If you consider the miserable schmuck who barely gets by in his job by playing games to be "successful in life," you're... well, you shouldn't.

Find something you ENJOY doing with your time 40+ hours a week, and do THAT. That is the person who has won at life.

What value does the cheater actually gain? Almost nothing.

I mean, if that job is the only job he can possibly do to survive, and he is genuinely incapable of doing it properly (because doing it properly would, in practice, give him much more actual job security), he has gained a value... but that is a very false hypothetical.

On other discussion boards, I'd assume you were trolling. There is enough good faith on HN that I'll reply honestly.

> miserable schmuck > barely gets by in his job

People who are miserable schmucks barely getting by in their jobs are the very antithesis of the manipulative human I described above. A manipulative person is usually the director of sales. A manipulative person is someone who spends 20-30 hours in the office at the most, and the rest of it with his/her family or vacationing.

You need to understand that manipulation of human beings isn't a character flaw, or something done for its own sake. It is done with a laser-focus on the results. Either you have manipulated the dev/ops team to work unreasonable hours to meet a promise to a major client that will net you alone a 20k benefit at the end of the month or ... you are going to be "just" the sales guy.

People like "us" here on HN are cannon fodder for people who operate at this level. Manipulation, persuasion, sales, negotiation - people who excel at this eat people who "ENJOY" their 40hr jobs.

I - I'm writing honestly here. It's difficult for me to believe you are not trolling. It's a very thin line for me to believe you are writing honestly here.

> cheater actually gain? Almost nothing.

The ability to demand a salary equivalent and easily surpassing that of a 20+ year engineer for ... the ability to sell things? Do you realize this human has no academic expertise whatsoever? They are PAID to manipulate and persuade.

You can call that "cheating". You can find it detestable. You can cry about it in eloquent and persuasive language as you have attempted to do above.

I sincerely do not mean this as an insult but: either you will adapt to the fact that 'success = manipulation' in life, or you will become one of the deluded schmucks in a dead end job because your skills with rails/js are obsolete in 20 years. The ability to manipulate people has infinite job security, and infinite earning potential.

As the Marines say: adapt, and overcome.

The sales folks I know are all very hard workers who often get yelled at for flaws in the software that the engineers didn't care much about. They have an overall view of the product that many engineers should but don't have. They travel a lot additionally to their actual work time which is much bigger than 20 or 30 hours. Also, I have seen engineers being as much guilty of feature creep, if not more than sales. Sales usually want the feature they need for their current customer - fair game (product management must prioritize for the greater good), and they would like the features to be implemented well. Of course their job doesn't scale that well, but they are still very important for major contracts.

Maybe if your sales team is not working this way, you should consider a new employer, the same way many are advocating when the engineering team is broken. Product management, engineering, marketing and sales should work together.

Yep. Geeks really need to appreciate that sales, marketing, etc. are special skills, every bit as much as understanding computers is, and you need these people every bit as much as they need you.

They are actually much more difficult, as are all soft skills that are poorly codifiable. Learning to code is much easier than learning to sell, if only because you can do it alone in a basement with a PC and a book. The reason we engineers often don't get this is because under "natural conditions" more people without special training possess these skills (which means they're widely applicable in everyday life) and almost nobody has to reinvent computer science to survive.

> Either you have manipulated the dev/ops team to work unreasonable hours to meet a promise to a major client that will net you alone a 20k benefit at the end of the month or ... you are going to be "just" the sales guy.

That is a failure on the dev/ops teamlead though, in my book. Outside of a technical emergency, teams shouldn't do overtime and their leads should make that happen.

If the work is too much, additional people are required. Otherwise or if no other people are acquired, the work gets done as fast as it gets done and that's apparently sufficient.

(And yes, I am aware of the abhorrent 'culture' of startups that engineers and workers are hired for N hours and expected to work for 2*N hours at least to be 'loyal' to the company)

"People who are miserable schmucks barely getting by in their jobs are the very antithesis of the manipulative human I described above" In three sentences following a several screens of article? Perhaps we will be discussing that?

Manipulative (and skilled) director of sales is good for him. But that wasn't the point.

Manipulative (while skilless) software developer is miserable unless he is able to move into management and do it quick, before he is uncovered and booted. That's what we learned from the article.

Remember these days cheating is called 'Smart Work'! People who work hard are considered fools, who inevitably do all the work for some one who can exploit their work to his/her benefit. In our society financial worth is the sole measure of success, and unless you get caught doing something illegal the more manipulative you are, the more you are considered smart.

Unfortunately if you take a real hard look at it, much of that is true. I know great programmers who do great work, only to find some one at the top levels take all the credit, and make the programmer look like a replaceable cog in the wheel. Fat bonuses, promotions, foreign travel, big pay slips et al are taken for things like 'nurturing innovation', 'demonstration of leadership' which is basically making somebody else to the job, while not moving a finger towards the goal yourself, then just blanket claiming the credit for the all work and in the meanwhile making it look like it would have been impossible for anything to get done in their absence.

There is an entire mass populace of people that makes fortunes doing things this way. And such people as I said are considered 'smart'.

In many ways I feel Ayn Rand said was very right. The progress of the world depends on a select few prime movers, then there is always a crowd which makes it big by merely begging, cheating, leeching, stealing and sycophancy.

It's pretty common for these 'cheaters' to become promoted and get positions with higher pay and power, while people that are technically competent but are not good at self-promotion don't and have to deal with being managed by these incompetent people.

"Success" is such a nebulous term that it's silly to consider the manipulator who enjoys "gaming the system" to be less successful than a worker who enjoys being productive. To assume the person playing games is struggling to stay afloat is to misread the entire workplace environment that allows and rewards manipulating behavior.

Sadly, middle management in large companies is full of miserable schmucks like this. They tend to get promoted, have pretty good salaries and rather small work-time.

It is sad, because good middle management tend to make huge difference. It is exactly the position where these do the most damage.