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by majormajor 1154 days ago
I've found nothing more frustrating in jobs than when I can't help but care about things the company doesn't care about.

If your company doesn't care about 50K I don't think there's a need for me to convince you to care about it. If they have no mechanism for either raising those savings opportunities to leadership and prioritizing fixes, or rewarding someone for saving them 50k on their own, they pretty clearly don't care.

So if you're in a company where nothing that you could do from your own initiative would matter to the company (maybe you can save them 50k but they are spending 400 million a year so it's a drop in the bucket), you can still care about success for job security, any sort of bonus or stock compensation, etc. But how much you should care maybe should be proportional to how much you can influence.

Maybe the company is being irrational to not care, maybe they aren't, but you also choosing not to care about the things they don't care about seems healthy to me.

(It's good to remember that while "Quiet Quitting" is the buzzword of the day, this is also literally the premise of a 25 year old movie, Office Space. Literally down to the level of "it's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I don't care" and "Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? ")

2 comments

> "I've found nothing more frustrating in jobs than when I can't help but care about things the company doesn't care about."

Gotta put it in my fortune file.

Fortune has so many hilarious lines in it. I feel like it makes me a little smarter.
replace "saving 50k" with "eliminating tech debt" for many

we all know we could rebuild or refactor systems to improve them, but all we would be doing is spending time and money to earn no more money, because the "improved" product/service wouldn't appear different to the outside world

my new attitude is to not even both with tech debt unless the product will be enhanced or improved in some user-obvious way