Things Nobody Cared About

I did a lot of ’extra’ work in my professional career, always believing that some day, somebody is going to see that ’extra'.

There’s this C. S. Lewis essay, The Inner Ring. The tl;dr is that if you’re good, people will recognise you, don’t worry about politics. This essay is 80 years old. In 2024, the people who recognise your work are not the people who hire you, and they are certainly not the people who set your salary level.

Things I thought people would care about:

  1. How many commits or stars I have on Github

  2. How many open source projects I have contributed to

  3. How many questions I answered on biostars

  4. How many teaching workshops I’ve run and organised

  5. How many people I’ve helped

  6. How many obscurities I know about Python, or R, or SLURM, or whatever

  7. How reproducible and maintainable my code is

and so much more.

Things people care about, in university:

  1. How many papers I’ve published

  2. How many grants I’ve got and their total dollar value

That’s it.

Things people care about, post-university:

  1. How much I cost

  2. How many projects I’ve delivered on

  3. How much reach on LinkedIn I have

That’s it.

I could have saved myself a lot of work.