[QuercusMax]

I'm definitely not in the same boat as the OP (trying to get away with doing the minimum), but because I hate to be the long pole on a project, I always try to get my pieces done well in advance of when they're required. As I work primarily on infra, I can usually manage to pull this off.

What this means is that often when crunch time hits, I've got excess capacity I can use to help "row the boat" (or maybe bail out water from leaks?). Excess capacity is extremely valuable as lots of folks are really bad at time estimation, so having some more senior "floaters" around can really help get projects completed.

Excess capacity is also useful for longer-term efforts. You need at least a few folks who can get out of the low-level crunch mindset and figure out what needs to be done for sustainability of efforts, or else you just end up in mega-crunch forever.

[reader_mode]

I've seen something similar backfire for a guy I worked with. He had this idea that he would get his shit done Monday-Thursday and have an easy WFH Friday.

People ended up doing most work towards end of sprint and Friday would usually be really busy - basically he always had to be present and management would offload priority stuff to him since he was done. So he'd end up busting his ass all week. Eventually he got tired and reverted to standard schedule - but this meant his relative performance dropped - I saw him get singled out in a review for performance drop (and not a lot of people noticed when he was going above the norm).

[bbkane]

I'm surprised he didn't just switch his "light day" to Monday or another weekday.

[reader_mode]

But the end result would have been the same - he wouldn't finish his tasks ahead of time, he wouldn't have spare capacity on Friday - management notices this and thinks he's underperforming

[QuercusMax]

Seems like if he had done that, he would have been just like the rest of the team, getting everything done last-minute but still shipping stuff.

[QuercusMax]

Obvious your mileage may vary, and timeframes matter. I'm talking about getting my pieces done weeks or months in advance of when we need to ship, not days or hours.