A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care...

Right.

The company doesn't care.

But I do.

I don't work hard on my craft, push myself to be better/smarter/have more impact, or go above and beyond for my employer.

I do it for myself.

Indeed. Although I find it increasingly hard to find work that aligns with my expectations about technical excellency (too many companies chasing big returns on half-finished products for example) or even methods of creating software. This is hard to manage from a personal perspective but I guess life goes on... I wholeheartedly agree with the author - life's too short to be wasted on work that may get you some good words in one quarter and not matter the next.

Well said.

My experience has been that caring about your craft is a great way to get in trouble. As a previous co-worker once told me "it turns out that the less I care about this job the more happy my managers are with my performance."

Was that before or after “the consultants?”

I have the same exact experience at my current company. My official performance, which is given by my boss, improved since I started to not care. My output fell, the quality of my work is the same, just less quantity, but for some reason my scores are higher.

On the other hand, I had a job where my performance was rewarded greatly, and I was lucky to be at the right place for that. Almost all of the employees at the same company were not that lucky.

There is an exact and correct amount to care. It varies job to job. It's mostly a matter of just turning the big dial inside yourself until you get it in the sweet spot for where you are now.

That's because time pressure is real. We can't all be Knuth and spend our life looking for the perfect algorithm to solve all problems we could ever have. Most of us must ship something that works well enough for a particular scenario, as soon as possible - tomorrow, next week, next month, not next year. If you care too much about the quality of your work, you might end up never shipping; at some point you have to stop caring and just push the damn button.

It's not always time pressure. It can also be, for example, calling out others for doing things that don't make sense or hinder what's actually needed for the job/company, which in turn makes them uncomfortable and leads to discipline for you and not them. My response after having that happen? Fine, I'll look the other way and not care how much we're getting done anymore.

This is the wise, pragmatic answer indeed!

Find the Middle Path.

Neither extreme is correct.

Doing the absolute bare minimum to not get PIP'ed is corrosive to your own soul.

Going "above and beyond" when you might get laid off tomorrow, is naive and opening yourself up for exploitation.

The quicker we make peace with the fact that hard work alone will not get us ahead (in most cases) the better it is for our mental health. We can put as much effort into our jobs as long as we accept that the only guaranteed result is our own joy, pride in our work and nothing else (not even a thank you from suits) is guaranteed.

If we are not able to accept that, then just do the bare minimum like most people. OR find a better job, but there is still no guarantee the new job would actually be better than the old job. But hey, at least we might get more compensation in our new job, so there's that

time is always going to be a valid term in the equation, probably with an exponent > 1

Perhaps. Pay attention to the time you spend "doing the task well" so that YOU are satisfied. You are now smarter (say) but is your hierarchy going to promote you for this? Or park you and make you do this indefinitely, or blame you for the rest that didn't get done? Is your network as a whole now more inclined to hire you out in their next venture?

The question to ask yourself then is: why is it that the behaviour that brings you pleasure/meaning/satisfaction happens to align exactly with what the company wants?

I spent most of my career with a similar attitude to yours, and TBH it's still my default. The question I find myself asking more and more is: can I maintain/increase my level of satisfaction while giving less of myself to a company that simply doesn't care?

That smells like something a person with very little choice would say. At least I was saying similar things to myself in times I had very little choice. It's a very good way of regaining illusion of agency.