Are you good or too good?

Most of the time, I have seen that if you are good, you will be assigned the work. If you are very good, you will be assigned most of the work. But the question is what if you are too good?

Well, definitely you will not answer this question like “if you are too good, you will be assigned all the work”. This is because of the way of the question series by which I have started this blog.

Somewhere in one of my previous company, we have a person who was definitely a sound one in all the areas. Here I am referring to areas like – Coding, Testing, Marketing, Technically, management etc. etc. etc. I mean that guy was a legend and a right person at the right place. At that time, this guy had a rich professional experience of more than 15 years. But some of his colleagues or in fact subordinates, didn’t like to put the topics on the discussion table in front of him. Those useless guys always said that he will start his “philosophies” and will waste our time.

Once I have a problem while testing and I discussed that issue with all my senior management. But I was still confused about what to do. I straight went to that guy and we discussed about 1 hour for that problem. After coming from that meeting, the way I managed that particular issue was awesome and most of my colleagues were not aware of the fact that this all was due to that legend guy.

Later as the time passes, I have seen that only those guys worked with that masterpiece who himself are too good in their areas. That means most of the managers (or subordinates) that have a lower frequency cannot even sit in front of him.

This is a fact that when you have a professional experience of more than 12 years, you should maintain a class in your domain. But what if you have only 6-7 years of experience and you are somehow started creating your own class in your expertise area. This is the time frame when most of your managers (or subordinates) will see you from their eyes wearing a jealous sunglass.

Those who think or seek to express themselves differently are marginalized early. I do agree that no one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.

But we should never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

So the whole episode has turned up to a final law which I will call –

The great Law of work: If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are too good, you will get out of it.

-- Sanat Sharma