Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and …

Doing the right things tends to also not align with promotions either. The thing that helps your team mates us ignoring the business needs and min/maxing the promotion game. That's less fun than doing the right things, and more work than min/maxing your quality of life

What now? People are supposed to choose their career strategy and on the job behaviour so that their teammates(not friends, teammates) can optimize their own career strategy ?

> Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing... but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy! The people who game the system eventually move to further enforce the system (for their own benefit), at the expense of the purpose the for which the system was first put in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_la...

Let’s talk about teams with where you have one person doing everything. They are creating deadbeats. Does it never cross anyone’s mind that the way to fix this is to move that person off of the team? Often they are sucking the oxygen out of the room with a strong personality or dogmatism for some personal ideal of quality. The manager lets them run with it because the work is getting done but that manager is bad because his team is languishing. I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly. These leads who want to run everything don’t have the energy to convince people well, instead they just write so much complicated code as fast as possible to beat anyone else to the space. It’s not just ego it’s a matter of avoiding a hostile work environment being hostage to this one persons gatekeeping. They dedic…

> but the people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company They screw themselves more than anyone else by spurning opportunities for bettering themselves

>The people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company. Big companies don't suffer if random people are slacking off and refusing to do their work, but their teammates who want to get a promotion or build their skillsets are going to suffer the consequences of deadbeat coworkers. ??? You've got it exactly reversed. Slacking coworkers are the company's problem, not yours. I've never seen any company decide not to give a promotion to somebody because their coworker was useless. Hell, sometimes the useless coworker helps because it makes them look better by comparison.

I think I'm on number four... > Posting this just never gets old... > > It must have been a couple of months because... > >> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of > >> months or so > >> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...