Nah in a lot of cases the guy doing the bare minimum also makes more than you.
He’s a project manager!
Do project managers make decent money? In my field I’ve always been told developers make significantly more.
I would make more as project manager, but I don’t want to be on the phone and write mails with clients all day
I would rather set myself on fire than to look at budgets, billable rates, timesheets, or talk to people.
I’m hardore technically aligned, and far enough along in my career (and at a good enough company) that I can turn down opportunities to PM.
Look at this fat cat who can turn down opportunities over here!
He’s such a dick
May I ask what your field is? I am in software development.
looks around barley, I think? 🤷
Ha. Ha. Ha. Lol, sort of
Every time I’ve been promoted I’ve made more money and done less work. At this rate I’ll be 9-5 on the golf course in a few years making $500k/yr.
Kidding. Golf blows.
Whoa there friend, let’s not disparage the game just because of its association with capitalist pigs and blowhards.
I like mini golf. Good use of land competitively. If CEOs met in the mini golf course I think the world would be in a better place.
More interesting too
Just misses riding the cart
Golf cart racing track! Adjacent to the mini golf
If you see me going the extra mile, it’s probably the side-effects of me using the company’s resources to learn and do crazy experiments for my own gain.
Some people are passionate about always doing the best they can, and they get a great deal of satisfaction from it. I love being excellent at what I do.
I don’t have a wife or kids. My jobs are a huge part of my identity. Heck - my night job teaching is something I do because I want to do it, not for the little bit of extra money.
But I also know that I’m weird. Most people just want to do their job and go home to their families, and that’s great. They’re doing the job, so they should be compensated every bit as much as the people like me who are devoted to their work.
Nah, I get it. I’m much the same way - I don’t do things half assed - just not made that way.
That said, I’m also not going to eat the corporate brainwashing gruel. The higher up you go the more you see people just flat accept stupid corporate decisions as ‘enlightened’ and they heavily adopt the corporate lexicon. Who needs a critical eye when you fit in?
Fuck that noise.
While I realize there are rules, structures, and culture in place. They shouldn’t hinder people. IDGAF about how someone does something as long as the product is technically sound, reads like Tolstoy, and was efficiently created.
I work a shit ton of OT, but I get paid 1.5x or 2x based on circumstances for that extra time
I deliver the same quality of work on ST and OT—my best, but I would never work unpaid OT (e.g. some of my salaried engineers have been living at the job during our system upgrades) or do things well beyond the scope of my job.
Fuck that
I inderstand fully. I used ti go through the same. At the same time I noticed a big difference when i got married. And a huge one when i had kids. Having a child and being responsible for it is a life changing situation. I tell my self that i became an adult not when i turned 18 but when i became a parent. When this happened to me, my perspective about work stoped revolving about being the best, and turbed to be just and help others be better. That made me soon to realize that those 2 cannot get always together.
Tldr: work 2 live > live 2 work
It depends on the company and how they treat your job, but mostly as a worker you are there to fulfill a company’s requirement. Unless there’s a position or incentive to go that extra mile, don’t, most companies will never see it. Even if you want to do the extra work for yourself, I’d recommend to find a way to do it as a hobby if it’s unrewarded, separate from work.
What they will see is the absence in case they do need it, and then they will be required to fulfill it, although they may not want to focus on better and more empowered workers with higher expectations and may instead just focus on quantity over quality by hiring more people to fill it. Even worse, don’t be the guy who makes his (and other’s) jobs obsolete to scummy bosses.
Open your eyes, you aren’t in school, you aren’t getting rewarded for better grades at work unless they make it part of the business and your bosses stick to it and not just plugging in friends, buddies, and associates.
The real payment is all the traumas we got along the overtimes
Hah! You got overtime? I just got trama and toxic managers.
In a better spot now, though
At my previous job they had a special term for unpaid overtime: “Professional time”
So glad I’m no longer working there.
“Professional time” sounds like a euphemism for wanking off on the clock.
A lot of us “do the bare minimum” do the bare minimum because of all of the time in the past we spent going the extra mile only to be rewarded with ever greater expectations for identical compensation and opportunity.
They made us this way.
No sympathy for them. No mercy!
“Okay but the guy who goes the extra mile will get a promotion and do better in the long run.” —a guy who has always gone the extra mile, never gotten a promotion and is doing exactly the same as everyone else
I got a new job last year. It was a massive pay cut. 1/3 of what i was making. Skip to the end for a TL/DR.
I hit the ceiling hard at the old job and people i had never worked with or worked with only a handful of times had basically all said i was uncomfortable to work with because of my pace. I’m a walk and talk guy and if i was hired for a job (I’m a long term contact worker) I was usually hired because someone else had started a project and here i am. I was a fuckin one man wrecking crew. I work amazingly well with just about everyone because i find their strengths and weaknesses and immediately (and usually subtly) just start with the weakness, get the ball rolling and by the time there’s momentum they are back in their comfort zone. Aim them and let em go. I work with management, i work with operators and I’ve worked with janitorial staff to solve really shitty problems quickly and mostly painlessly. Apparently that means I’m doing jobs other people should be doing (eg currently and actively employed) which rubs them the wrong way. I’m contact, dgaf. That’s a wall of text bitches.
TL/DR i know it’s easy to say money isn’t everything but it can definitely be a trap that promotes some bad/unsustainable life choices. Recognize its unsustainable and have a plan.
I get paid way more than my coworkers, and even my supervisor, because when I got hired I immediately made a bunch of random tools in google sheets that only I know how to maintain, and spread them around until everyone was using them. Before long, I was essential to my department, and praised for going “above and beyond” even though I was mostly just dicking around making the tools rather than doing my actual job.
I have 0 coding experience, so the tools are absolutely horrendous behind the scenes, but that just means that they break pretty often, and people are reminded that only I know how to fix them. So, when I went looking around on LinkedIn for other offers after a few years, I eventually got one that was paying way more since it was in a major metro area, and I took it back to my manager to negotiate a 50% raise and a full-remote designation that virtually nobody else in my office is given.
You don’t get ahead by working hard, and you don’t get ahead by working smart to benefit the company, you get ahead by working smart to benefit yourself. Think about it this way - if you’re at the store to buy bananas, and you see that they’re selling bananas for $0.05 ea, you’ll likely think “Wow, that’s a great deal!” and buy a bunch of those bananas at the $0.05 price. You’re not going to pay them the price you think would be fair for a banana, you’re going to take advantage of the price you’re allowed to pay so that you can save money. Your employer sees you - working for less than you’re worth - as a $0.05 banana. You’re nothing more than a cheap commodity they were lucky to snag on sale.
Bro, I’m salaried and only really need to work six hours a day. So that’s exactly what I do. My coworkers put in 12-14 hours a day six days a week… We get the same paycheck.
Granted, I’m consistently rated at the bottom of my department by my supervisors, but I’m also the most highly requested employee by our customers. Literally no one else gets requested by name and I have to triage projects.
I’m consistently rated at the bottom of my department by my supervisors
Unless you miss out on raises or promotions because of this or lose your job, this is meaningless. It’s “this will go on your permanent record” but for adults. This is coming from somebody who is pretty proudly the quiet worker who stays around the middle of the pack and does just enough to keep things slightly better than just maintained, so both coworkers and bosses can objectively see that I’m neither making things worse nor just keeping things coasting. And I got a promotion last year, so I guess it’s the right strategy (here, anyway) lol.
Yep, they’re only middle management as far as the company is concerned I’m still competitive for corporate level promotions and my “bad” reputation will stay back in my current office. I’m gunning for a promotion next summer, so hopefully these dingbats will be in my rearview mirror next year.
Good luck and Godspeed! Write down every recent and upcoming success so you can cite objective improvements in your interviews/meetings. Customer feedback will help too. If you have any big clients who can vouch for you personally being the reason that your company kept their business, even better. The only risk there is that they may decide that you’re too valuable in your current role, but you can get ahead of that by pitching that you’ll be able to apply your success to bigger wins in a higher role and guide others to learn how to do what you’ve done. Worst case scenario, you don’t get that promotion but you still have it all compiled for interviews elsewhere. If you want to be at the level of that promotion, you should chase it whether it’s within the company or without! You got this!
See I’m salary but I’m forced to put in 8 hrs a day. Even if I have no work to do. It sucks.
That’s horrible. What’s the point of salary if you have an hourly requirement? That sounds like fake hourly.
The point of Salary is so they don’t have to pay for overtime. The slave labor is the purpose, forcing people to work more than 8 is just a nice little cherry on top ☺️.
Boom shakalaka. He shoots he scores.
This is the answer. I worked for a company before the law changed where “managers have to work 60 hours a week”. You know why? Because those last 20 hours made them half of what they would have had to pay someone else. Somehow people fell for it though. “It’s a guaranteed paycheck if I git sick. It’ll work out, won’t it?”
Nope.
It ain’t for you boo boo.
I don’t go the extra mile for the company. I do it to help make things easier for my coworkers and the people who depend on us in the hope that I can make life a little less shitty for everyone.
I have 40 hours a week at work.
I spend them trying to do a good job.
I have no fucking clue what people mean when they say they go the extra mile.
Sometimes it’s as small as clean up your work area for the next guy. That’s seen as the extra mile for lazy people.
I think most people would consider things like, working over 40 hours when you are salaried, routinely doing someone else’s job in addition to yours (like fixing their mistakes TOO much), skipping your lunch breaks to work.
Don’t get me wrong, doing those things SOMETIMES is ok. It’s when it becomes expected or ongoing that it’s a problem. Because no company is ever going to say “You are generating more profit for us at your own expense, slow down.”
The thing is, it is not your job to make things easier for others.
It’s the company’s job to keep their employees happy by providing enough workforce for the amount of work that needs to be done.
You are doing exactly what the company wants you to do, by playing into your emotions.
Just so they don’t have to.
This is exactly the kind of moronic attitude that is making life shittier and shittier for everyone on the fucking planet.
I am not talking about just cranking out extra widgets or whatever. I’m talking about looking for problems and taking steps to resolve them before they escalate into something worse instead of just leaving it for someone else to do, I’m talking about taking time to answer questions for my coworkers so they don’t waste an hour trying to figure things out on their own, I’m talking about collecting data on issues we’re having so that when I take it to the boss I have numbers to back up what I’m saying instead of just generic bitching about the job so that they will actually take it into account and look for solutions.
I do a little extra because I know my other coworkers fuckin’ won’t. I tell my new hires that you’re not working for the other shift but rather for when it’s your shift again.
I go the extra mile. It’s not for pay. It’s because I’m stuck at work for 8 hours anyways and I’d rather work than pretend to work.
And neither gets enough to cover inflation.
Profit sharing fixes all of this because it provides incentives for everyone to go the extra mile so they can make more money.
Yeah, but those profits could go to the shareholders!
Eh, going the extra mile is how I went from customer service agent to senior server engineer in 5 years (with the same company).
There’s always a balance between the two, but the most important thing is knowing how to say no without sounding like you’re saying no.
but the most important thing is knowing how to say no without sounding like you’re saying no.
Yeah it’s a lot about how to market yourself to your higher ups. An employee is a commodity and selling commodites is more about marketing than the actual quality of the product. The biggest victims of that system are the introvert ones who do six extra miles but don’t get any recognition
Tell me about it, my inability to recognize my own achievements is almost pathological. Work extra to get a difficult but interesting project out on time then deflect any praise provided after is a sure fire way to never get noticed.
the most important thing is knowing how to say no without sounding like you’re saying no.
The best part is that once you have proven expertise and an impressive resume, you don’t even have to sound like you’re saying no anymore. After being a lackey for a long time, it feels wrong to say no because it makes you feel like an asshole, but the reality is that there’s only so much time; there are only so many hours in a day, and you have only so many days left in this world, and you should expect to actually enjoy some amount of those remaining days. Plus you start to realize that your value far exceeds your compensation, otherwise a company whose sole existence is for the purpose of profit would be incapable of existing since there is no profit if the labor is paid what it is objectively worth. So you just pick your battles and tell people to fuck off when they overstep. It costs money to hire and train a replacement, so unless you’re already highly compensated, you have the power to say no to egregious asks and you really should, or you set precedent that you’ll say yes to that type of shit and they will continue pushing until they find the line where you finally say no. There is risk that they’ll fire you and figure out later that it takes more than one new hire to do what you were already doing without considering the scope creep, but with a good resume and a healthy savings I enjoy playing chicken with a bad boss.
I’ve been with my current company for almost 3 years and I’ve only had to say no a couple of times. They’re far from perfect, but they’re good enough that I actually don’t like to say no when I have to here. They pretty much always have reasonable asks. I’m 35 but I could actually see myself staying here until retirement unless they drastically change. I know for a fact that I could go elsewhere for similar pay and treatment pretty easily (because I’ve interviewed and received offers but turned them down because the pain of change wasn’t worth something lateral), so I’m ready if they do pivot to fuck this environment up but I’d really rather stay.
Isn’t this socialism? 😜
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(Joking! before anyone hurts me)
