[a_imho]

Hard disagree, bruteforcing work for rewards is waaay sub optimal in the vast majority of cases. Most people are better off interviewing, job hopping and always-be-leaving and/or social engineering their careers. Note, I'm talking about competent people who can hold a job. Any unit of effort put in over not-getting-fired is almost 100% wasted (financial) reward wise.

[pi-e-sigma]

Exactly. It's much, much easier to get promoted if you brown-nose or schmooze with your boss. If anything, being the hardest working man in a team is a sure way to not get a promotion because you are too valuable as a work-horse

[tharkun__]

We may have very different ideas about all this. And different experiences and expectations of life.

I'm not sure what "bruteforcing" means here. I definitely had people on my team that were of the "just-enough-not-to-get-fired" variety.

In most places they would not have been fired - agree. But they worked for me and I expect you to actually be doing your job and not just kissing up to the boss. I don't expect you to do overtime and I will protect you and the rest of the team from said overtime BS. I'm really really allergic to unrealistic BS "deadlines" and I'm super extra allergic to deadlines that get set because someone else did not do their job properly (like a PM not planning properly and such).

The general "pretend to be busy for 60h a week" culture is something I despise. Put in a regular 40h (or if that's your place 35h, 37.5h etc.) of work but I don't want to "see" you be on Facebook (or HN for that matter) on work time. And you have to actually display competence when we have a technical conversation. There are so many people being passed off as intermediate to senior level that just do the bare minimum not to get fired that are perpetual juniors with 20 years of experience. The worst guy was actually one of those and he really thought he could weasel his way out of actually doing work with the typical "I ran into issue X and Y and Z and it took forever to solve them" dance. For things that literally take 5 minutes to solve for someone that is not just pretending. Provably. So yeah, not with me. Go work for someone else.

And yes, I got to this place by - horror, shock - actually doing good work. I've gotten 20% raises without asking for them by just doing a regular 40h week doing my normal work.