You get taught your entire childhood that the only thing that matters is how hard you work. That you're only as good as your word, and the path to success and happiness is paved by your work ethic.
But that isn't how it works, is it? The people that wind up the most successfully aren't necessarily the people that had the most determination, that put in the most work. (Not that it doesn't help)
It seems you can viably make a living by either working yourself to the bone, or by being really good at bullshitting and office politics.
Having acquaintances that are much more successful than you, yet couldn't produce value if you held a gun to their head really makes you think.
And that's not the worst bit -- many of them don't actually care about their work/job, or what they provide to a company. It's a means to an end, they do as little as possible.
Life is way more complicated than parents tell their children.
Preaching "the only thing that matters is how hard you work" probably demaged more lifes than COVID will ever do. What about supply and demand? ("selling sand in the desert" might condemn you to failure no matter how hard you work) What about alliances?
I used to believe in pure meritocracy also. Nowadays, at least on a individual level, I have solid doubts. Suppose you are in a position to promote/reward one of two contenders: a "jerk" and your best friend. The "jerk" happens to be better (by your standards), but not clearly better. Who should you reward/promote? By the meritocracy law this is a no brainer but is it the right/optimal decision? By doing it you will erode a friendship. Do this often and soon you'll be without allies thanks to the "God of Meritocracy". By the other hand, if we go too far in this path, we arrive to Nepotism and society will suffer with it. Like most things in life there is a balance that must be kept.
Pre-define your endgame lifestyle, calculate the costs, and then get off at your stop.
Seriously, it's like a project cost estimate. How many kids do you want to have? Where do you want to live? What do you want to live in? When do you want to retire? What do you estimate yearly costs will be by the time of retirement? Calculate the cost of everything (it'll be in the millions) and then you've got a handle on how much money you'll need every year, and what you need to grow into.
Then you've got a target to aim for, and you can either adjust the target (increasing frugality, downgrading your expectations) or you can upgrade your weapon (switching careers, gunning for higher-up positions).
It's important to remember that no one actually feels rich or successful. If you have a million dollars, you'll be able to hang out with guys who have ten million dollars. But those guys can hang out with guys who have a hundred million dollars... it's a never-ending slide of bigger houses, better vehicles, longer vacations, more important jobs, and it never feels satisfying- unless you decided where you were going to stop.
How could you be bothered by someone being more successful than you if you already decided how successful you wanted to be?
This is actually spot-on for my views in this area. I have a QoL in mind, the inputs required, and a general expectation that I won't get morality from my workplace unless I go to the civil service.
It brings a form of inner capitalist peace. Rant incoming....
I think many Americans, of which I am one of course, expect their offices to be that moral link, and from there all of this anger (justifiably maybe once it shows false) flows as that morality doesn't exist there. This anger gets made worse by the SV trope of "Making the world a better place by X," which overtime starts to ring untrue because of course it's untrue. This then gets further exacerbated by seeing a-hole, incompetent Brian's lifestyle far outstrip yours, and it seems like Brian doesn't much care about making the world a better place but is succeeding at these companies. What management books has he been reading?
This is an old hand but it's true: if you want morals and a sense of tangible community, seek out a bowling league, your Boy Scout troop (RIP s/), your church, Boys and Girls club, a soup kitchen, the PTA, local govt, school boards, mentorship programs, jesus I can go on and on. These are places that are crying out for volunteers usually and make tangible impacts on local communities that a fleet of donated Chromebooks will never make. Why do I feel empty inside after closing this project? It's because it doesn't compare to mentoring a low-income kid into college that only requires of you 1x Thur night a week to do vs. 400 sprints and Brian to get those Chromebooks out the door and into a school.
Want to go really wild? Take that dev or infosec job at your city govt. Lord knows they need the help - be the team that unfks the COVID unemployment API (if only it was that simple haha, but still). But no, that job pays $90k to my $160k and no Asana.
What am I supposed to tell you friend :shrug:. Morality is out there but it takes a paycut or IRL interactions on a Thursday night. Buy into tech capitalism and the UES apartment and all the tradeoffs or don't, but you can't have it both ways in this system.
I agree with everything you said, but having worked as a contractor for the civil service, there's not a lot of morality here- more incompetence and cruising for pensions than can possibly be believed, though.
As an aside, that pay cut is exactly why the gov't programmers are struggling. Top talent wants money, and the government will not offer competitive salaries, so the government IT structure is all garbage, and the cycle continues...
Because working hard is not important if it has no impact. I've had people work really hard, I tell them to make sure to do blah, and to focus on blah2, and to let people know that they did blah3. They ignore that and just work on what they think is important, and work super hard.
Then eventually people realize what they did is a bit "offtrack" and doesn't connect to an existing system that everyone agreed is going to be the base platform going forward, and it's also not immediately useful because it didn't focus on blah2, and it doesn't cover this use case that everyone else cares about (but that they don't think it's a big deal), and other people don't ever figure out it does blah3 because they never documented it properly and used a less familiar term for it. Also, everyone is now stressed out, because what this person did now needs to be replaced in way less time. Well then, all that "value" they produced was just a waste of company money, frankly.
So yeah, I would promote the person that worked less hard, but was well connected to figure out what others care about and is important to the company, and made sure that piece worked great. And the person that produced less, but enabled others to produce more (either from a technical standpoint, or a morale/assurance standpoint) so overall the output was greater. It's a no brainer.
Also, people who are constantly thinking about their own productivity can be dismissive of others, creating a bad work environment. So you don't want to elevate those behaviors.
I think the person is talking about cases where working hard had a big impact, but the person did not benefit from it.
This is fairly normal. The only job I had where this wasn't the case was the one where the manager and his manager had grown from within - had worked on the same stuff we had, so they knew the ins and outs.
In all other cases, it's a manager who came from another team, and while they were very technically competent, they had never done our job. They usually were not in touch with what was needed to get the job done, and placed little value on much of the labor needed to get it done. This usually leads to team members manipulating their way into getting someone else to do the real work so they can do their manager's pet project. They get the promotion, even though the pet project dies soon after, and the folks doing the bread and butter for the team stay where they're at.
This straw man is the thing you fall back on to rationalize not working hard and not caring, just playing politics and taking credit for each other's work?
