> dangle carrots
When my coworker was leaving, I learned that he was earning 2x my salary. I went to my manager and asked for a raise. He told me he'd promote me if I do some project. I went above and beyond, but my manager simply set me up for failure. I don't think it was intentional, but rather that he's incompetent, because it's a pattern that I tell him to do X, he says that X doesn't make sense, one year later we go back to X.
Now my strategy is to slack off as much as I can. The company is comically dysfunctional, so the end result is that I have a livable wage for effectively two hours of work a day. The rest of the time I'm at home.
I have a go-getter in my team but they also got disillusioned when they fulfilled the promotion requirements but then the requirements changed. This means we're slowly building a team of lazy fucks, contributing to the overall rot in the company. Which honestly isn't a bad deal from my perspective when you think about it.
This happened to me after an acquisition. I was on my way to becoming a director before our company was acquired and they ended up firing my boss and keeping me in place, with no more room to grow (and stringing me along about starting a new department that I would lead, which was never going to happen).
I used the extra time to start a consulting business and 3X my salary. When I was finally laid off a few years later, I just laughed and continued with my already successful consulting career.
The company was so dysfunctional, nobody really knew what I was doing. When asked, I would just say I was "really busy"/mention some technical stuff I was working on and I would always answer questions immediately from co-workers and management on Teams, to give everyone the idea that I Was still working hard.
What got me in the end was a new VP was hired and looked at the yearly budget. He started questioning why he really needed me and I was gone.
"When my coworker was leaving, I learned that he was earning 2x my salary."
Why would you assume you are worth 2X to the company or any more? Your co-worker might have had more experience than you.
One time, an excel spreadsheet with salaries was leaked at work and I learned I was paid 50% higher than a co-worker in the same position. Multiple things determined this: I had more experience/education and I was better at negotiating my salary when I was hired.
"He told me he'd promote me if I do some project. I went above and beyond,"
I'm not sure how much you were expecting as a raise, but it would have never been even close to 100%. Companies just don't do this.
I use this time to play video games and watch porn because honestly, I'm tired of the whole hustle culture where you're expected to perform at 110% all the time and just get more work as a reward. We'll see how long before I get fired, and when that happens, the whole economy will probably be different from what it is today anyway, so whatever skills I pick up, they'll be obsolete.
> Why would you assume you are worth 2X to the company or any more?
I'm not. But the company isn't worth to me much either. So we're stuck in a situation where I do shit job and they pay me shit money, and that's their business model.
> I'm not sure how much you were expecting as a raise, but it would have never been even close to 100%. Companies just don't do this.
This is why employees who aren't lazy fucks like me jump ship every two years in order to maximize their income, because getting any raise whatsoever requires disproportionate amount of effort, which means that the whole model promotes keeping shit developers instead of good ones.
I'm not claiming I'm a good developer. Maybe I don't deserve to earn 2x. I'm just claiming that the company is dysfunctional because there's a self-correcting mechanism in place that promotes incompetence and laziness, and I'm acting as designed per the mechanism.
If you are looking for the response that I think you are wasting your life, then here have it. You only have one life, and for many people life isn't so great. Help someone out, and do something useful with your life.
I guess they figured out they could do something more useful with their life than work hard for that company?
How does this relate to what I said?