I tried this one time., to actually be a great employee. This was well into my senior programmer status, got hired at at a new gig, and I liked the place. So they had a massive chunk of work. I busted my ass for 3 months to get it done in time, nights, weekends, you name it.
We got it done, zero bugs too, was honestly impressed.
A month later they asked me why my velocity had dropped. Well, because I pushed hard for that, but this is normal times, I’m well within my fellow engineers ranges right? Well sure, but you’re about 20% lower on our charts. Was told I would need to get that back up if I wanted to be eligible for raises or promotions. My 6 month review came up and that was forefront. I “showed promise” early on but I had been lacking lately. They mentioned my huge project as a footnote.
Seriously kids, don’t try. Business will formulate everything you do into graphs, and they only care if line goes up. Stay in line with your coworkers, and nudge the line up only noticeably through the years. They want to play stupid games, give them stupid prizes.
This is how MBAs are taught to manage.
On the plus side, it sure informs employees early on in their careers to some utterly preposterous truths.
If you try, don’t try until 6 weeks before your evaluation. What you did 10.5 months ago doesn’t matter, what you did yesterday matters a LOT
Sounds like you should apply somewhere else.
I manage devs and am a dev, and I look for personal progress and impact on the broader team. If I had someone like you, I would first tell you to slow your roll a bit (nobody should we working nights and weekends) and give you more visible work in the future, because you obviously know how to get stuff done, and you need that visible work so I can make a stronger case to promote you. A lot of the time, it’s not the amount of work you do, but how visible your work is to the people who hold the purse strings, and my job as a dev manager is to make sure the good devs get credit and decide to stick around.
Oh yeah, learned the lesson and moved onto a different place. Learned that pushing yourself will only earn yourself more work, and they’ll forget you immediately.
Sometimes the only reward for digging the biggest hole is a bigger shovel
Confirmed
All I got was a bigger plot that needed to be turned into a hole yesterday. Same shovel, just all dinged up and worn out now.
The secret is to under promise and under deliver. You just need to be better than the worst guy.
I’m currently the “subject matter expert” on a nightmare project by having been exposed to it the most without going mad.
Have you gazed into an abyss long enough to have the abyss gaze back into you, without becoming endlessly lost in said abyss? Congrats, you’re now team lead on the abyss project.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Protips:
- walk everywhere fast. About as fast as if you don’t get to the toilet immediately, there will be a serious accident
- when someone asks ‘How are you?’ or how you’re going, the first words out of your mouth are “Busy” or “Flat out!”. Adding anything after that is optional.
- Bonus points for always being the one to initiate the break off in a conversation. Look at watch, “Well, I gotta run, XYZ is due…”
- The immaculate hat-trick is combining all three without breaking stride as you blast last someone
