I am not a competitive guy, how will it affect my career?

I was never competitive, in the sense of wanting to "defeat" my workmates. If they wanted to defeat me, I'd concede, after putting up a brief fight. Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting. I would advocate strongly against bad decisions, ifd I thought I'd get a hearing.

I became a programmer, and I stayed a programmer. Like, I tried managing projects once; didn't agree with me. And I was obliged to take on the management of a support team, once; that didn't agree with me either. I retired a programmer.

I didn't get as rich as I'd have got as a man-manager; I suppose a really good project manager must be worth their weight in gold, because I've never met one. But I earned enough to raise my kids, buy a house, etc. So that's not so much about competitiveness, as about ambition. I have had the ambition to make something really cool; but I wasn't ever lucky enough to have a really good idea and the time to implement it. And probably I just wasn't clever enough.

If you enjoy your life, and you earn enough, my advice would be not to worry about competitiveness and ambition.

Remember that even being average in tech means your standard of living is likely to be 1.5 or 2x that of the average person in your country (based on tech salaries vs average salaries in most countries). That's pretty awesome. You don't need to make yourself some sort of rockstar - most people, including those who want to be one, aren't. And that's totally fine. Just do what you enjoy and ignore the rat race :) Maybe one day you will wake up and go "Holy crap! I am so excited about {random_domain}!" and that excitement will get you a little further, but if you don't it doesn't matter that much. Forcing it however will just cause burnout, boredom, or stress.

Note: I genuinely believe if you're here asking this question you are more interested in tech than the average, so you're probably putting yourself down a little.

Work hard, don't be a jerk and you'll be fine.

A lot of ambition these days is misplaced in my opinion. Why don't you try crossing over some of these diversified interests? Some very interesting things can happen when you mix disparate interests and before you know it, you could be one of the authorities in something new.

Or if not, then at the very least just keep being a great employee. There's plenty of room in tech for people that are consistently good but average. Remember "average" means you're already better than half the people! Rockstars are way overrated but they get all the attention. Don't buy the hype. Right now in tech (and the economy in general - speaking of the US here), employers would give their right arm just for a solid worker that shows up consistently and on-time. Showing up is half the battle.

Also maybe lean into the boredom a little. Sometimes boredom can be a great motivator into doing something different, wacky or new.

I like what Kevin Systrom said on a podcast about being competitive. (Paraphrasing) He said he was not the type of person to need to beat someone else in everything. He doesn't need to be number 1 all the time. But he was competitive with himself. He would set goals, and try to reach them. Personally, I think this type of competition is very healthy and will lead to a fulfilling life.

Set your own goals. Don't just ladder-climb or be competitive for the sake of it. Don't live someone else's life.

I have never believed in all-or-nothing / aggressive competition. I believe that a win-win situation for everyone is always possible.

That's why I never spend any time in things like sports competition (despite having the talent for it), etc.

I've created communities and foundations, but found that my true strength lies at being "the engine", not the leader / celebrity.

An "engine" is hidden away, not visible - but it's the one that's actually make everything works.

I enjoy staying behind the scenes, connecting with people, encouraging & motivating them, work together, developing strategic partnerships - and leave the stage for others more talented for it.

I helped advocate and assist leaders, but I don't want the spotlight because of its various burdens.

In an IT team, I help people work together, smooth any wrinkles, help my colleagues, discuss strategic targets with my boss and help the team to focus on it, etc. I talked with users, note their concerns, and help raise it internally in my team.

I started as a lowly junior programmer - but rose so quickly I suddenly ended up as Head of IT. I quit soon, because it's putting me in the spotlight; this makes a lot of things suddenly political and involves a lot more drama than necessary.

I just want to have fun, not encountering drama queens everyday.

So yes, it is possible to be not competitive and be successful anyway.

Define "successful career in tech" for yourself, then ask if that is what you're doing.

For me, I want to put my attention onto helping others, in this case by using computers, data, and statistics. I also put attention onto playing music for others, listening to their problems, and cooking for them. There's no need to one-up anyone if your goal is simply to help others.

And btw, it's not bad to spend attention on yourself, it's good to improve your fitness, nutrition, sleep, quality of life, and your own satisfaction and joy. There's nothing wrong with a Giver Giving to Themselves, which will enhance their overall health + giving abilities.

With all respect, it sounds like you want to be "excellent" but without the work?

You can't have one without the other. If you don't want to do the work that's totally fine, but you have to come to agreement with yourself that you stop measuring yourself against that. Really, the secret to tech is caring enough about the people and the results to do a good job. Do that and you will be more than fine. Just be sure you're getting something you want out of your job!

Decide what you want exactly, and be willing to sit with the question for a long while without an answer. Do you want to be in tech? Do you want to be deeply technical? Do you want to mix technical work with people management?

Once you know what you want, you will find work you want to do to get there, if need be.

You seem to be conflating 'competitive' with being highly competent.

In my experience, it's not necessary to be competitive, but pursuing a high level of competence IS quite important.

Yes, doing just enough to pass a day will likely affect your career.

Having said that - being a generalist can be a skill all on it's own. Having the meta-ability to pick something up quickly and doing useful work with your new knowledge can be a highly useful skill, especially if you are working on smaller teams.

I worked with a guy like you when I was younger. I was 28 and he was 61 and we were the same level (senior engineer, below staff, basically two levels up from fresh grad). This was at eBay, which at the time was like working for a FAANG today.

He was perfectly happy. He came in at 9:30, napped at lunch for an hour, left at 5:30, and did ok work, good enough that you could give him a boring task and he'd get it done in a fairly timely manner. We made enough money to cover his mortgage and expenses, and he really had no ambition to go farther.

And there was nothing wrong with that. He enjoyed himself, wasn't bitter or angry or anything like that. Last I heard he retired at 67 and collected social security.

You don't need to be competitive to be successful or happy. My first question is: what do you want?

If you enjoy life in the most boring way, then it sounds like something in your life is already fulfilling. Boring and exciting are entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Especially early in your career it can be daunting to see the success and skill of other people in the field but recognize that their success took a long time to build up, and probably some amount of thrashing around too.

So again, what do you want? Do you enjoy continually learning new things and getting satisfaction from exploring new ideas? Do you enjoy the act of building something new from scratch? Do you enjoy optimizing parts of what you build at a small level until the details are just right? See if you can clarify for yourself what you really care about and focus on doing more of that.

For now, I would also counsel against avoiding being 'a boring copy-cat'. It already sounds like you have an interest in going broad - embrace that.

There is a slight disconnect in what you are saying you are and what you want for yourself. If you say you are not competitive, then why are you trying to uplift yourself or make a dent? Success is very relative. You either need to have enough self esteem to find joys in other things in life to treat the job as a job and not let your performance at it shake you too much OR you can make a choice that what you want matters to you to the point you are ready and WANT to work for it.

There are no free lunches. Nothing comes for free. So why should success? If you want something, you HAVE TO work for it.

So this brings me to my three steps for you:

1. Give a hard look within yourself for what you want. Keep in mind that this can change with age and what you want for yourself now won't be what you want 5 or 10 years from when you will have to do this exercise over again.

2. Once you've figured out what you want, the hard part is figuring out EVERYTHING, and I mean absolutely EVERYTHING, that you will need to succeed at it. It is completely easy to delude yourself at this point. People delude themselves into thinking a 1 hour YouTube video can make them a programmer or a 497 dollar course can make them a real estate mogul. There is real work involved and you have to research to KNOW WHAT YOU'RE GETTING INTO. If you ignore this step, you are going to enter a field with a false sense of security and, to some extent, entitlement because you will expect your dreams to come true but wont have the hard skills needed to survive long enough to achieve them.

3. Finally only if you decide that the hard work is worth it, COMMIT yourself to it. Commitment is a word which does a lot of heavy lifting and I personally believe that very few people, especially the younger ones, know what that word entails.

Only if you do all of these 3, will you be successful. If you skip 1, you will be passionless and hate your career. If you skip 2, you will trampled by your competition because you won't even know what you don't know. If you skip 3, you will just give up at the first sign of hardship.

I, for myself, decided that I'm not very competitive and would rather live life easily rather than kill myself to compete with others. I've given up hope on a lot of things and know there are a few things I'll never have but I'm OK with that for now.

Good luck with your decision.

No one likes competitive coworkers. I've heard of some being fired for being too competitive.

I've also had a manager being very competitive against us people reporting to him. He always tried to monopolise interesting projects, fully control standups such as telling us who goes next who does what. Disregard important pieces of work done by other team members because he didn't contribute in it and take credit for other people's work. Intentionally hire lower skilled candidates so he can be "top" one in the team... One of the main reasons I left that job, don't be like that guy.

Programming is a team sport. It's not about the individual, but about what the team can output. Competitiveness can be a liability.

Most projects have parts that require some cleverness, but most of it is grunt work. You may not be the fastest, clever or ambitious guy, and still be a key player in a team.

As long as you get shit done somewhat predictably you should be fine. If you really want to get better, understand where your value is.

You don't need to be great at everything, just at the important stuff (that is, important to the business), understand why they pay you, it's usually narrower than what most people think.

> How far can a boring person with diversified interest go?

Diversified interests sounds like the opposite of boring to me.

> If one doesn't aim for excellence, is it a bad thing?

It probably indicates that your actual interests lie in something other than what you are currently doing. One suggestion I found useful was to make two columns on a sheet of paper and keep it at your desk. The first column is "I loved this!" and the other is "I hated this". When you find yourself enjoying a task (or vice-versa), write it down. The theory is that our interests are surprisingly specific. The guy saying this (Erwin McManus if I recall correctly) said that he is really excited by helping people find their passions. Not pursue them, find them. It helped me identify some of the areas I enjoy, so I've pursued jobs in those areas.

> I am jack of all trades but master of none.

Reframe this: I know a little bit about everything, so no matter what your problem is, I can solve it. I might not solve it the most efficiently, but if you need a problem solved, I'll solve it.

Some environments need raw production. Some need carefully crafted algorithms. Some need prototypes held together with duct tape. Some need solidly connected piping. Breadth favors some environments over others. Breadth is helpful for freelance contracting, for instance, since clients have a problem and want the assurance that you have already solved a similar problem before, so the more difference environments you have worked with, the more likely you will look like someone who can solve their problem.

I wouldn't worry too hard, though. (Nor would I recommend jumping in to freelancing too early.) If you're early in your career, focus on figuring out what it is that you enjoy, and leverage your skills to slowly move in that direction. And figure out what your boundaries are (hrs/week, pay, on-call, etc.), so that you know what things to avoid. There's plenty of software jobs besides FAANG out there.

You don't need to be competitive, just reasonably productive and have a spine.

Find a role that works for you. Ideally in an area of interest. I'd say put in the interview prep to land something good that pays well. There are a ton of high paying jobs out there, there isn't a reason you don't have one. There isn't really a need to be competitive, just keep producing code and leaning into stuff that interests you.

You need a spine to be able to step away when the situation around you is going bad. Don't get trapped in a job you hate, don't work with or for assholes. Make sure you go get a job with good benefits.

Good luck!

I don't think "competitive" and "being curious to dive into details" are the same thing.

You can definitely do fine without being competitive. I don't think competitivity is a plus, really.

Can you do fine without being curious about technology, just doing enough to get by?

Honestly, in the current market for software engineers -- I don't see why not. You might not get to the "top levels". You'll still make more than 90%+ of non-software engineers. There are people who arne't even competent who are getting rich, so.

> How far can a boring person with diversified interest go?

Someone once said "quantity has a quality all its own." A diverse skill set can be a force multiplier when tackling challenging problems. Bringing a wider perspective can lead to more optimal solutions.

> If one doesn't aim for excellence, is it a bad thing?

Is it a bad thing if other people don't aim for excellence? The guy fixing your brakes? The airplane mechanic on your next flight? The front-end developer of the corporate chat program you use every day?

That's not to say everything you produce must be perfect in every way - but I've always found that I never feel bad when I know I've given my best effort. Whereas knowingly under-performing does tend to eat at you.

> I am really early in my career and sometimes I get cold feet when I see how incredible other people are.

Lack of experience is a temporary state. The smartest, most experienced person in the room started from ignorance. They put in the time and effort to improve and you can certainly get there too if it interests you.

> What does it take to uplift myself and my own levels?

My recommendation would be to find a hobby or side project that is at least somewhat related to your field. Something that you find interesting and can use as a springboard for skill development. Getting involved in an open source project is a good example of somewhere one could contribute as well as benefit.

The one thing I would watch for is the "squeaky wheel gets the grease angle". If you don't do a little self promotion and negotiation, you'll likely miss out on larger merit/cola raises, promotions, etc.

Since that works like compound interest, the missed opportunities can add up quickly.

That is, if you don't feel like being competitive most of the time...fine. But there may be some benefit to doing it once in a while (yearly review, etc).

Hi just so you know, I am you 30 years from now and I have come back to tell you that we are a loser. Now I would not have thought this to be true until a few days ago, my time of course, but I am telling you that we have made a big mistake. You will need to be aggressive and make more money so you still have enough to retire on after the gold digger leaves you.

Part of the game is realizing everyone is playing a different game. Then getting better at your own game. Sometimes it will be possible to be doing something you have intrinsic motivation for. Other times it will be something you do just to put food on the table. Sometimes it will be neither at all.

random observation: don't you think it's kind of interesting the way you are asking strangers about the right way to evaluate your own personal inner thoughts about the way you compare yourself to others? :)

One thing I would do if I were you is to find places of work that are pro-active about career development. Places like this typically reward managers for their underlings' success and career progression.

In those type of companies you don't, necessarily, have to be competitive/ambitious to move ahead, because the incentive programs would make it so that your managers would push you forward. You'd still need to be able to express how you'd like to progress and to then take steps to make sure you could achieve it (learn new skills, work on your weaknesses, etc.), but you wouldn't need to drive it forward entirely on your own.

In my personal experience managers who do this well are extremely rare, however.

There are ways to be competitive without being competitive. Example: Some people love to be the smartest person in the room so they'll beat their ideas over the heads of everyone else. I don't really want to deal with those people, so if I think there is a better idea, I'll get buy-in by going to everyone one-on-one. Sometimes that means "my" idea is co-opted by someone else or the team in general, but I'm okay with that because it's worth it to me to see the best strategy more forth. But the real fun is when Mr Blusterpants knows it was my idea that won.

Depends on your work ethic and concentration.

Competitiveness is just a motivator to be productive and focus. Arguably non-competitive high producers are the best for keeping objectivity and not getting too emotionally attached to one approach or another.

I would make a distinction between striving for excellence, which is a desire for self-improvement and involves competing with yourself to do better, and competing with others in a desire to outperform them.

I think you have to strive for excellence in some key areas in the your life, especially where you have talent or a strong affinity to participate or contribute.

I find it's much more useful to collaborate with others than compete, but your mileage may vary. When I see other people who are incredible, I try to find a way to complement them and collaborate with them on projects where we have common interests.

>Neither am I curious enough to dive deep into intricate details.

I think you should try to overcome this and become an expert in some narrow domain. That way, you will not have to be explicitly competitive about your career.

I think it depends on your workplace and environment. I'm not a competitive guy. I simply cannot be bothered.

Starting as a developer in the company I'm working today I'm now the Head of Product Management. Even as a developer I was always focusing on the customer and UX of the features I was developing. Our management and CEOs were great. They noticed that and promoted me throughout the years without me ever asking for it.

I think if you have the right management, just being great in what you do is enough.

Only way i can think of, is some people might try to gauge your desire to work and arrive at the wrong conclusion. Specifically the type of people who compare you to your coworkers or other people in general and tell you how you’re worse off. Their idea of motivating someone is to put you down so you react to their terrible opinion of you. If you’re not competitive, this doesn’t work. If you dont react, you may appear as someone having little to no ambition to do anything.

I have never been competitive. More a collaborative mindset. My career is fine I think. Working for a startup in SF. Making good money and it's a remote job.

Thank you for asking this. You are not doing anything wrong. There is more to life than being great at some niche tech skill. In many things, being a jack of all trades will help. It's perfectly okay to just treat a job as what it is, just a job and focus on what interests you or what matters to you. Many people come to this realization after slogging for many years at work. You have just realized that earlier.

It seems like you are describing someone who would work well in jobs that position them as the underdog. Especially since we can say that you just stood up in the company of a bunch of productive, competitive people and directly said, "I'm so not you." (Let's not look past the fact that this can be seen in some ways as a competitive, challenging stance.)

So the fact that you can own this perspective in that way may say something about your resilience in subjectivity. Your ability to say "here's my thing, here's how I understand myself," combined with the conclusion, "let's say I don't change that. So what?"

For the sake of reasonable contingency--just in case the opposites, all that grand stuff you _don't do_, starts to form into a cognitive blind spot later on, I'd probably start to objectively define those opposite things you are setting up against, ASAP. What is excellence really, what do people really expect of a non-boring person, and so on. This needs to be objectively outlined so it doesn't compromise your ability to keep an open mind if life change is ever really needed.

On your question of uplifting yourself: I'd start with what you're showing you're good at right here--explaining your position gently, and seeing what other people offer in response. You will definitely be able to learn a lot of new perspectives that way.

Eventually some of those positions can probably turn into experiments you can conduct, to find whether there are new paths worth exploring, or whether you already perceived them all. :-) You could document this, train others on it, use the experience for all kinds of advancement purposes toward uplifting yourself.

Regardless, life is effort, career activity is effort--you'll be putting in some long-term effort anyway, so I think your circumspect analysis of such effort in this way is laudable and worthwhile.

Good luck in wherever your path takes you.

P.S. In regard to underdog paths, I'd look for underdog companies with counter-philosophies. Start with the extremes, heck even anti-work if you need to. It will be really important to find some grounding for your conceptual position and it's key to ground it where it connects well for starters. That will lend your efforts authenticity, which is key to seeing your thought position and experiments roll out in full effect.

Nobody wants a guy who self claims to be 10x like Rick, who produce ton of code which is neither readable nor maintainable. All you have to be is 10x social. It is as simple as that.

10x is a myth unless you are Jeff Dean, you can't keep up like that forever and occasionally you need to tune up a little bit while you are testing in production.

Being competitive correlates with advancement at managerial levels. Being competent, productive, and pleasant to work with is enough to put any individual contributor role within your grasp. Whether or not either of those are related to "success" is up to you.

After ten years, I've started equating success with happiness, and as a result my decisions have changed drastically.

Focus on how you feel, and the rest will follow.

Do you want to feel bored? Boring? Not good enough?

Figure out how to feel excited, and the results will follow.

If you remain feeling boring, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The results will be boring. There's no shortcut.

How can you get exciting outcomes while feeling bored?

Your post demonstrates humility and a drive to improve. You realistically assessed that making a dent would take years of consistent effort rather than building up some crazy competence self image up in your head and exaggerating.

I'm only a few years into my career myself so I can't say how far you will go but you sound like an awesome coworker to me.

Depends on what you mean by success. Those who rise through the ranks tend to have a combination of ambition and ability. I've worked with plenty of great devs who didn't have ambition to become a lead/manager never mind a VPoE. And, I've worked with plenty who had the desire to but they didn't have the ability.

Performance isn't everything. This may be total motivational speaker BS, but I fell for it hook line and sinker.

https://kanbanzone.com/2021/performance-vs-trust-how-to-choo...

I'm feeling exactly the same. I'm almost thirty and switched jobs 3 times in the last 2 years and still don't know what i want to do for the rest of my life. I have to admit that makes me a little bit nervous.

> What does it take to uplift myself and my own levels?

If you are not already, I‘d invest heavily into health. I‘d check for undiagnosed ADHD/ADD. I’d lay off cannabis if I were using it. I‘d read up on how dopamine can be increased (there’s often some low hanging fruit). No harm in at least investigating in that direction.

"Is it necessary to be competitive to have a successful career in tech?"

Depends on your definition of success, the definition your boss uses, and the culture/disposition of your peers.

I'm very much a 'we did something' type of person vs taking credit for it myself. It absolutely has hurt my career.

Focus on being fulfilled. Learn to surround yourself with people who love you. Have a rich and varied life. What is excellence at work really worth in terms of utility? So you don't make VP or CTO or something. Think about what it is you really really want out of life.

No one is "boring" with diversified interests. It's how to listen to others first, find common ground (human condition is easiest), and emphasize the highlights of one's own interests now and then.

If nothing done actively in work, consequences include:

Lower salary.

Fewer oppy's like management track.

This advice is specifically for the non-competitive types:

If you find yourself in a situation where your boss wants you to compete with your teammates and the outcome for the loser is getting fired or making a lot less money, then find another job ASAP!

Find places that reward teamwork.

Remember Office Space? Sounds to me that you’ve got upper management written all over you

that sounds like me, Im probably older than you.

You might realize in the grand scheme of the universe everyone is meaningless no matter the impact. After a generation or two, almost everyone is forgotten.

Do what makes you happy (not always easy to know what that is).

My dad used to say dont bother to do something if you cant be the best. For me, I do things while they are fun (learning phase) and then I move on before the mastery phase.

Ive known some amazing, brilliant, and successful people. I do ok and dont sweat it. The happiness killer is comparing yourself to other people.

Check out this book: "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein. I bought it, but haven't read it yet. It's highly rated on Amazon.

Consistent boring work over time will take you further than being "competitive"; as they say "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".

Are you passionate about anything? Doesn't have to be work.

Work with larger companies and you will be fine..

I enjoy life in the most boring way. Just doing enough to pass a day

You sure you're not depressed, etc? Done any bloodwork or checked test/hormone levels? Eating and sleeping well?

Everyone, particularly men, have that thing that reveals their core passion - that topic/thing where they could talk the ear off anyone about it, that thing which fulfills their need to satisfy meaning and purpose.

If you're just punching the clock in life, something is off.