It doesn't.

There are lots of people who are comfortable where they are and continue to do solid work. I'd say that's probably almost half of folks at the mid-career levels in the big tech companies. This is actually why rest-and-vesters are so damaging. If you get a couple of these people on your team, they tend to bring down the morale of the much larger group who are earning their keep.

It's easy to be happy getting paid your current rate for doing a good solid job. But, it is really hard to stay happy in that situation if the person sitting next to you is getting paid the same, but doing almost-but-not-quite nothing.

In this situation, the previously-happy-worker types tend to either 1) seek a new team where they're not working with a rest-and-vester, or 2) slowly degrade into emulating the rest-and-vester because they feel demotivated and that their work isn't appreciated (since it isn't being appreciated more than the rest-and-vester's non-work)

Good managers identify this situation and put the rest-and-vester on notice to shape up (many of them will if you work with them -- many of them used to be the previously-happy-worker but at some point got poisoned and just need to have the callouses removed. (And a few of them just need the boot)

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On the other hand, in tech really you are either growing or dying. That doesn't mean that you have to be growing in promotion/job-ladder-shaped ways. But if you're not learning something and growing in some way, you're probably regressing.

> But if you're not learning something and growing in some way, you're probably regressing.

but this has nothing to do with your work - you grow and learn as part of your personal desire or interest. If it happens that your personal interest intersects with your job, then that's a great coincidence.

A rational actor will notice they get either a promotion or less work in the high/low work instances. If you work in between those boundaries, you get nothing extra.

In some cases, yes.

In others, as implied by the post I was replying to, people think that if you're not constantly Striving, you're not good enough.

This seems cyclical to me. If you do the bare minimum and get fired, that is a contradiction.

If the bare minimum is getting promoted then that means there is no room to slack.

If you look like you are slacking to your coworkers, then you probably are not doing the bare minimum. The bare minimum would be exactly what it takes to keep your job.

So I believe what you are saying is that there are multiple bare minimums from various perspectives. In those cases, you take the biggest one.

Another example for a gameable aspect of promotion is cutting up your achievements to look more favorable during a promo round e.g., salami slicing. If you hit a promotion, save the extra stuff for the next round.

And if you are at a large organization, you certainly have the data to estimate exactly the bars for promotion.

The key delta is often that the bare minimum to keep your coworkers from being demotivated by you is a bit higher than the bare minimum to keep your manager from noticing your underperformance.

If the work you are doing falls in this middle range, then your slacking will harm those around you but you probably won't get fired (if it takes longer for a manager to get fed up than the mean time between reorgs, you probably can survive indefinitely)

If the game was fixed and everyone had full information, there isn’t a reason this would happen.

But I agree if the promotion/firing is relative or dynamic in some way, then you’d race down to arbitrarily low effort.

The real problem is correlating work with value in an unbiased way. If you had perfect information on the value of each worker, I can’t see how it would be complicated to do a cost/benefit analysis.

But without reading/predicting the future you can’t usually figure out value because an unfinished product has no current value and a finished/legacy product has fixed value. In either case the worker has no marginal value.