[danwee]

> I've felt most burned out were when I worked with people who didn't care, who I couldn't trust to care, and so I ended up being the only person in the room who cared.

Been there, but I don't see it as a problem. On the contrary, by being the only one who cares, I got promotions and salary raises. In the few situations in which I didn't get more than my peers (who didn't give a damn), I resigned.

So, at least for me, being around people who don't care that much is an opportunity for me to by working normal hours (9-5) and caring, get a salary bump.

[JohnMakin]

> On the contrary, by being the only one who cares, I got promotions and salary raises.

This is definitely not always the case. I can think of cases in my own career where this attitude was actually detrimental to my success at the company.

[giantg2]

Mine was detrimental for sure.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> On the contrary, by being the only one who cares, I got promotions and salary raises.

Then management cared.

> In the few situations in which I didn't get more than my peers (who didn't give a damn), I resigned.

Yeah, that's a legitimate response to nobody caring if you can.

[sokoloff]

> by being the only one who cares, I got promotions and salary raises.

Having also been in a similar situation, I'm going to guess that it wasn't actually the caring that made the difference, but the practical actions that you took (motivated by that caring) that made the difference.

It's one thing to "care". It's another to do data recording and a subsequent Pareto analysis of the sources of outage/downtime/bugs/losses, then to apply efforts to solve the 20% of things that likely result in 80% of the losses, thus dramatically improving the operations of the company.

Other people don't seem to care at all, while others "care too much" (meaning won't accept anything other than 100% fixes to 100% of issues, meaning they can skip over the hard work of data collection and analysis).

Creating good outcomes is generally rewarded; mere caring is not.

[hinkley]

In marriage psychology they say the hardest emotion to come back from is contempt. If you are enough more than the people around you, it’s challenging not to end up there. Maybe bigger people have less trouble, but it’s work.

[tambourine_man]

You were very lucky. There are many cases where the people who do the most are not recognized or compensated. It's even seen as detrimental, sometimes.

I’d say most cases, in fact. Being able to standout is a skill.