chop wood, carry water.

this is inherently hard in a world of performance reviews, and corporate ladders to climb. especially when it’s heavily implied that you need to advance or move on.

At my last job I gave myself a 3/5 ("acceptable") rating across the board on all self eval performance objectives. In the comments I thought I had made it clear that I did exactly what was required and nothing more or less. I also motioned that I had no interest in advancing my career from where I was at.

I ended up on some sort of remedial training and career progression plan that onlt added hours to my work. Haha

That's unfortunate. Everyone is expected to be a cog but no one is allowed to admit to being comfortable as a cog you always have to be seen as giving 110% and striving for that promotion that logically will never come for most. System is designed to attempt to extract as much as possible from you and if you are not seen as playing along then you can be replaced.

No matter what management says, they never want to hear the truth.

That unfortunately applies to management in non-literal hierarchical sense whether voters, work of high hope no talents who expect success to be just one step away, or telling friends that their new romantic relationship is toxic and self-destructive. Societies have long had hypocrisy problems with honesty globally and frankly probably in prehistory and precivilization as well given how little humanity has fundamentally changed. Rven with our vast accumulation of knowledge over time.

Honesty just isn't selected for in an "evolutionary" system. It comes down to a true but unsatisfying tautology that things which survive better wind up being more common, especially when those things create more of themselves.

Everything's a nail to management, they'll hammer to see 5/5 on their stat sheets even if they don't matter.