OK, hire me, and if I over-perform and help you achieve a business target, I want a triple salary next month. Or better still, 20% of the extra profit.
No? Then you'll keep seeing what you call "mediocrity".
I am a pretty good programmer and have literally saved businesses, several times over the course of my career.
Never again though. A pat on the back is not enough of a reward.
Sorry to disappoint, but.. I don't want to hire you. I am a socialist, I find labor markets morally objectionable. The above is one reason, putting pursuit of profit above human excellence leads to mediocrity.
What benefit does excellence derive for the excellent then, other than feel-good bubbly feelings? If labor cannot differentiate itself then collectively it will do the minimum acceptable and everybody will be mediocre (unless autism).
> What benefit does excellence derive for the excellent then, other than feel-good bubbly feelings?
Ultimately anything can only give you feelings. I don't understand what else would you expect from (pursuing) being excellent (just to clarify, I define "being excellent" here as being extremely skilled at some ex ante selected task or creative process; both individuals and organizations can have that property).
But I get what you're saying. You feel like being excellent should give you money, fame and ladies. But you can get these things without being excellent. At some point, being excellent is a burden, and it's irrational to pursue it if you have those goals (of money, fame, etc.). (Someone else said in this thread that they want "a credit" for the excellence. Well if you want that, you don't need to be excellent, you just need to be good at pretending that you're, in front of people who you ask for the credit.)
Now, corporations (and private companies in general) are setup to pursuit profit, not excellency. If excellency gets in the way of profit, and mediocrity is sufficient, they won't pursue excellency, regardless what the individuals in those companies want. That's organizational laziness. Note that organizational laziness is rational (and we teach it to MBAs), because rationality only ever makes sense with respect to your goals (which here is pursuit of profit, not of excellency). But that also means, rationality is never gonna tell you which goals you should pursue. Therefore, to decide to want excellency will always be an inherently irrational act (therefore, you only do it for good feelings).
The point of the second comment I made was that yes, some people choose to build mediocre (capitalist) organizations (based on profit maximization and labor market) in pursuit of organizational excellency. To me as a socialist, this is a foolish mistake. If you're interested in excellency, you should build organizations of peers (like cooperatives) who intrinsically share that goal, not subordinates who have to be motivated extrinsically. I should also note, every organization will get parasites who have different goals, like work for less effort. Unless these people are somehow a burden on the goal of excellency, they are less problematic in organizations that pursue excellency than in capitalist organizations that pursue profit. Therefore, the organizations where the excellency maximization is a goal may seem to be collectively less efficient (more wasteful) than those where profit maximization is a goal. Again, this comes from the fact that being excellent is not necessarily the optimal way to pursue an extrinsic goal, such as profit.
Hand-wavy dismissals are not a discussion argument. I don't accept this as a rebuttal.
> You feel like being excellent should give you money, fame and ladies.
And that's called "tearing down a straw man". Why are you arguing in such a bad faith?
The only thing most of us who finally smartened up about the labor market is this: profit must correspond with reward.
You and others seem to conflate this pragmatic view with the suggestion that we do sloppy work. No, we do our work just fine and we do it well, reliably, and on schedule. What we do NOT do is to go above and beyond.
But you and others seem to get triggered on other topics (mostly about human excellence and "we as a society must all help") that have almost nothing to do with the discussed topic and give your takes not on it, but on these other things.
Finally, profit being an "extrinsic goal" is a needless philosophization and does not advance any discussion.
This. From worker's point of view it's irrational to work hard if the pay sucks. Good management should realize that, and demand less from underpaid workers. Embrace the culture of laziness, or pay a fair wage.
