[watermelon59]

> I do not care about being competitve.

> I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.

I’ve made the mistake of saying that out loud during pre-pandemic lunch conversations and happy hours and every time people looked at me like I had two heads.

[jseban]

I think it's a perfectly healthy and normal attitude to have, but the thing is that it's only your perspective as the employee, and to avoid being short sighted and irresponsible, you have to also to some extent consider the perspective of the company as well.

I mean, in the extension if nobody cares a single f about being competitive, then maybe your whole company doesn't care about being competitive either, and oopsies some other company cared a bit more and now you don't have any jobs anymore...

[jdgoesmarching]

There are people who’s job it is to care about the perspective of the company, and they make a lot more than any of us.

If a company wants its employees to care, it can re-organize itself as a co-op. Until then, our relationship is purely transactional.

[Aeolun]

As long as you are enjoying yourself it’s fine right? I enjoyed that for a while too, but just developing became boring, so now I’m also trying to play office politics. Not in the sense of some machiavellan scheme, but previously I’d just utterly ignore it.

[pm90]

Office politics can be amusing if you’re able to step away from it a bit and don’t care too much about the rat race. It’s immediately obvious who are the folks genuinely interested in building value and who are drones interpreting what their managers order them to do.

[dclusin]

Eventually someone has to do the lowly business of actually implementing the value that those 10x ninja fullstack super senior software architects just created. God bless the drones.

[TeMPOraL]

It's a self-inflicted problem. They shouldn't have promoted those 10x ninja superstars out of development and into management roles (and apparently, "principal engineer" and even "senior engineer" is frequently just faux-management - all the responsibilities, none of the authority of a real manager).

I find it ironic that our industry trains up developers until the point they finally become competent at their jobs, and immediately force them to manage new breed of trainees instead of doing the work they're good at.

[mschuster91]

It's a real pity how much resources get outright wasted due to petty office politics squabbles... too bad many managers don't care :/