> You win if by win you mean fool everyone to pay you for nothing, if you're someone who gets satisfaction mostly from feeling smarter than others and "winning", that sounds adequate

There have been many times in my career where I went the extra mile, but didn't communicate it well enough and ended up not getting rewarded for it. I also noticed other people over-communicated what they did, even in cases where I didn't think what they did was really that hard. If they get rewarded for that, is it fair? My opinion today is it doesn't matter. If I want that bonus or that promotion, I'm going to "perform" for my boss to make sure I get my share.

I hope my surgeon doesn't have your attitude.

You need to both do good work and take responsibility to communicate this to your manager.

If you just do good work, but don't communicate it, your manager might not know and won't reward you properly.

If you don't do good work but only "perform", you lack integrity, you're not developing yourself, you're cheating your customers, and you are a drain on your employer and society.

Given enough time. Yes, your surgeon has this attitude. Any system with a grade will be gamified to hit arbitrary targets. Even if those targets do not map back to customer value. Even if the targets are out of their control. Aka red beads.

https://youtu.be/ckBfbvOXDvU

“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don’t complain about illogical behavior.” – Eli Goldratt

Unsurprisingly, even in medicine doctors who do better at patient communication get better reviews. And there's an entire industry of alternative medicine which is bad at proving efficacy but good at selling it to the patient ...

I would argue that patient communication is a vital role in healing. Some doctors might get by beeing bad at it, but there should be someone in the system who explains the situation and possible tradeoffs to the patient instead of them. After all, the patient is the single person who is most motivated for healing to succeed. Quite a few doctors never grasp this concept (to be fair, they are similar to many engineers in this), which is a shame.

The placebo effect is so strong that doing nothing convincingly might be all they need.

Oh I don’t disagree with your comment about integrity. I just don’t think good work is enough in the corporate rat race. I know when I’ve done good work and I’m proud of it, and I do my best to put good effort into whatever I do, but I’m not naive enough to think that somehow that’s enough to get rewarded at work. Working for someone else is a combination of doing good work and managing expectations. Sometimes good work isn’t enough, or even needed.

> you are a drain on your employer and society

A drain on the people that are enabling this type of attitude in the first place? I have a hard time understanding your reasoning here.

Presumably medical work is different from this type of office work.

Perhaps most importantly/obviously in ease of measuring effectiveness, patient outcomes have a lot of other factors of course, but it seems like a better metric than 'number of closed tickets' or 'lines of code' or whatever.

My findings exactly, if an impactful project ships in a forest and no manager is around to see it will you get promoted? Not in my experience

>It's also possible to get satisfaction from delivering a big project,

and then getting fired because obviously don't need you anymore!

I have a hard time faulting people for attitudes or behaviors that are adversarial considering that the system seems to be designed to be adversarial, although I must admit I find myself unable to play those games as they seem too tiring than just trying to work hard and deliver and hope that works out.

on the other hand now I think of some projects I was on that didn't go too well, could it be that the guys who I thought were clueless idiots that were seriously making everything we did take twice as long were actually performing work for more important people than me - the product owner who could never make a decision themselves but had to rope others into it (thus creating a paper trail of work performed) or the technical tester who had been given that job because he was tired of writing excel spreadsheets and needed more challenges and wrote many unreasonable bug reports.

So while I don't fault them (as being immoral or unethical) I sure can be annoyed by them.

There are certainly intrinsic motivations as well, but what the company incentivizes is performing, whether or not you achieve anything. You can still achieve something if you wish, but achievement is not a requirement.

In a country with healthcare tied to employment & ever rising cost of the most basic of living, it gets hard to blame people who do whatever they have to do to get by / live

Forget even needs. I don't blame employees for playing the game for whatever reason, as that is the game management has, though its actions/neglect, decided that it wants played.

And this is why financial independence is so sought after by a lot of people - they want to stop playing this game, but without having to make sacrifices to their lifestyle.

Ironically, that financial independence comes about from investing in companies that engage in this game.

You say that healthcare is tied to employment in the US. Obamacare tried to change that but failed.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. At this point, the military axiom of taking any action at all is better than inaction seems to hold. If you want to change the status quo of American healthcare, Obamacare is better than doing nothing while waiting for healthcare Godot, even if Obamacare is the opposite direction of where you want to go.

I see this a lot in our industry (and other industries) as well. People will endlessly bikeshed for a perfect solution until well past the point that "any action at all" was a better choice than continual bikeshedding. This dynamic is often used by stakeholders with a significant investment in the status quo to politically kill any change while appearing to be onboard with change.

I thought the point of Obamacare was to separate healthcare from employment, but it turns out it never succeeded in truly accomplishing that.

Managers often take advantage of that attitude and when their employees start to realise that it drives away most of the satisfaction from the work.

It's hard to keep that adversarial attitude at bay when that is the lifeblood of management.

I think winning here is more money, more interesting projects, bosses treating you better and so on. It is very material.

Satisfaction from good work turns into resentment quickly when you find yourself respected less then peers.

Isn't the point that "win" here means "progress in one's career"? I think the comment is pointing out that promotions and salary increases depend on the perceptions of those in a position to grant them. (See also: Goodhart's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law )

I think the point is a little more general than that. You "win" by convincing people to pay you - whether it's for nothing, for regular work, or for superior work, is immaterial.

This isn't a zero-sum game, at the IC level at least. Winning doesn't mean others lose. It just means you get paid. There are many roads to victory, including empty performance.