I feel like "useful" and "valued" are very poor terms for the situations described in the article. I think a much better explanation is that just because you may excel in one role (and be recognized as such) does not necessarily mean you'll excel in another role. And heck, I think it's important to recognize these qualities and limitations in yourself. Calling this being "useful" or "valued" puts an emotional/moral spin on this that is unwarranted in my opinion.

If anything, in a business relationship, I think it's important to recognize that nearly everyone is just "useful". It may be the case that people think you'll be more useful in an expanded role, and thus will give you advancement opportunities. But even then, the business environment may change, and your skills may not longer be highly prioritized. Just look at lots of the recent tech layoffs that have snared well-respected, senior technologists. Apparently they were "valued", until they weren't.

What is also useful to keep in mind is the tendency to recreate your primary family life in the workplace. So if you had critical controlling parents who never valued you and everything you ever did was worthless, then you'll tend to select for those places and it is often done outside of awareness.

Was your primary family spent being valued and appreciated? Then you'll select for that and when people start to not value you, you'll intervene earlier to correct for it and you'll have the skills to do that.

Did your parents respect your boundaries growing up? Were you able to erect strong boundaries and have people listen to you when they over stepped, or were you constantly put down and your wishes ignored? A lack of skills in erecting proper boundaries and then maintaining them by being in the goldilocks zone of not too soft and too hard can lead to issues in the workplace and personal life.

First step is bringing this in to awareness so you can look back with hindsight, next step (the hardest) is mid-sight, you know you are doing or not the doing the thing you need to do but can't do it or don't know how. There there is foresight, hey I normally do this thing that's not good for me here, I had better do the thing I need to do to keep this situation positive.

Keep this mantra in mind: You are the only in charge of you and your emotions, no one makes you do anything, and you will protect yourself.

Awareness + skills = ability. Psychotherapy (not counselling) is what you need to look out for. Combine that with Transactional Analysis and it makes you very very effective.

I have traded within a quite tight comp band for my entire 30 year tech career. I am useful in general. I have been valued by being offered "promotions" and "strategic instead of tactical" positions, but I always chafe.

I enjoy the work. I enjoy solving specific problems in tech.

I do not enjoy the "business" of tech and have no interest in any of it.

I definitely have inadequate drive to grow a business and make others wealthy, even if I get a few crumbs.

For me, contracting is the perfect match. I don't need to get involved in your politics, I just need to eat jira tickets. Realiably and well. When there are none to eat, I can go do my own things.

I would need to care a LOT more about the business and dollars to excel at it, and lately I lean in the opposite direction. I see nothing wrong with simply being comfortable and useful. We have it good that we can make this choice.

$0.02 :)

I have always been useful not valued, worked at 8 or more places. Only people who value me are family. Businesses don't.

You find out pretty quick: suddenly on PIP, or get bullied thereafter because you phrased something slightly off in a Jira comment. If I can get paid and treated OK, I see that as good.

Don't put stock in business relationships. Try to have good ones but put stock in ... assets, family, health, etc.

Now I have seen valued people but they are rare. And if push come to shove I'm sure that bond could break.

I used to recognize this at my last job, pay was good but left searching for other opportunities where I felt valued in a team.

Two years later and I've about burned through all my savings looking for any job at all. Seems like current market has decided my skills and connections are not enough. Fixing to just uber or something next month out of desperation. I used to make six figures.

Turns out I decided to quit at the absolute worst time. I may not have been valued socially at the last gig but I felt somewhat useful. Nowadays enough time has passed and I no longer feel valued nor useful. The distinction fails to make any difference when the threat of losing it all constantly looms over you.

If I could I would go back in time and berate my self to keep that job at all costs and remain valueless, instead of insist grass is greener for some nebulous quality of "valued". Some things like health insurance are just more important than some intangible ideas of being valued or not by higher ups I won't really understand.

I like and appreciate the authors points but just wish they would have done more with the connection of the two.

You might be valued because you are many things. You might not be valued because of many things. If you are able to be useful and valued, while also being fulfilled and happy personally and professionally -- that's great.

But, there is normally not a direct and clear situation like this in organizations. If there is, enjoy it while you have it. Normally, it's not as direct and clear to assess and understand. You are also part of this equation. The dynamics in an organization are normally not consistent.

Dynamics in organizations can shift quickly. Culture can also mean you could be doing all you can but the situation is no longer good for you for a variety of reasons or good for the organization.

Informed re-evaluation of your own value in your situation, at reasonable points, is vital. You may be not as great as you think you are, you might not be able to feel valued or useful in a changed or toxic environment. You may not care about that stuff. The organization may be incapable of providing any of that validation but, ultimately, it's up to you to decide what you are able to live with and why. How the organization provides whatever for you to contemplate is part of the calculation that must rest on your shoulders -- and that effort is ongoing and important.

“ I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.“ - General and Commander-in-Chief Weimar Republic https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord

This is far more simple than it sounds. Do what others cannot to deliver success to the internal goals of the business. It is always more about capabilities and delivery and it’s never really about hard work.

These capabilities can include authoring new tools but most often are soft skills and better written communication. Many people will fail at this because they cannot perform or independently determine their own performance criteria.

Sometimes the employers will set you up for failure by limiting your value potential so that you are a commodity. In these cases value is not what you add but how well you play a game.

I have been both.

I worked for a Japanese company, for most of my career. My non-Japanese status, often meant that folks with clout would not look to me, for input, when making strategies.

Personally, I think that it was OK, for a lot of stuff, as I really wasn't a "native," when it came to corporate culture, but E.L.E. disastrous, in a couple of instances; namely, where they were dealing with American companies. They made critical mistakes, by not understanding the culture.

But they did value me, and my team. They gave us work that was "corporate DNA" stuff. So secret, even our CEO didn't know about it. We had a very high level of trust, with Japan. Not sure the names the author gave to the two different approaches are ones that I would use.

What a wonderful text. I have seen soo many colleagues who do solid, if not extraordinary work, yet they get paid mediocre salaries. And then there are people who create an aura, as if they can walk on water. And get promoted constantly, get new roles, new opportunities. But when you scratch the surface, they are not necessarily doing much better work, but they are informed, know latest trends, use the right buzz words, bring a fresh air into the team, new models, mindsets, paradigms. And they think very highly of themselves. Unlike the others who do their job well, but are treated not like rock stars, and do not signal that they are ready to leave the company. So they always stay where they are, get paid the same. And management does not feel like treating them special to keep them.

There is an enormous, invisible river of wealth flowing all around us. An individual can contribute to it, and draw some off from it as it flows by. In an ideal world, each would withdraw in direct proportion to the amount they contribute: A salesman goes out and shares a solution to a problem that a customer didn't know could be solved, and takes a commission for this information distribution, an executive turns a large problem into small ones which can be solved by individual engineers and gets compensation in proportion to the managerial activities involved, and those individual engineers create the solution and receive a salary in proportion to their skill and effort and share in creating that value. Right?

No, this is too often completely wrong. Having utility is only half the battle, you also need leverage to withdraw in proportion to that utility. If the customers all know about the problem and your product, but your company has a near monopoly, the salesmen can position themselves as middlemen where the entire transaction flows past them, and they'll siphon off some nice round number - say 10% - completely disconnected from the minimal or even negative value they contributed to the process. Conversely, the engineers can find themselves completely powerless to negotiate compensation, producing value to the company 10x or 20x their salary, out of view of the customers and with no leverage to extract any more or less from the process.

> ‘Go where the rich and powerful are,’ I’d tell him, ‘and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You’ll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear.’

Kurt Vonnegut, "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater"

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/4076-god-bless-you-mr-...

> I had become the go-to person for making things run smoothly, for fixing urgent problems, for delivering. But every time I pushed toward more strategic and ambitious directions, there was a lot of can-kicking and “let’s think about it” that went nowhere. I was incredibly useful to the organization, but not necessarily valued, and at some point, I started feeling a sense of stagnation. Compensation was good, the actual job was aligned with my interests, but that sense of being just a useful caretaker was hitting my motivation. In the end, I had to move on to another role.

this hits home, hard.

> If you’re valued, you’ll likely see a clear path for advancement and development, you might get more strategic roles and involvement in key decisions. If you are just useful, your role might feel more stagnant.

I think it might just be the organization or people. I know a lot of engineers that don't want to progress to management or other "strategic" roles. They're happy doing what they're doing and they often complain about a culture that expects them to grow in these very narrowly defined bands that eschews technical ability.

Framing it this way as though to truly "value" an employee you have to expand the scope and nature of his work does more harm that good. I think it's more about having an honest conversation with management and set expectations. Management often doesn't want to mess up something if it's going well so may not take initiative.

If you earn some dough and are treated somewhat nice you have already hit the jackpot.

Don’t give up a perfectly good job just because you have power fantasy issues. You will always be a worker bee, that’s just how the world is set up. Someone or something will own your ass regardless of your compensation structure.

> If you’re reading this and wondering which side of the line you are on, I encourage you to take a moment to step back and look beyond the surface. Are you valued, or just useful?

Thanks for reminding me again that my 20 year career has been completely useless, other than being a "seat-filler".

According to this definition, being involved more, I'd rather be useful than valued. Like Socrates who went to the market to see what things he doesn't need, I cherish each meeting I am not invited to. It's a blessing.

As long as the pay is good (or better) than in the "valued" path, useful is better.

Exception: I have equity and the decisions made are bad.

Valued = useful + hard to find.

The more rare you are, the more you are valued. You still have to be useful to be valuable though.

In order to acquire those rare skills, an ungodly amount of work is often required. It is also a huge variable. A rare skill today can become useless tomorrow.

Also, beware of indispensable people. "This company needs me" can have all sorts of causes. Maybe you didn't documented things right, maybe you just have a long history with them. It doesn't mean being rare. Being rare is feeling "this skill I have could be of use to any similar company and few people know it".

The skill could be anything. Perfect pitch, excelent document writing, de-escalation, low-level bit shaving.

Isn't being incredibly useful actually a pretty solid way to be valued, especially in the trenches? Maybe 'useful' is just 'valued' in work boots instead of a fancy suit.

There is another kind of useful-but-not-valued, and that's the person who does things that management ignores, or finds not worthy of investment of time, but inoculate against future trouble or enable other work, or make it considerably easier, down the line.

If you engage in that kind of work, it's not just that you'll not be recognized/valued, but rather - be thought negatively of, for doing that.

It’s the difference between partnership track and various “counsel” type titles at law firms.

The former grows (or at least maintains) a book of business and is valuable, the latter has key skills and is useful but clearly not to the same degree.

And like many other contexts, the vast pipeline of people willing to dedicate their lives to trying to be useful mitigates the value of just being useful over time.

A lot of human status is based on primate signaling, not merit or usefulness, nor kindness or trustworthiness. It’s based in the brain stem, not the neocortex.

I have met useless, dumb or insane, but charismatic people who can instantly be in charge of any room they walk into. It is not rational. It’s monkey stuff. One of them is currently the President of the USA, and truth be told I think most presidents have these qualities to varying degrees. (The current one is just a very pure example.)

That being said, it doesn’t always work. It tends to work best on people who are inexperienced or who have some emotional need for a parent figure. But that's a lot of people.

I was valued. Then the company laid off the whole country and stopped hiring in that country.

In the end it's just luck.

> Leadership made it clear that they saw me as critical to the company’s future, not just because of what I had delivered in the past, but to help shape what came next.

The more useful, though more crude, metric I use in my career is to estimate how replaceable or disposable I am.

This is extraordinarily hard to evaluate at first because we all tend to look at our little domains of the code and imagine how they’d collapse without us. You have to have some humility and some business sense to start recognizing how critical you and your inputs are to the company’s mission.

Nothing brings this in focus quite like being in a meeting where a company is forced to cut budgets and lay people off. I know that’s not helpful because most people won’t get to see that directly, but you can start to imagine how that looks if you do the thought exercise enough times. Imagine the company had to cut some percentage of headcount to avoid bankruptcy. Would you be cut at the 10% threshold? The 50% threshold? 80%? I guarantee your first estimates are going to be too optimistic, but it’s a helpful thought exercise.

From the mentorship side, I frequently see people confuse being good at their job with being irreplaceable. When push comes to shove, a lot of companies can cut deeply, hire some entry-level people to put out fires, and coast for a year or two until budgets are good again. This leads to a lot of great but generic front-end, mobile app, devops, or other generic positions getting cut. The company will suffer a bit, but rarely does complete collapse occur (despite what we like to imagine).

On the other hand, there are roles where companies cannot cut without immediate and long lasting pain. Cutting lead developers of core products or kicking out the sales team isn’t an option. It’s always the people working on generic problems, side quests, pet projects, or acting as clean up crews for the main teams who are normally too valuable to put on the generic work who get cut.

It’s possible for work to be valuable but also be eminently replaceable, offshore-able, or be a top candidate for being paused or cancelled when the budgets suddenly get tight.

Yeah the company needs a website and needs front-end developers for it, but does it need to be you? Or even in-house at all?

If you're employed, you're probably valued and useful in some respect.

I think a much more important question is: what are you being valued for and does that fit with your goals?

A person who wants to build skills to take on the world's most challenging problems probably doesn't want to be valued for their ability to grind on the tedious tasks or because they look good in marketing materials, for example.

> valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction

This article is heavy on emotional persuation, but rationally, it is not even operationally defining the terms. It posits the existence of 2 categories of employees, when, it is hard to know if they even exist.

I seems that there are different meanings to "valued".

Here how the article defines it:

> Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction. This comes with opportunities to grow and contribute in ways that are meaningful to you and the business.

But I would say that in a business setting, the definition of being valued is usually much less abstract, it just means you are worth money, the value here is a dollar amount.

Being valued this way doesn't mean that you will be given opportunities to grow, but it means that there is a good chance you won't be laid off, and that they will listen to your requests as an employee, because they consider that by losing you, they are going to lose money (that is, your value).

I recently had a bout of this at my current work.

For a while I was struggling to pinpoint my discontent, but I ended up realizing it was because I felt I was undervalued compared to the contributions I had made over the years.

As it happened, my superiors had come to realize the same, so when I asked for a talk, they preempted my plan by announcing this.

As mentioned by the article, I've since been included in much more strategic talks and discussions to help shape the future of the company, as we're moving our products from the desktop to the web.

It's still something I'll keep an eye on, but just realizing the source of my frustration was very helpful. It also made me more aware of how I shouldn't sacrifice too much unless it's being valued, as opposed to just being more useful.

What I hate about office politics is that it feels like all the planets have to align to get what you want. It's not reliable.

I'm way too clumsy and unpredictable for this 'one shot to make an impression' approach. During critical times, I tend to put forward my worst self, I can't help it. I tend to pathologically undersell myself and my work. Like my brain wants me to do everything on hard mode, just for entertainment value and so that I have stuff to talk/complain about. It's like I self-sabotage to ensure that my success rate stays below 10%.

When bad stuff happens, I don't even feel anything anymore. I expect failure. Though I still feel really great in those rare times when good stuff happens.

I'd say value, in the way the author defines it, is more a function of scarcity. If you are someone who can get stuff done but you are easily replaced, you are useful - not valuable. If you can get things done that nobody else can, or will, then you are valued.

water is useful. Diamond is valued.

So be the diamond, not the water. Unless there's no water around anymore...

I thought this would be about what you actually do versus what you're perceived as doing.

That's how I'd interpret these words. "Useful" means you do something that's beneficial to the company (or at least your management). "Valued" means that the company (or at least your management) believes you do something that's beneficial to them. In a well-run company, these match well. In many companies, they don't.

Being valued is a big part of what drives advancement. If you're seen as beneficial then the company (or management) will usually try to keep you, and offer you opportunities to expand that benefit. If management sees and understands what you do, then being useful can suffice here. Otherwise, the gap between these things means you need to be political and ensure that your usefulness is seen and understood.

The article seems to be talking about leverage, collaboration, and reach. Your usefulness on your own is limited. Beyond a certain point, the only way to become more useful is to start acting as a multiplier to other people's efforts. That's what it describes as "valued," but that really doesn't seem like the right word at all.

I'd put it like this: success on the job depends on how you're seen, not just what you do. Be mindful of how those are connected at your particular position. And your impact, both in terms of practical outcomes and visibility, can only grow so much on your own. If you want to go beyond that, you need to work with others and multiply their work.

> I had become the go-to person for making things run smoothly, for fixing urgent problems, for delivering. But every time I pushed toward more strategic and ambitious directions, there was a lot of can-kicking and “let’s think about it” that went nowhere.

If you are effective where you are, why would the organization want to promote you and lose the work you are doing now? Maybe the higher-ups were aware of the Peter Principle.

More deeply, this hints at something we probably all need to internalize. Engineering and "management" should be separate tracks. Right now, management is mostly synonymous with people manage, lording it over people. Good engineers might aspire to rise higher into "management", which might be a poor fit for their skills, interests, and temperament. Engineers should be able to rise to the top as engineers.

If you see management as your ideal destination, then go into that from the start. Become a management trainee, not an engineer. But overall I think (people) management should lose it's aura of prestige. It's just a skill like any other, and people in those positions are frequently ill suited to it.

The other thing I would encourage folks here to do is self-advocate.

We may deride the bloviations of the folks who are "all talk and no code" and how they seemingly ride the coattails of folks actually in the trenches, but honestly a lot of people do great work and sorta expect it to get "naturally noticed" in the corporate environment.

Not saying ditch your IDE and just throw around buzzwords in boring could've-been-an-email "sync meetings", but don't forget that demonstrating the value you have is also important and often neglected skill.

If a clever PR hotfix merges in the forest, does it make a sound?

I am telling on myself here, in a way, as this article hit hard and with great serendipity: I was part of a RIF at a well-known company this very morning, and I most definitely did not advocate very well for myself despite really holding the projects I was on together technically in the background / shadows.

It's more like: Are you useful, or are you friends with the top management. I would say most jobs are 10% skill, 90% softskill and social ranking

This hits close to home after recently being laid off.

I believe in making yourself invaluable, but would caution against falling into a niche. Especially if you want to avoid getting caught up in a layoff. But as long as you have valuable skills you will be able to find other work. Some companies are better at hiring (talent acquisition) than others.

Feeling valued is the key here. If you need external validation then by all means, work smarter towards it. Become a manager. Become a company influencer. Build a brand, and sell it hard.

At some point later in life, I hope you’ll figure out your own sense of value, true to your being, and decoupled from what others may grant. Your raison d'être.

I am a physician. I am useful because i can remove kidney stones and relieve the awful pain people find themselves in. My value however continues to decline as the monopolistic practices of insurers and hospital systems (who are now starting their own insurances) has reduced my reimbursement to less than that of a plumber. The money that used to go to workers now goes to the c suite. Ironically they were nonexistent 50 years ago when healthcare delivery was better in the US. This redistribution of ‘value’ has been facilitated by information systems that have allowed data to be centralized and aggregated. I cant wait for AI to replace the c suite so all the money goes to shareholders- maybe then people will wake up.

Ultimately i see this whole trajectory as a communist plot- centralizing control and profit.

The article's 'useful vs. valued' distinction is spot on, and for me, it largely hinges on perceived replaceability.

Being a diligent workhorse makes you 'useful' - you're reliably closing tickets. But 'valued' often means bringing innovation or strategic foresight that's harder to replicate.

Sometimes, too much visible grind on routine tasks can almost cap your perceived value. It reminds me of the senior dev whose Jira updates might be terse — like 'Continuing research on core problem' — for days. They're not judged on daily ticket volume, but on the eventual breakthrough or critical insight that unblocks everyone or defines the next big thing. That signals a different kind of leverage and indispensability than just high output.

I’m not sure “useful” or “valued” really captures how things work at most jobs. In my experience, whether you get promoted or paid well has more to do with things like: how much money you help the company make whether your role is hard to replace and honestly, how well you get along with others But there's another layer too. The people who really stand out often: think ahead of their manager and get things done before being asked know how to make the right call in stressful moments and are just genuinely good to work with That last one is underrated. In a crisis, the person everyone quietly turns to that's usually the real MVP, no matter their title.

From the company's point of view, good management is finding the people who are useful and making them feel valued.

A useful person tends to have the ability to get hired elsewhere, and will sometimes do this even at a drop in salary, if they are more valued elsewhere.

Companies should value useful people, and lay off the managers who can't.

Great way to fool yourself.

Sure you might get a surprise 50% bonus during a layoff. So you work even harder and put your heart in the company because you feel "grateful" for the appreciation -- the company apparently values you a lot. Guess what? You might be the perfect guy to lay off in the next round (as soon as within a few months), whether because of your role/performance of the quarter/relationship with new boss or just no reason.

Good for you that it didn't happen like that. But plenty of people had such experience.

Which is why I never put more effort or emotion than necessary for my job. When I think I need to work overtime, or when I get frustrated about something/someone at work and keep thinking about it after work, I ask myself, what if I get laid off tomorrow? Then the answer becomes apparent.

It's funny that peasants tell each other the difference between "useful" and "valued". Capitalists can't get more of these. Executives are laughing in their chair reading this article.

I think a lot of this distinction comes down to individual vs group focus.

Being good at your own work makes you useful.

However being strategic, thinking about the bigger picture, AND being able to effectively communicate that while navigating the complex social interactions of your leadership team, that makes you valued and will lead to a path to leadership (managerial or technical).

So many of is have poor social skills. It pays to focus on them and not just the skills relevant to your tasks at hand.

But if you want to be valued you must be useful at the first place.

I unfortunately still have to revert to the "customer is always right" level of understanding, the customer being either external or management or... whoever can get you booted. A lot of the time it doesn't matter what you fixed on the way to attempting to complete your behind schedule widget. If it's late they may ultimately blame you for it and ignore the positive effects. ... Because someone might have to fall on their sword.

I have 100% experienced this distinction. Crushing in, getting stuff done - but management is not interested in promoting me - they like me where I am. Versus crushing it, getting stuff done - and being sought to contribute vision/strategy, being invited to important meetings, and given opportunities to do bigger things.

It's interesting to consider the partial inverse of the aspiration behind the article: striving for the combination of non-usefulness and also high-valued. That's kind of what traditional (and probably contemporary) aristocrats are.

As the dowager countess in Downton Abbey said: trying to be useful is so "middle class". She didn't mean it as a compliment.

What surprises me, is that software engineering is not immune to that. I thought a domain where applied math and precision is normal would lead to a place where speed and quality would be praised, but human dynamics overshadow all of this and you end up swimming in politics just as in most jobs (some manual labour jobs are more easily quantifiable and high performers are praised though).

If you are useful but not valued all that creates is extreme resentment.

Competence, especially when objective and irrefutable but not accompanied by what are assumed to be mandatory associated traits (see halo effect) is seen as an affront to nature and creates a very intense sense of dissonance and injustice that prompts corrective measures, usually in the form of scapegoating.

Why does this not create an arbitrage opportunity to pick the useful ones who are not valued if you are a CEO or manager?

"useful" and "valued" are kind of in the eye of the beholder. As long as my paycheck is on time and doesn't bounce then i feel perfectly valued per the deal I made with my employer. As for useful, i don't really care as long as i'm valued per my definition above.

Can’t be undervalued if you aren’t actually useful for anything. Therefore, value correlates with uselessness, moderated by uniqueness. Generic uselessness is still low value due to supply/demand.

Be useful enough and someone will always pay you.

Want to sell your soul and climb the corporate ladder so that you are "valued", go for it. You won't be so valued when the company gets bought and they don't need two vice presidents of blah.

The use of passive voice and vagueness hides the actors involved: namely management.

But they always have a spreadsheet where they calculate how they can convert your former salary into their bonus.

"Never underestimate (management) greed" - to paraphrase Scarface.

> any drudge can do it if they’re prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days

It still remains a fact that most working people don't have a few days to sit in front of a computer making art. Especially not uninterrupted.

The best advice is to keep applying for new opportunities continuously. At minimum, one per month. Never stop, even when things are going great. Your employer doesn't care about your career as much as you will.

I have tools in my garage that are quite useful - I’ll likely end up selling some of them for cheap because while they are fine tools, they aren’t especially…valuable to me

Also found being the person with historical knowledge and insight into details is quite dangerous. Means regardless of what’s going wrong you’re the first one being pulled in.

Reading this thread, and having been around a while, I agree with most of what’s being said. If I could go back and coach my younger self through the mess of work life (promotions, burnout, undervaluation), I’d hand over three books that ended up being practical maps more than just philosophy.

Some valuable insights from thee books are:

Sun Tzu: The Art of War Success often comes from preparation and positioning, not effort alone. Promotions tend to go to people who made themselves hard to ignore before opportunities opened up. Don’t fight every battle, pick the ones that matter.

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations Focus on what you can control. Most stress comes from chasing recognition or reacting to things you can’t change.

Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People Being technically strong isn’t enough. Careers are shaped by relationships. Listening, being likable, and helping others shine often creates more traction than pushing your own brilliance.

If I had started with these mindsets earlier, I probably would’ve saved a few years of frustration. Good luck to everyone dealing with these issues.

"All that are useful are valuable; but not all valuable are useful." - Me.

I'd rather be useful than be valued but is totally useless. :D

Ah yes, the eternal quest for "feeling valued" at work — as if we're all in a corporate therapy session instead of just here to solve problems, get paid, and go home. American companies love inventing emotional debt as a substitute for job security. Maybe next time I get laid off, they’ll throw in a heartfelt Slack emoji to ease the blow.

My experience is: If you are good at something, you will do it for ever. Be good - or get good - at things that you value.

https://b0a04gl.site/blog/being-useful-at-work

TLDR: being useful at work isn’t a trap unless you stay stuck there usefulness gets you in the room, but you gotta level it into ownership and leverage. don’t cry exploitation if you never made the jump, useful ≠ disposable unless you make it that way

I guess the point is that the ~slaves~ paid laborers that built the pyramids were "useful", but the people that told them what shape to build were "valued"?

Tools are useful but ultimately can be thrown in the trash. Valuable things must be preserved and treated with respect. Strategic thinkers and VCs are treasured, but workers and ICs are dispensable.

This is just a lot of words to imply a moral hierarchy around social class.

Guessing most women fall into the useful category then, as they’re kept out of conversations a lot.

Being productive doesn't mean your skills are scarce or you have leverage.

I feel like everyone is going to think they are useful. Not sure how meaningful this is.

And just because you are valued, it doesn't mean you are useful.

From the perspective of an employer, this is mostly nonsense.

> But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler

You are, if the org works, seen as a person fulfilling an important enough function (because... otherwise you would not be hired) and if you then do that, that is fantastic. When anything doesn't work, that sucks, and that is something that every employer understands.

However if you are not okay with the role that you are occupying in that apparatus, or no longer okay, that's not on your employer (unless, of course, you have been mislead about your role or trajectory). Some people are looking to do a specific thing for a long time and getting really good at that, and it makes me sad to see when people try to cast shadow on that. I certainly wouldn't, but I would caution against projecting your own value judgements onto other people. It says more about how you look at the world, and what kind of place you would create, than it says about the company you work for.

It’s just your measure of value va theirs is different.

Do your job and you will always be useful, rarely valued.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

No, it depends who's valuing you.

Great writing, makes perfect sense!

I don’t feel like this post has any cohesive thesis. It seems to have been written mainly to brag.

Those are interchangeable.

perceived usefulness becomes value

Ouch!

At the end of the day, as an engineer, you will always be as replaceable as any factory worker. If the market wants cheaper worker, they will just layoff a bunch and hire again with lower salaries.

There is life outside your job, you only live once.

value = usefulness / wages

Everyone can provide value to the world if we accept them for who they are, and what they love and can offer. The issue lies when we, as a society, decides what is valuable and what isn't.

It takes some guts to be in management, but being a good worker-bee will only get you so far. You have to know how to work with others, you have to be able to make critical decisions at the right moment. Not everyone has the talent for it. And if you don't have it, you don't have it. Will you, as this author has described, find a comfortable position in life, be able to afford whatever you need? Absolutely. And you'll never have to be responsible for impactful decisions; you'll never have to fire anyone.