On one hand this seem crazy. On another, every place I worked at was full of free-loaders who did nothing and never got fired. I wonder if things are different at Netflix.
We have extremely quiet people at work, few know what they do, but they're actually extremely productive, rarely make waves (good or bad), and help keep longer term goals.
The "Rockstar" types join, get all excitable, make a handful of rapid (often good) changes, burn out, and leave. Likely to start again at their next workplace.
Yes.
I'm content with just sitting here and doing this job for now and get paid enough to live at my means, so I make no attempts to get a promotion where I'll have much more work and stress, and make little attempts to go above and beyond. I just stay consistent and I'm seen as a free loader by some. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The most helpful advice I've ever been given by my manager is to come to terms with my, so to say, "rockstarness". There are people who come in to work everyday and deliver a constant stream of output. Others (like me) have huge bursts of productivity at seemingly random times. And that's fine when you know that this is what's going on. When I'm in a phase of low productivity, I don't panic anymore about not getting anything done. I'm deliberately spending the time mentoring juniors, learning new things, or working on getting tickets unblocked so that when the next productivity streak hits me, I'm ready to make the most of it.
In my experience, over time, freeloaders tend to become vocal and lobby for policy changes (within the team, not corporatewise) that helps keep them there. I've seen them oppose technically sound decisions because they're not sure they can handle the complexity, or (and more commonly) because it involves skills they don't want to learn. Skills well within their reach if they just tried - some of them had those skills in school and they merely need to get a book and review what they once knew.
Generally, if you're a motivated person, but in a team with a significant number of "freeloaders", your ability to raise the bar of the team will be limited. I left my last team because of it.
Where do you work and how do I get a job there?
I've only worked in big corporations - and I rarely see this attitude. Many people became engineers because it was seen as a way to make a decent living. The number among them who actually enjoy technical stuff (say, well enough that they would do it in their spare time if they had all the money in the world) is negligible. And then even amongst those, big corporations with mediocre management can do a great job of demotivating you. I've certainly been there - where I decide "Screw all this. At this point I'm doing it only for a paycheck (i.e. no job satisfaction). I'll just put in the minimum to keep my employer happy and use my extra time to do fun technical stuff at home".
In my experience, the "median" management helps you go down that path. You really need them to actively foster technical interest.
Western Europe country. I wouldn't suggest my company though. Where I currently work is Slack-off Fest 9000, but it's also a big corp.
Maybe you should check out meetups, hack fests, hackathons, coworking spaces, hacker spaces, maker spaces around you. There you can meet the real engineers. They earn maybe even just 50-75% of your colleagues. But they always give 120%.
And these also exist in big corps, but true, it's rarer there. The highest motivated engineers I see in big corps are people who don't care about engineering that much, but are certainly working their ass off to ship whatever stupid idea their manager had latest. The thing will not work in a customer environment, but it's good for a demo, and more does their manager not need.
I also led teams of engineers in the start-up world. Usually all you need to do is keep the political bullshit away from them, show them the sufferings of the customer, and provide them with enough money that they don't starve to death (and can afford 1-2 raspberry pis, and/or a nerf gun).