HPCwire: Five Ways to Kill Your Career

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October 20, 2006

Five Ways to Kill Your Career

by John E. West

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!

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