The healthy answer lies somewhere in the middle.

Burning out trying to overdeliver and prove your worth is no better than underdelivering and slacking off.

There is a balance. Exceeding your employer's expectations is of course a good thing as a salaried employee. That's how you build a highly successful career.

But one of my expectations as a manager is that you manage yourself so you're still around 3-5 years from now and don't need to take a break for mental health reasons.

You're a good manager.

It can be very difficult if not impossible to engineer your own path in most environments these days. These days most devs are simply trading time for money. If the backlog board is empty, they're on retainer waiting for it to fill up.

Because of the eternal effort of the enterprise to commoditize developers they're given no decision making power. So even though they continually identify work that could be done to improve product or process, they know it's a crap shoot to follow through on such work as it's more than likely to be rejected for one subjective reason or another.

The recognition must have a high return to make up for all the time wasted on rejected initiatives.

Are you guaranteed those things if you work better than the rest? No, external factors can nullify all your dedicated work.

What would you do if all you had to show for your effort was that employee of the month picture on the wall?

If the delta is worth "tens of thousands of dollars in salary", consider what your free time spent on other things is worth. It might not be.

But "freedom to design my own role"? Where do you get this?

This is an interesting point. We tend to conflate "greater control" with "greater responsibility", but we shouldn't. The first is a benefit, the second is a risk. They often go together, but having had a job with lots of responsibility and no control, they certainly don't have to.

Regardless, I would much prefer to have a working environment where I'm engaged and involved and making an impact than where I'm only grudgingly doing just enough to get by, even if it doesn't lead to recognition and rewards. Although, in my experience, it does.

However the inverse isn't true; your employer doesn't pay you as much as they possibly can for 40 hours work. They pay just enough.

So why not work just enough? It's meant to be a balanced exchange.

That's not the case everywhere though, which is the observation that TFA and the parent were starting from. Obviously if you do make more it's ok.

>And if my company has layoffs I'm one of the last who would be let go.

You'd be surprised how many people thought that and got the short end of the stick.

It's a delusion that helps people sleep at night...

The times I've been at a company where shitty politics supersede reasonable practices, I've left. And having a resume with greater achievements makes this easier than a resume with fewer.

The famous example Taleb uses in his book is the Thanksgiving turkey.

"Consider a turkey that is fed every day," Taleb writes. "Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say.

"On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief."

http://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-talebs-black-swan-than...

You're exactly right, in an unexpected way though.

I was working at a somewhat successful BigCo. (makes HN frontpage every other month or so) a few years ago. Then came the time to discuss raises that year. I did more than was required of me, helped other teams, rewrote a bunch of legacy code in languages that were not part of my job description, etc.

What did I get? A sub-inflation raise in a year where the company's revenues increased by 70%. My closest coworkers received about the same. All because we worked on infrastructure, deemed a cost center.

So next year I coasted and put in the bare minimum while working on side project and taking freelance work. Got average to below average marks when the special time came. Then got asked to work unpaid overtime to "fix my mistakes". I quit on the spot. It was a huge relief.

Now I work for the man in the mirror and he's the best boss I could have ever wished for.

Assuming you're rational, say you're paid $P for Q output. If you thought you had a 75% chance to get $P+10% for producing Q+5% output, you'd be right to work harder and produce that extra output. If, on the other hand, you thought you had a 10% chance to get $P+100% for producing Q+50% output, you would not accept that.

I'm sitting here at work typing this reply to you. It's not about using every hour, it's about fundamentally seeing your output as malleable instead of fixed based on your manager's "targets" and seeing yourself as responsible for your level production.

Most of my time (and much of my team's time) is spent on projects that were my idea. It wasn't that way at the start of my career but I've always works towards taking control.

self-directed vs. manager-directed is a separate concern from whether or not a programmer can be expected to put in 40 hours of high focus, high concentration technical work per week.

in my experience getting 20-30 high focus hours in a week is a very good week. the rest of the time has to be used for things that are much less focused. like arguing about this shit on hacker news, for example. it's not even an either/or scenario. you need to do both. just like when breathing you have to both inhale and exhale.