[wildrhythms]

I work at a big corp and my experience is swaths of the year (I'm talking weeks at a time) when upper management is engaging in faction warfare many levels above me, and my own manager doesn't know what the team should be working on until upper management can set priorities. So I have nothing to work on. I guess this is 'coasting'.

[fooker]

I remember a situation during my stint at Google, VP involved in a not-really-competing internal system kept threatening us about comparing our system against theirs so we don't make them look bad. Even though there was an explicit internal benchmark (made by them!) that was made for such comparisons!

Our team was flabbergasted that this could even be an issue.

[refulgentis]

That's an excellent example. TL;DR: Working through why people did that ultimately lead to my epiphany that no, it wasn't that everyone else was lazy, they were just better-adjusted via understanding tradeoffs.

Longer version. Sorry to torture the threads with these, but I've noticed people don't take 'BigCo is a weird, strange, place' stories seriously unless there's a full anecdote coupled to it:

Google was my first real job, got very very lucky with a transition from dropout waiter => startup founder => sold => 9 months later, did interviews as a joke and...passed?

My first few years, I didn't understand this was happening, and eventually we got transferred to Android, and it was just an absolute directionless wasteland for at least 4 months. I couldn't even begin to understand why my peers A) had no work B) were fine with it C) when we tried talking about this, it was like we were speaking different languages.

I saw it as a 'leadership opportunity' and butted my/our way in to a big project and picked up another. Huge stuff. Visual redo of key property, and on the side, got a fundamental change to the input method for the same property, delivered by me client side and server side, then wheeled and dealed to get it deployed cross-platform.

That whole year peers didn't invest in the visual redo, even though it was ostensibly our teams work. Our newly promoted manager never planned / assigned work to people, and was out for about 50% of that first year.

It turned into Lord of the Flies while they were out. Only 2 peers worked on it out of 4. #3 helped out on a lower-key project. #4 focused on advocating for a feature that'd watch your screen and ex. tell you Infowars was Very Bad if you visited Infowars. At Old Google you could work on obviously bad ideas like this and you just wouldn't advance. It's a good thing that this would only last a month or two these days, if it happened at all.

Peer A was extremely confident but also extremely out of touch, for example, 2 weeks before launch they spent 5 minutes arguing with the partner team, telling the it was impossible that we had written all our code in $BINARY_A instead of $BINARY_B...which we had. When faced with the bare fact, they then went with "oh no wonder why nothing works" (???)

Peer B was relatively new to tech, so the histrionics the other would leap to had a massive influence on them. Always horrified we were doing anything at all without getting 3 separate approvals first, stapled to a direct request laying out exactly what was required, instead of just a Figma / GIF.

Peer B also got _insanely_ over-the-top mean to me after the project. Yet, they were nice and extremely intelligent generally.

That's when it finally clicked for me that something was off and I needed to approach the coasting question more inquisitively:

_what_ were they seeing differently?

They understood they were avoiding pain that they'd get ~0 credit for working through.

They were right.

I got excellent reviews from the partner team and product manager, I got awful reviews from Peer A and a meh one from peer B, and got a middling performance review after moving 2 mountains essentially solo.

Though, a $10K bonus, this was standard payout for staying silent / not complaining after dealing with an obviously toxic situation.

I had to appeal to VPs for recommendations the next year to break through the "gee you moved two mountains and had great feedback from everyone _not_ on the team, but peer A and peer B didn't like you much"