This is 100% dead on, and I think people like the OP don’t quite get it.
Tying this back to his question of doing my very best out of a sense of self esteem, I can relay my anecdote of “career self discovery” (apologize for the pretentiousness). I already summarized a lot of my career experience in my previous post. At one point I started volunteering for a local dog rescue group. Because they needed people and never said no, I quickly jumped up into a board position where I was doing bookkeeping, mentoring new adopters, fundraising, organizing events, recruiting and managing volunteers and also of course organizational governance. After a couple years of that I stepped down and then did all that for another group.
At that point I realized that I’d stretched myself and learned so much more about my leadership and administrative/organizational abilities than I’d ever learned in a couple decades of my paid career. It was such a confidence booster. So when I was done with that, I launched my own small business which I still run today. THAT is where I give 150% purely out of a sense of self-worth. For me at least, I can’t do my very utmost best unless I have very long “reins”. And that’s something that most paid jobs can’t or won’t give you. They are too risk averse. My incentive to outperform is to find a way to blow my own mind with what I’ve accomplished.
It is easy to see the shittiness of that kind of attitude, but I don’t think it is inherently shitty.
A few months back there was a Reddit thread posted by someone who was sad because all his coworkers hated him. Comes to find out that he was working 10 hour days at the office when everyone else was clocking out at after eight. He was spending the extra time honing his coding skills and not actually working for the company. But to management, he probably looked like the super committed and dedicated employee. It doesn’t take much for “super” to become the new expectation level that everyone is held to. Too bad if you can’t or don’t want to.
As a single, childless person, I try to be careful about this. I could work crazy long hours if I wanted to and impress my bosses in the process. But getting along with my coworkers is also important. I don’t want them to love me, but I don’t want them to hate me either. And I don’t want the work effort I put out when I am young and unburdened to be the standard I am judged against when I am old and more weighed down with responsibilities.
Add me to the many that doesn’t base my self-worth on my job performance - at least, not enough that I feel I need to break my back to be worth something. Even taking it relatively easy I’m one of the best programmers at my (rather small) workplace, if not the best programmer here, and I certainly am satisfying expectations. My bosses are happy with my work and I’m objectively awesome. Even when I’m taking it relatively easy.
But I could certainly do more. Work harder. Work longer hours (for no additional money). Push myself. Lose my evenings. Lose touch with my family. Burn out. Get stress headaches. Start hating my job. Start hating my life.
These are things I could do. But, well, I really don’t see the appeal.
I base my level of effort on what I want to get out of my career. If I don’t like how I’m treated at work, then I’m there to get the skills and experience that will take me to my next job.
But generally, no. I don’t buy into this “hustle culture” bullshit of “crushing it” at your stupid corporate job stuffed into an open-plan office.
So if you don’t drink, where did you come up with the notion that the best way to “go far” in your career is to drink and hang out in bars?
If you’re a manager and your employees are ordered to comply, they will on average, and average is what you’ll get, and that’s perfectly fine for a lot of businesses/industries. Unless you’re really trying to get a stellar bonus, maybe crack some skulls.
Or establish metrics to evaluate performance, and systems to improve performance, as well as consequences for underachievement, as well as rewards for overachievement…
The problem with using metrics to evaluate performance is that they very often define ‘underachievement’ is such a way that doing the job thoroughly to the best of your ability is ‘underachievement’ while doing just enough to solve a problem for the moment is what gets the rewards for ‘overachievement’. For example, retail workers are often evaluated on pushing store credit cards onto people. If you really try to do your best for people, you shouldn’t push the cards onto people it might be a bad idea for, but obviously if that’s the metric then you sell, sell, sell. Tech support is often evaluated on their ability to quickly close calls, which means that their best bet for complicated issues is not to solve them but to try to get them out of their name ASAP so they don’t get dinged for it. Escalate it if possible, transfer it to someone, close it and hope someone else gets the call back, and so on all result in better rewards than trying to fix it.
Yeah, I have to agree with you. The metrics become corrupted over time, like at Enron. And I’ve seen it at the BMV where they were trying to reduce wait time, by denying service for anything minor. I would like to think those situations will eventually resolve themselves in the long run.
In my second day at what ended up being one of my favorite customers, my direct manager told me “ slow down, we don’t want to make the internals look bad”. We needed their collaboration, as well as that of those people in our team who weren’t as fast as Boss, Wolfman and me; we didn’t really gain anything from those of us who were faster making a show out of it, and Boss knew who were the fast workers; she’d take advantage of this to distribute some tasks to those who were actually available in a way that didn’t make anybody look or feel bad; she would also tell the Wolfman and me to work from home on certain periods where she knew we really didn’t have jackshit to do, with specific instructions to check our mail twice a day and otherwise make sure the Cub was growing up correctly (he was) and the streets of Barcelona were where I’d left them (they were), respectively.
Keeping pace with slower people when the team needs to meet certain goals at the same time isn’t a problem so long as I don’t expect to look busy and frazzled while I do so. Being told “take it easy” by someone who means it, I’m OK with.
The responses everyone is giving are so far from what I though my original question was, that I thought I must have phrased it wrong or something. But I went back and looked and the OP is
“Why would a person based their attitude or work ethic on other people’s attitude or work ethic? I don’t get that”
So basically, if your coworkers are slacking off, or doing a crappy job, do you start to slack off or do a crappy job? Or do you continue to work at whatever effort you worked at before you noticed them slacking off.
For example: Imagine your company required cover sheets on the TPS reports. Everyone knows that cover sheets are required on the TPS reports. But you’ve discovered that nobody else puts cover sheets on their TPS reports. Do you stop putting the cover sheets on your TPS reports, or do you continue to do it because you know that is the requirement?
From watching other lazier, less-qualified, less-knowledgable, less-experienced people in my industry who do drink somehow succeed and in some cases/ways surpass my own career.
I just saw this post. One of my earliest memories of something that formed my personality was the realization, in 3rd grade, that I was being taken advantage of by my teacher.
I was far ahead the other kids in most subjects, but especially in Reading (remember when it was a skill with a capital letter? :)) and Math. My “reward” for this was that I got to help the other kids, especially the ones who were struggling with either subject.
Fuck that. I finish my shit early and then I have to do Bobby and Sue and Chris’s shit too? Fuck that.
Depends. What does the person who *gets *the TPS reports do? Do they make no comment on the missing cover sheets, and proceed with their job as normal? If so, then sure I’d stop - because clearly nobody cares about it, and if nobody cares about it it’s not a real requirement.
If I ever hear the TPS person bitching “God, I wish someone would put a cover sheet on their report once in a while”, then yes, I’d put the cover sheet on.
slow down, we don’t want to make the internals look bad”. We needed their collaboration, as well as that of those people in our team who weren’t as fast as Boss, Wolfman and me; we didn’t really gain anything from those of us who were faster making a show out of it, and Boss knew who were the fast workers; she’d take advantage of this to distribute some tasks to those who were actually available in a way that didn’t make anybody look or feel bad; she would also tell the Wolfman and me to work from home on certain periods where she knew we really didn’t have jackshit to do, with specific instructions to check our mail twice a day and otherwise make sure the Cub was growing up correctly (he was) and the streets of Barcelona were where I’d left them (they were), respectively.