The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
October 20, 2006
Five Ways to Kill Your Career
I spend a lot of time focused on trying to get people -- especially people just starting their careers -- to think about their careers over the long term and to identify ways that they can do something meaningful with their time. It's fun, but I realize I'm leaving out a small but important part of the workplace: those who don't want to get anything done and would rather just be left alone. So for the three of you that I've neglected so far, I present 5 ways to kill your career.
These tips build in complexity, so we'll start off easy.
Tip 1: Ignore deadlines
If you want to be sure that you have very little promotion opportunity and that no one wants you on their team -- both key to killing your career -- you'll need to start ignoring deadlines. You need to build this one slowly, missing deadlines by a few days at first. Eventually you'll want to step up to blowing off assignments completely. People need to know that they cannot count on you to deliver and to stop asking.
The skill here comes in knowing when you can safely start totally ignoring a deadline. If you open with that, or move to it too early, your boss will still have enough drive and energy to try and rehabilitate you. You've got to slowly burn him out by repeated delays of increasing length so that by the time you get to the full productivity blockade he doesn't have the will to fix you.
Tip 2: Sloppy work
When you do turn in work, make sure it isn't up to par.
Again, this is one that takes some skill to apply. You can't really start going to town on this one until you've burned out your boss and your teammates to the point that they aren't willing to try and "help you get better." Start by leaving a few bugs in your code. If you have to, add a few extra spelling errors to your report. Then work in a segmentation fault, sentence fragment (hopefully using slang!), or "feature" that will actually injure your customers if used as designed.
You can really be creative here, and it's best if your particular failings are slightly different from the ones you've seen at your work before. If your boss hasn't had to deal with a problem like yours already, he's more likely to ignore it over the long haul.
Tip 3: You're right
You've had at least four years of school, longer if you count grades 1-12. Hey, that's more than, like, 10 years of school! You can't possibly be wrong with all that training. And anyone who thinks you are is either too entrenched in the old way of doing things that they can't see your brilliance (reserve this feeling for bosses) or is just plain stupid (you can spread this around among co-workers and bosses).
The only way to help these people is to mentor them through their failings. When they disagree with you, you need to push back, explain why you are right and, most helpfully, identify this as yet another in a pattern of stupidity on their part. This technique is only really effective when exercised around a lot of other people, so pick staff meetings, customer briefings and large gatherings as locations for your mentoring sessions.
Tip 4: Tune up your communication
Look, you're smarter than everyone around you (see Tip 3!), but except for the new co-op student no one seems to appreciate that. You need to really emphasize the value of your training and intellectual gifts. Fortunately, you have an effective channel for this campaign.
As you are writing reports and doing presentations you've probably been getting questions, right? Mostly from co-workers and bosses who just don't see the value of your contribution and who want to challenge your solutions. Well, this is your fault! Your communication is still too focused on getting your message to your audience. You need to refocus all of your communications to send out one message: "I am smart, don't ask questions."
This is going to mean really smarting up your presentations, written reports, and even email. There is no reason that these dolts should even be pretending to understand your designs, and they wouldn't try if they knew how talented you really are.
Use bigger words. Use more advanced (others will see this as unclear) sentence structure and document organization. You can even kick this technique up a notch by applying your gifts to the English language itself. You've always found the rules of grammar, spelling and vocabulary restrictive, right? Why "consider" a design when you can "peripherate" on it? Why "analyze the problem domain" when you can "realm" it?
Tip 5: There is no "team" in "me"
Let's face it, everyone else is just hanging on your coattails. Isn't it time that things were a little more focused on you? What are your needs? What are your accomplishments? In what ways did you succeed despite the failings of your team/boss/division/company/or major religion? In what ways do their future development plans and meetings interfere with your life?
If you aren't happy you aren't productive, right? Share these things with the hangers-on so that they can at least structure an environment that will maximize your productivity. Ungrateful losers.
Happy sailing
I'm positive that if you apply these tips along with a "can do" attitude and a strong commitment to success you can bring your career to an abrupt halt. With skill, you might even push it over the balance and into decline. But don't be frustrated if you don't get fired. In truth it's hard to find a corporate environment that can create managers with the will and skills to manage and prune a workforce into good health. You might have to be satisfied with simply being shunted into a windowless closet in the basement next to the mailroom.
-----
West is the director of a Top 20 supercomputing center and author of The Only Trait of a Leader (www.onlytraitofaleader.com), a book and blog about leadership and career skills for technology professionals. Contact him at john@onlytraitofaleader.com.
www.onlytraitofaleader.com Leadership and career skills to help scientists, engineers, and technologists find success doing what they love to do. No time to keep up? Subscribe to the RSS feed!
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Feature Articles
Book Review: Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications
Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications, edited by David A. Bader, is the first book in CRC's Computational Science Series, edited by Horst Simon. Although the book is a collection of papers, Bader has done an excellent job of creating a compilation that holds together and covers a broad topic very well.
Read More...
The Week in Review
Cilk++ used in parallelization of the FP-tree algorithm for pattern mining; Istanbul benchmark results posted; and the latest on the NVIDIA Tesla shortage. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...
A Trio of HPC Offerings Unveiled at ISC
Last week's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'09) was a convenient excuse for vendors to announce a raft of new products, but three, in particular, stood out.
Read More...
Top Headlines
Cloudy With a Chance of HPC
Jul 01 | GenomeWeb Daily News | The popularity of cloud computing in the life sciences community was on full display at April's Bio-IT World conference. Read more...
HPC From the Beach
Jul 01 | Linux Magazine | How can getting to the ocean help with HPC computing? Read more...
DARPA Investigates Extreme Supercomputing
Jun 29 | GCN.com | Agency issues RFI for "Ubiquitous High Performance Computing" systems. Read more...
Supercomputers Go From Biggest to Cheapest
Jun 29 | Computerworld | The bottom of the TOP500 reveals the coming revolution in truly accessible high-end computing. Read more...
CPUs Gear Up For -- and Some Avoid -- Hot Chips
Jun 18 | EE Times | Parallel software also takes spotlight at Stanford confab. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Multimedia
Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Data Center Manager
National Renewable Energy Laboratory -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 08, 2009
Data Mining: Failure to Launch
WWW
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA