and legible. This is exactly what Osmani suggests, instead of "helpfully" responding to all the DMs or requests for help about things, document what you would do in response to the common questions, and set up a rotation of people in charge of responding to them. This is a real bummer to me, because again, I really enjoy spending my time being the go-to helpful person on a team, but this is the much better approach for the organization, and ultimately for everyone including me.)

▲

caminante 2 days ago | parent [-]

FWIW, from a stoic viewpoint, glue/coordinator roles are getting eviscerated by basic LLMs.

I feel the resentment is stronger if you ignore the game and get lulled into contentment when others are more transactional. It's all about interfaces and continuous contracting. And planning 2+ steps ahead.

▲

sanderjd 2 days ago | parent [-]

Oh I disagree entirely with your first sentence. LLMs continue to be much better at writing lots of code than keeping track of how all the pieces of an organization actually fit together.

▲

caminante 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm pretty sure it's good at both.

>I like being helpful and I like doing this kind of work and I really don't want to think or care about how it is reading to upper management.

Coding aside, I'm afraid this is already falling prey to LLMs plugged into exec calendars and org charts. You're adding yet another non-human, digital layer.

	▲	sanderjd 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm happy to agree to disagree, but I think this seems like a misunderstanding of the kind of work I'm referring to. It's not clear to me how being plugged into exec calendars and org charts would help, so I think we're probably talking about different things. But that the with is misunderstood and invisible to lots of people is the whole point of the thread! So it's an understandable misunderstanding :)