[muzani]

Ideally it's good to give it 110% and then take a lot of rest. This is how you improve. But there needs to be trust there. So find a job which you can trust, and which trusts you. Your colleagues and boss should have your back, like a military squad would. If one of you needs to be away, you'll cover up the workload for them or they'll cover for you. If your leader feels you're tired or overworked, they'll try to push work away from you.

But that's an ideal. Many jobs are transactional; they squeeze what they want from you, and you squeeze what you can from them. In situations like this, you'll have to give it 80%. There's tricks to look like you're working more than you are. If the boss expects you to work at nights, you slack off in the day. You complete a task, read HN for a couple hours, then commit the code later to pad your effort.

But this 80% will make you mediocre in the long run. Going at less effort than you can will decrease your energy. Find something that's closer to your pace. They'll seek to punish you for doing well, so find someone who appreciates your efforts.

[Graffur]

It's impossible to give more than 100%

[muzani]

Say, your record is 10 push ups. You try to do 11. That's how you improve. You might actually be able to do 40 in a group session or 131 if your life depended on it, but there's no record of that.

But that way you end up targeting 211 in a month which at some point becomes impossible.

If you aim for 100% you'll never improve so it's only natural that all managers put you above expectations. However, instead of pushing you to that 40, some learn that by triggering your survival instincts, they can push you over 100. They think it's growth but it destroys you long term.

The other problem is some people know they can do 10 tasks in 8 hours then take on 11 tasks, and end up doing it 9 hours. This leads to some kind of expectations creep and before you know it, you're working day and night but your ability isn't improving.

So the survival mechanism is to do 8, which the manager pushes up to 9 or 10. So to achieve balance, you have external forces pulling you up while internal forces pulls you down. But this wrecks you internally, and you become dependent on external pressure.

[Graffur]

If 10 pushups is 100%, then you won't make 11. If you do 11, that is 100% of the pushups you can do, not 10.

I didn't say you can't improve but the way I see it is that 100% is the max you can give. Improving doesn't make it 110% otherwise we're all giving 1100000% from when we started our career.

[tra3]

That’s not how we think at awesomesoft; there’s no “I” in team. We always give 110%!

This kinda attitude is gonna land you in the bottom 10% of stack ranking.