zlacker

For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a bad person if you're not mediocre. See this from a recently posted article 6 hours ago:

> It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic similar to those folks who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad.

Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.

>>energy+(OP)
> Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad.

That could be also because of the employer's rising expectations. The baseline expectation goes up as soon as one person overdelivers. The "making us look bad" doesn't mean you underdeliver, just that it's all of a sudden proven that all of you could do more.

When another employer offers higher salary you might also go to your current job suddenly pissed at your employer or boss. Not because your current salary is low but because it could be higher.

>>energy+(OP)
I don’t know what the context of that quote is, but I gotta say the realization that I would never be the smartest person in the room if I want to do interesting things (bec I simply don’t have the reasoning or memory that these people have naturally) was super humbling. I’ve spent the last few years coming to terms with it and in the meantime… I hate to say it but, I’ve surrounded myself with mediocrity as an ego boost. Only one job in the last decade did I feel like I wasn’t the smartest person on the team… and I got out of there so fast, I had way too much imposter syndrome and too big of an ego to admit it.

So I don’t get to do interesting things but my ego doesn’t feel stupid.

>>energy+(OP)
In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a very heavy drinking culture. These days that social pressure is entirely different for kids.

That said there are lots more ways to be good at your job than a narrow focus on hours worked and raw brain power.

>>energy+(OP)
It feels particularly bad if these capabilities come as part of one’s natural state.

I don’t think I’m an exceptional programmer or anything like that for example (on a whole I’d say I’m average), but the ability to keep a codebase in my head just kind of appeared after hitting a certain threshold of experience. It’s not something I intentionally developed. To meet social expectations, what am I supposed to do, pretend I don’t have that capability and handicap myself, ultimately making my workday harder? That doesn’t make any sense.

>>mehele+N4
> In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a very heavy drinking culture. These days that social pressure is entirely different for kids.

This was in the US too--there was a "Gen-X slacker" ethos that persisted into mid-millenial "culture". Radically different for people born even 5 years later, I think it largely reflects the relative (perceived) security back then.

Under-explored topic perhaps.

>>nyarla+un
> Under-explored topic perhaps.

Gen-X in a nutshell, isn't it? People rarely seem. To remember that that generation even exists.

>>energy+(OP)
Few are willing to say to out loud, but many are willing to think it.