People just have different definitions of what coasting means. In general don't think "doing nothing" or "avoiding work" think "add certainty to process + decision making like everyone else does", and much more importantly "avoiding friction because as soon as there's even a little bit, people leverage it"
More detail on what causes this:
- processes become elongated through what Steve Yegge called cookie-licking, more specifically, anyone above line level doing "I am the 10th person who needs to give a green light for this to happen"
- the elongated process taking so long with that many people that some people lose interest or move on or forget they already approved it
- business disruptions (ex. now Sundar told VP told VP told VP who told director to add GenAI goals)
- bad managers are __really__ bad at BigCo, there's so much insulation from reality due to the money printer, and cultural bias towards "meh everythings good!"
- managers trying to get stuff done rely on people who slavishly overwork to do the minimum possible for their _direct manager_ to be happy
- only needing to keep your manager happy, and your manager being focused on deploying limited resources, creates a suspicious untrusting atmosphere. The amount of othering and trash-talking is incredibly disturbing.
- _someone_ has to slavishly overwork on any given project because there's very little planning. due to the "meh everythings good!" inclination, coupled to software being pretty hard to plan accurately anyway. so what's the point of planning it all?
- newly minted middle managers are used to clinging onto anything their manager cares about and overworking, so they end up being a massive bottleneck for their reports. New middle manager on my team's profile page looked like a military dictator's medals, 6 projects they were "leading", 1 of which they were actually working on and actually got done.
- The "coaster" realizes "if I go outside the remit of what my manager asked for, they A) won't care because they didn't ask for it B) which exposes me to non-zero friction because they'll constantly be wondering why I'm doing it at all C) I'll have to overwork because they won't help plan or distribute work because it was my idea to go beyond the bare minimum D) its very very hard to get promoted, especially based on work my manager didn't explicitly ask for E) the cultural bias here is strongly towards everything is okay all the time no matter what, so any visible friction will be attributed to me personally being difficult
And that's _before_ you account for the genuine sociopathy you see increasingly as you move up the ladder.
Anecdote:
I waited _3 years_ to launch work I had done and 3 VPs asked for. Year 3, it came to a head b/c one of the 3 was like "wtf is going on!?" My team's product manager outright pretended our org's VP didn't want it, had 0 interest in it, after first pretending it didn't _come up at all_ in a meeting arranged to talk about it.
Within a couple weeks this was corrected by yet another VP meeting where they called in the PM's boss' boss' boss and the VP was like "fuck yeah I want this yesterday", but engineering middle manager and PM closed ranks to blame it on me. Engineering went with "Where's the plan / doc!?!?" (I won't even try to explain this, trust me, after 3 yrs they knew and there were docs), and both pretended I was interrupting meetings regularly (I was the only one who ever wrote anything on the agenda, and once we hit year 2.5, I was very careful to only speak when called upon because it was clear it was going to build up to this, as they were assigned the new shiny year-long project to rush a half-assed version of Cupertino's latest, as they were every year).
For camaraderie along the way:
- any peer to peer counseling / mentorship at your company. having someone senior in an unrelated division caring about it, and who I also could trust to be honest with me about when it was my fault vs. I was being railroaded helped a ton
- Blind (the app). Standard perils of internet anonymity and verbal brutality, but, at least you'll always get excellent advice. if you did your best, people aren't afraid to say it either.
- be aware of your companies policies on medical leave.
- leave sooner rather than later
Our team was flabbergasted that this could even be an issue.
Longer version. Sorry to torture the threads with these, but I've noticed people don't take 'BigCo is a weird, strange, place' stories seriously unless there's a full anecdote coupled to it:
Google was my first real job, got very very lucky with a transition from dropout waiter => startup founder => sold => 9 months later, did interviews as a joke and...passed?
My first few years, I didn't understand this was happening, and eventually we got transferred to Android, and it was just an absolute directionless wasteland for at least 4 months. I couldn't even begin to understand why my peers A) had no work B) were fine with it C) when we tried talking about this, it was like we were speaking different languages.
I saw it as a 'leadership opportunity' and butted my/our way in to a big project and picked up another. Huge stuff. Visual redo of key property, and on the side, got a fundamental change to the input method for the same property, delivered by me client side and server side, then wheeled and dealed to get it deployed cross-platform.
That whole year peers didn't invest in the visual redo, even though it was ostensibly our teams work. Our newly promoted manager never planned / assigned work to people, and was out for about 50% of that first year.
It turned into Lord of the Flies while they were out. Only 2 peers worked on it out of 4. #3 helped out on a lower-key project. #4 focused on advocating for a feature that'd watch your screen and ex. tell you Infowars was Very Bad if you visited Infowars. At Old Google you could work on obviously bad ideas like this and you just wouldn't advance. It's a good thing that this would only last a month or two these days, if it happened at all.
Peer A was extremely confident but also extremely out of touch, for example, 2 weeks before launch they spent 5 minutes arguing with the partner team, telling the it was impossible that we had written all our code in $BINARY_A instead of $BINARY_B...which we had. When faced with the bare fact, they then went with "oh no wonder why nothing works" (???)
Peer B was relatively new to tech, so the histrionics the other would leap to had a massive influence on them. Always horrified we were doing anything at all without getting 3 separate approvals first, stapled to a direct request laying out exactly what was required, instead of just a Figma / GIF.
Peer B also got _insanely_ over-the-top mean to me after the project. Yet, they were nice and extremely intelligent generally.
That's when it finally clicked for me that something was off and I needed to approach the coasting question more inquisitively:
_what_ were they seeing differently?
They understood they were avoiding pain that they'd get ~0 credit for working through.
They were right.
I got excellent reviews from the partner team and product manager, I got awful reviews from Peer A and a meh one from peer B, and got a middling performance review after moving 2 mountains essentially solo.
Though, a $10K bonus, this was standard payout for staying silent / not complaining after dealing with an obviously toxic situation.
I had to appeal to VPs for recommendations the next year to break through the "gee you moved two mountains and had great feedback from everyone _not_ on the team, but peer A and peer B didn't like you much"