A lot of us “do the bare minimum” do the bare minimum because of all of the time in the past we spent going the extra mile only to be rewarded with ever greater expectations for identical compensation and opportunity.
They made us this way.
No sympathy for them. No mercy!
Nah in a lot of cases the guy doing the bare minimum also makes more than you.
He’s a project manager!
Do project managers make decent money? In my field I’ve always been told developers make significantly more.
developers SHOULD make more, but in my experience they don’t. I suspect part of this is because the people that make the salary decisions frequently talk to the PM so they know he’s valuable, but the devs even if he has talked to them he likley doesn’t have a relationship with them, and sees them primarily as a number of spreadsheet that can be replaced with less expensive developing nation devlopers anytime the stock price goes down (or in my case went up but they thought it was going to go down, so they went ahead and laid off 1,000 devs in the States anyway, promising to hire 3,000 Indian devs in their place, and then not actually doing that even, which made the stock price go up again)
I would make more as project manager, but I don’t want to be on the phone and write mails with clients all day
I would rather set myself on fire than to look at budgets, billable rates, timesheets, or talk to people.
I’m hardore technically aligned, and far enough along in my career (and at a good enough company) that I can turn down opportunities to PM.
Look at this fat cat who can turn down opportunities over here!
He’s such a dick
When I was in college I learned I liked the idea of coding a lot more than I liked coding. Now I know just enough C++ to be able to translate dev speak into corporates speak and back, can claim to be an engineer, and get to talk to stupid people, who think they are smart, who think that I’m really smart, and I spend more of my day on social media. I had one job that in the six months I was there I think I actually did MAYBE 40 hours of work. If it wasn’t for “business conditions related to COVID-19” I’d probably still work there, though I’m making more, and working somewhat more, now.
May I ask what your field is? I am in software development.
looks around barley, I think? 🤷
Ha. Ha. Ha. Lol, sort of
Industrial automation
Every time I’ve been promoted I’ve made more money and done less work. At this rate I’ll be 9-5 on the golf course in a few years making $500k/yr.
Kidding. Golf blows.
Whoa there friend, let’s not disparage the game just because of its association with capitalist pigs and blowhards.
Can I disparage it for it’s ecological impact?
Fair
Free golf for everyone!
Hard work is rewarded with additional responsibilities and tasks for no additional benefit. What is the point?
I get paid way more than my coworkers, and even my supervisor, because when I got hired I immediately made a bunch of random tools in google sheets that only I know how to maintain, and spread them around until everyone was using them. Before long, I was essential to my department, and praised for going “above and beyond” even though I was mostly just dicking around making the tools rather than doing my actual job.
I have 0 coding experience, so the tools are absolutely horrendous behind the scenes, but that just means that they break pretty often, and people are reminded that only I know how to fix them. So, when I went looking around on LinkedIn for other offers after a few years, I eventually got one that was paying way more since it was in a major metro area, and I took it back to my manager to negotiate a 50% raise and a full-remote designation that virtually nobody else in my office is given.
You don’t get ahead by working hard, and you don’t get ahead by working smart to benefit the company, you get ahead by working smart to benefit yourself. Think about it this way - if you’re at the store to buy bananas, and you see that they’re selling bananas for $0.05 ea, you’ll likely think “Wow, that’s a great deal!” and buy a bunch of those bananas at the $0.05 price. You’re not going to pay them the price you think would be fair for a banana, you’re going to take advantage of the price you’re allowed to pay so that you can save money. Your employer sees you - working for less than you’re worth - as a $0.05 banana. You’re nothing more than a cheap commodity they were lucky to snag on sale.
Making yourself indispensable is a great way to never get promoted.
I turned down the promotion they offered me. It was significantly more work, required me to come back to the office, and only offered a 10% pay raise. It doesn’t matter where your “standing” in the company is - if you’re indispensable, you can fight for good pay even outside of managerial roles.
If you see me going the extra mile, it’s probably the side-effects of me using the company’s resources to learn and do crazy experiments for my own gain.
The real payment is all the traumas we got along the overtimes
Hah! You got overtime? I just got trama and toxic managers.
In a better spot now, though
At my previous job they had a special term for unpaid overtime: “Professional time”
So glad I’m no longer working there.
“Professional time” sounds like a euphemism for wanking off on the clock.
Unpaid overtime probably (which would be a hard no from me)
We got straight banked time off in-lieu. It was bullshit.
Yeah, that’s a crock. My first corporates job did that to us, and then never approved the paid vacation requests, let-a-lone the banked time-off we were promised for being such good cubicle slaves working above and beyond, and it is all legal because “exempt salary employee”
Hah, cubicle. Not to shit on you, but that would have been much preferable to my situation. Seasonal environmental field work - 300ish hrs a month from May to November
True, but better than the places that expect it for nothing in return
Or in my case, get singled out by a manager from another department for no reason, who then gaslights the other managers into thinking I don’t do shit when I’m the only person in my section that even does anything at all. Go through the whole “try to make them quit” playbook but never do anything wrong so they can’t fire me. I would have outlasted all those fuckers if circumstance hadn’t forced me to move out of state.
Pretty sure they just wanted to eliminate my full-time position to save money.
Been there
My rule at work has always been based around the bears and hikers analogy. You dont have to be the best at what you do. Just dont be the worst.
Also some jobs afford opportunities for non-conventional self-education. If you can learn useful personal or professional skills while at working, do it, and under the guise of work.
Bro, I’m salaried and only really need to work six hours a day. So that’s exactly what I do. My coworkers put in 12-14 hours a day six days a week… We get the same paycheck.
Granted, I’m consistently rated at the bottom of my department by my supervisors, but I’m also the most highly requested employee by our customers. Literally no one else gets requested by name and I have to triage projects.
Some people are passionate about always doing the best they can, and they get a great deal of satisfaction from it. I love being excellent at what I do.
I don’t have a wife or kids. My jobs are a huge part of my identity. Heck - my night job teaching is something I do because I want to do it, not for the little bit of extra money.
But I also know that I’m weird. Most people just want to do their job and go home to their families, and that’s great. They’re doing the job, so they should be compensated every bit as much as the people like me who are devoted to their work.
Nah, I get it. I’m much the same way - I don’t do things half assed - just not made that way.
That said, I’m also not going to eat the corporate brainwashing gruel. The higher up you go the more you see people just flat accept stupid corporate decisions as ‘enlightened’ and they heavily adopt the corporate lexicon. Who needs a critical eye when you fit in?
Fuck that noise.
While I realize there are rules, structures, and culture in place. They shouldn’t hinder people. IDGAF about how someone does something as long as the product is technically sound, reads like Tolstoy, and was efficiently created.
Later on: the employee who does extra work will make the employee who does the bare minimum getting fired, but he doesn’t get a wage increase. He will however complain about “lazy” people like immigrants, the disabled, etc. instead.
Eh, going the extra mile is how I went from customer service agent to senior server engineer in 5 years (with the same company).
There’s always a balance between the two, but the most important thing is knowing how to say no without sounding like you’re saying no.
that’s capitalist bullshit
OK, buddy.
that’s why I outsource the work to other parts of the world for a cheaper price. They will do it better, cheaper, faster and won’t whine about.
Isn’t this socialism? 😜
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(Joking! before anyone hurts me)
I get bigger raises.
Using optimistic numbers from my workplace–
Is an extra 3% a year worth the 20% more work you’re doing?
The key is to look like you are doing 20% more work, but not actually do 20% more work. Of course that only works in certain cases.
Considering I’ve reached the point where for the first time in my life at the end a 2 week cycle SOMETHING is left over even if just a little bit? Yes.
