I think people simply stop caring once it's just a 9-5 job, plus it is never rewarded anyway. So you get random results.
That's why I always believe the following two points:
1. Engineers are trained on-job. This means, if you want to be a good engineer, a really good one. You need to be very picky about what you do. Most of the "engineer" positions out there, like 95% of them, do NOT promote, or even go against the best principles of true engineering, so you are basically fighting against the objective that is to be the best engineer you can be.
2. Engineers should NOT deal with complicated business rules -- that is, it can exist in code, but the stakeholders are the one to provide and explain it. We should want NOTHING of it.
Serving business interest, and keeping our jobs ≠ doing whatever the business stakeholders want, that means we have to be very picky about the kind of job we do, the kind of team and company we want to be part of it.
> I think people simply stop caring once it's just a 9-5 job, plus it is never rewarded anyway. So you get random results.
I can kind of see that, if you're so disengaged you don't care if your job is hard or easy. Then you just see it all as slogging for a certain number of hours a day.
But I don't get that. I don't like things being unnecessarily hard, and writing stuff down makes it easier to actually get things done in the future. And at some point you're going to get judged on your performance, so wasting a bunch of effort uselessly slogging doesn't make you look good if someone paying attention to if you're actually getting things done or not.
The biggest reward is me making my own life easier, and when I do that I can always later pretend to slog a big to grab some time for myself.
People who don't care already probably would take less work now instead of less work in the future. Like, they could just rage quit at any moment. I guess that's the mindset.
I had similar mindset about other things. My wife always wondered why I need to slice chores into pieces and do them one by one. "Why don't you just do them in one shot? It's a bit easier". "Honey, I really hate chores, and I might get hit by a truck in the next hour, so if I push as much work to the future, I maximize my happiness function at the moment."
That's why I always believe the following two points:
1. Engineers are trained on-job. This means, if you want to be a good engineer, a really good one. You need to be very picky about what you do. Most of the "engineer" positions out there, like 95% of them, do NOT promote, or even go against the best principles of true engineering, so you are basically fighting against the objective that is to be the best engineer you can be.
2. Engineers should NOT deal with complicated business rules -- that is, it can exist in code, but the stakeholders are the one to provide and explain it. We should want NOTHING of it.
Serving business interest, and keeping our jobs ≠ doing whatever the business stakeholders want, that means we have to be very picky about the kind of job we do, the kind of team and company we want to be part of it.