"Nobody has that objective except the very passionate."

This is very cynical and pretty much wrong.

I would put that attitude probably in the bottom 20%. I think most people want to do a good job.

It's also kind of toxic because unfortunately it spreads.

'Doing a good job' frankly, often does not even mean working harder, from a lower-performing perspective it usually just means actually paying more attention and being more conscientious.

And yes - in a large corporate situation, it's very often sometimes to feel the impact, be recognized etc. etc. - but that shouldn't dissuade from basic professionalism.

If you're truly only 1/3 as productive, your manager surely notices, but there's probably little they can do about it. It may not be to their benefit to even try to fix it.

This is what I mean by systematic decline - this is how bridges never get built, and they go 10x over budget.

This is why NASA spends $200 Billion on only a few launches.

It's why Ford/GM can't innovate.

What Space X and Tesla are doing is in some ways spectacular, but in other ways, they are just doing what they are supposed to, and they can, because people are just doing their jobs.

Life is a giant Prisoner's Dilemma. We can all spend our time trying to do the minimum, or even taking the cream off the top while nobody is looking, in which case, when everyone starts doing that it all comes down - or - we can try to be consistently conscientious.

> I would put that attitude probably in the bottom 20%. I think most people want to do a good job.

I'd buy that most people want to do a good job. I doubt very much that many care much about doing so, beyond what's necessary or what they expect to gain them greater compensation, at the job they do to earn money to pay the bills. Everyone I know with even a little of that "spark" has had it extinguished by experience. Usually before they're 30. Most reserve their good work for things that pay little or nothing. They care a lot more about that.

The big problems you raise are not because employees are not working 100% they are complex and have various causes. Employee productivity isn't in the top 10.

Won't somebody think about the poor bridges that never got built!?

For real, If there is any single problem with the world its people doing too much. The oceans didn't fill with plastic from people sleeping in. The air didn't fill with CO2 because people clocked out early on Fridays.

Take a step back and look at life. Why should it even be work? Do birds sow seeds? Are monkeys bad programmers? Or, are they just monkeys?

Oceans are filled with plastic because politicians, regulators and company leaders are 'not doing a good job'.

So many, especially systematic problems would be much better resolved when people did their jobs a little better.

Montreal just built a rail line for $500M that may likely become redundant. That's bad, it matters. It's mostly a leadership / management problem of course.

You probably know more now and get the same or more done.

Or perhaps they have and that is why your performance ratings are flat, you get a lousy annual raise/bonus (if any), and your career is stalled?

Performance ratings are meaningless if you’re jumping ship every 2-4 years and the difference is between working twice as hard is a 2% raise vs a 4% one. What companies forget is new employees see the legacy of how you treated old employees over time.

The basic structure of small consistent pay bumps was extremely effective when people stayed at companies for decades. Work twice as hard and make 2 percent more for the next 30 years, that’s a big bump. Pensions pushed that out so even people nearing retirement still had reason to care.

I am not recommending people do the minimum, just acknowledging how people respond to incentives.

The gap at big tech companies between okay and "doing well" (i.e. twice the effort) is not a 4% raise, it's a 40% raise.

That’s easy enough to check by actually talking with other employees. It’s really not a company wide question, often large raises early are fairly easy but get dramatically harder as compensation increases. Which of course change the effort:reward calculation over time.

Except they aren’t flat. I worked hard the first two quarters. Got a 5/6. Did very little this quarter and also got a 5/6.

So I’m basically just vegetating until I quit.

This is what all the cool-aid drinkers are missing in this thread. You can feel like you worked your ass off, or you can feel like you've been coasting, and still get the same performance review. I've seen genuinely valuable engineers get middling performance reviews because they didn't commit as many lines of code to Github that quarter as the other guy on their team.

That's an extreme example, but even in a "good" system, management is notoriously blind to the actual value of an engineer. In a perfect system, performance could be measured empirically and compensation would be based on that. But no one on earth has figured that out yet, and something tells me they never will.

It's not just about performance reviews.

Imagine a world in which it's very difficult to assess performance, because that's often the reality.

How does this system flourish if everyone is doing the minimum / least?

It doesn't. It fails.

'Do A Good Job'.

That the performance reviews say are a secondary factor.

If you all stop doing good work, it will fall apart quickly and you will all be poor.

> If you all stop doing good work, it will fall apart quickly and you will all be poor.

I'm replying late, but wow, this is a gem of an argument.

Really? The economic incentives that create this lucrative field in the first place are all gonna collapse if devs realize they don't need to bust ass at their job anymore? It's amazing that you think the individual work ethic of engineers is the only thing holding the tech economy together.

How would software get written if the people that write software don’t write software? Curious.