[testfrequency]

I saw this often.

The heroes who are up late, solving a page or mitigating an outage are often the ones remembered and rewarded.

Meanwhile, a dependable, resourceful, and independent IC who “picks up trash on the floor”, promotes good work habits, and is dead reliable - no praise, they are just “doing their job”

Managers and leaders like drama, most staff and senior engineers gravitate to drama and love talking about it. Their day to to day work, often subpar and often not team players

[Ma8ee]

Yes, this is my problem. I'm seen as slow, because I take my time to deliver my stuff. And I'm rarely the hero of fixing some outage or some critical bug. Because my stuff works, quietly. The heros are always busy; fixing that bug and extinguishing that fire and delivers the new feature in a day (as soon as they clean up the latest incident). What people see is that I take three days to deliver the same feature. What they don't see is that I don't have to spend in total two weeks (spread over some time), fixing bugs and cleaning up corrupt data for the same feature.

[deafpolygon]

Reminds me of my time as a sysadmin managing over 100 individual linux boxes by myself. Nothing ever broke (in dramatic fashion, I mean) and new stuff were delivered on a steady schedule. I didn't spend all my time fighting fires, so the perception was that I wasn't doing anything amazing. I have to constantly point out the uptime, that every single case that needed it, we always had data recovery, but that was just considered part of my job.

[taocoyote]

I once knew a soldier that had reconfigured his tent heater to be out of the way by placing it against the side of his tent. The tent caught fire. He received and award for putting out the fire.

I have seen this pattern repeated a few times throughout my career. People are rewarded for putting out fires they created (metaphorically), but people who are diligent and don't create problems to solve are overlooked or seen as less than capable.

[hammock]

Everyone is selling something, and stories are how you do it. Can’t have a story without some drama

[agumonkey]

This is why I need a different job. This pattern sucks energy out of me. I need military minded coders.

[GoodDreams]

I’m interested in understanding what it means to be a military minded coder.

[alisonatwork]

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

[agumonkey]

Festina lente

[agumonkey]

On the field there's no time for false drama or fluff, you have resources (time, energy, devices) and you keep doing the best you can at every step. And if you don't think enough about how you plan your operations, you die.

I don't want my teammates to feel on the verge of death, but I really, really work better if I'm operating at high pace and density and if the team also does that, like swarm of people attacking all problems at all levels on the job.

[californical]

It’s likely a reference to the story in the linked article