[CoastalCoder]

An exception I've seen is in the US Navy's R&D activities (NRL and NUWC, specifically).

Plenty of those civilians are lifers with a serious sense of purpose for their work.

You get the occasional dead weight, but it's far less common than you might expect.

[pfannkuchen]

I dunno, I've seen this in multiple FAANGs.

Ladder climbing lifers don't phone it in.

Senior SWE lifers? Phoning it in pretty hard.

Other industries are probably different.

[hnbad]

Some call it "phoning it in", some call it "working sustainably and avoiding burnout". It's fine to "phone it in" for the daily grind if it helps you maintain your reserves for actual emergencies. As the author point out, early Facebook instead instilled a "sense of urgency" which means everything is treated as an emergency all the time, which just means nothing is.

[Aeolun]

I think you need to have a special kind of outlook on life to go work in a navy R&D department.

[CoastalCoder]

How so?