[pdimitar]

> And, my guess is that the reason for it is that nobody really wants to work too hard.

There is certainly a lot of that but it gets even worse: you get actively punished for doing good work in many companies: you end up making other people work like asking managers around for product requirements (that are of course barely written somewhere, if at all) or reminding that sysadmin that they half-arsed the job of the deployment and now must add another k8s resource, or asking another dev why did they do X with the Y library... you want to make sure not to screw something up but you just end up annoying them.

And sadly these things get brought up on meetings. And many over-zealous managers will scold you because they don't like the boat rocked (even if they would actually welcome their initiative; but that assumes they'd have made an effort to understand the situation which is not a given).

It's no surprise that many talented people just end up checking in, doing the bare minimum, and clocking out. The equation is extremely easy to solve: "work X*3, get scolded, don't get promotions, accumulate hostility in colleagues" vs. "work X and have peace and quiet".

[crabbone]

Haha. Yeah. I almost got fired in my first month because I asked another developer something I thought was really innocent: they mixed some code from pytest with unittest (two competing Python unit-testing libraries) where either one or the other could do the job perfectly fine. So, I naturally asked why'd they do it. Not even being mean. They, of course, interpreted this as me being snarky... complained to the management, and I had to look for another department to house me.

Now I write "sorry" and "excuse me" when I get assigned to review someone's code and I mostly fix typos in the comments. But, even so, I don't get assigned to code reviews all that often :)

[pdimitar]

Yep, had several similar such occurrences and my mind is boggled every time. I personally welcome any opportunity to learn and improve, but many people apparently don't.