> I'm confused why this is the top comment - how exactly can you be "one of the top performers" at your company while also "focusing on doing the least amount of work you can get away with"??
I've been at a few companies where the "top performers" were doing the least amount of work they could get away with. It was a combination of two things:
1) Extreme politicking. They were charismatic, charming, and connected within the company. They were in all the right meetings to take credit for successes and shift blame for failures. They may have connections, like being long-time friends of the CEO, that made them untouchable and targets for flattery/praise from people hoping to climb the ladder. They always insisted that they didn't participate in politics, but then they'd go on to describe something like manipulating the system so they could get the easy, high-profile work and sticking others with the grunt work. Nobody likes to think that they play politics themselves, but that's what it is.
2) Gaming the system. They knew, or even created, the hidden metrics that were used to evaluate employee productivity. For example, one person was busy chatting in Slack every day with short one-line messages. He created a dashboard of Slack activity that ranked employees (where he was always on top by a wide margin) and encouraged his team to be very active in Slack, while the rest of us had no idea. At another company we were secretly evaluated by lines of code committed, so of course the "top performer" was always committing a lot of generated code and constantly "refactoring" other people's code by moving it around to increase their Git activity.
It's a massive red flag when you're at a company and can visibly see that the "top performers" are avoiding work and playing games. It means you can never get ahead by working. This creates a cynical worldview (much like the parent comment) that work isn't about work, it's about gaming the system and extracting cash from the company while minimizing your work. It's really cynical cycle that puts people in a bad position when they leave for well-run companies where good work is actually rewarded.
Don't get stuck in that mindset, because it's tough for some people to escape. If you're at a company where the rewards go to people who game the system while those who work are languishing, you should start searching for a new job.
When I was a little boy and just joined another back office unit, my first assignment from boss was to create a spreadsheet, that basically served as a log of performed work. The boss went out of his way to tell me to hide anything that would give other employees an idea of what is being tracked ( in that case, average cases resolved ). I did with objections that it is not a great metric to begin with and that people are not idiots. I was overruled, but we didn't have to wait long for results. People starting skipping 'hard cases' to up their averages and grabbing 'easy cases'( cuz you know.. during one on ones boss discussed averages without officially disclosing it ). People are not idiots and they quickly figure our what is being rewarded ( or at least not punished ).
It was my first time learning that boss can make stupid decisions too.
I totally agree, but OOP said that they refuse to play the politic games. I don't see how you can be 1) a top performer, 2) refuse to politic, and 3) not work hard. I think that's a "pick two of these three" situation.
I've been at a few companies where the "top performers" were doing the least amount of work they could get away with. It was a combination of two things:
1) Extreme politicking. They were charismatic, charming, and connected within the company. They were in all the right meetings to take credit for successes and shift blame for failures. They may have connections, like being long-time friends of the CEO, that made them untouchable and targets for flattery/praise from people hoping to climb the ladder. They always insisted that they didn't participate in politics, but then they'd go on to describe something like manipulating the system so they could get the easy, high-profile work and sticking others with the grunt work. Nobody likes to think that they play politics themselves, but that's what it is.
2) Gaming the system. They knew, or even created, the hidden metrics that were used to evaluate employee productivity. For example, one person was busy chatting in Slack every day with short one-line messages. He created a dashboard of Slack activity that ranked employees (where he was always on top by a wide margin) and encouraged his team to be very active in Slack, while the rest of us had no idea. At another company we were secretly evaluated by lines of code committed, so of course the "top performer" was always committing a lot of generated code and constantly "refactoring" other people's code by moving it around to increase their Git activity.
It's a massive red flag when you're at a company and can visibly see that the "top performers" are avoiding work and playing games. It means you can never get ahead by working. This creates a cynical worldview (much like the parent comment) that work isn't about work, it's about gaming the system and extracting cash from the company while minimizing your work. It's really cynical cycle that puts people in a bad position when they leave for well-run companies where good work is actually rewarded.
Don't get stuck in that mindset, because it's tough for some people to escape. If you're at a company where the rewards go to people who game the system while those who work are languishing, you should start searching for a new job.