…their new goal is to be “perfectly mediocre.”
[Maybe you should store passwords in plain text](https://www.qword.net/2023/04/30/maybe-you-should-store-passwords-in-plaintext)
(I am fascinated by what I see as a possible mediocrity trend - and it makes me feel better lol)
> One person is aware of almost 100k/mo in unnecessary spend on AWS. They don’t bother to care about it or fix it. **They reason that they’ll be punished for fixing it by having to JIRA the issue, bring it into the sprint, discuss it in standup, and not be rewarded with any fraction of those savings financially.** Worse yet, it may take longer than expected to fix and they may be punished for it on their performance review. They’ve known about this issue for almost eight months.
> Another person simply doesn’t care about shipping code with bugs, and maybe even tries to. They get to shirk actual development duties by fixing their own broken code instead, and the fixes are celebrated. Not only that, but their management thinks that their work must be tricky because of the bugs that appear. **“I get paid the same whatever it is that I work on, so I’m going to try to keep my work relaxed and easy.”** They considered pretending to have very young children so they can opt out of the team’s on-call rotation that gives no extra pay, but thought that was going too far.
> A third literally has about a hundred diffs stacked up that repair innocuous compiler warnings, and they send one or two of them out when they don’t feel like doing their regular work and claim they “stumbled on some issues and fixed them.” They say they figured this out after their last raise was below inflation, and **say their new goal is to be “perfectly mediocre.”** They’re now working on a plan to quit their job for a “sudden emergency leave” and then negotiate their rejoining at a proper salary increase in a month. They don’t care too much if that doesn’t work out, because they have a second full-time job.
