But I think it's possible to continue to care while not letting the organization's sluggishness affect you in a personal way. You care because you believe it's the right thing to do and/or because it furthers your skills. Good. The others are missing out; even if their pay is the same now, in 5-10 years you will be better positionned than them for whatever opportunities come. At the same time—and this is where that balance comes in—if you're slaving away with no enjoyment of life, it all seems pointless.
I've seen a lot of people fall into that trap and then get bitter when the "less productive" person was promoted.
Of course sometimes the meta is licking your bosses boots not something that makes the company money...
Are you measuring feature completion or business impact? If your managers are happy with your coworkers that “produce less”, then chances are their efforts have the same business impact as yours.
It's a project with a fixed span, and the barrier to entry is very high (government clearance and certain skills) so many people who gain entry exploit the situation because they know we're short on people and won't fire anybody unless they have a negative impact on the business. So the bar is high to get in, but the bar is very low to not be kicked out (have some positive impact). So we'll keep people that only do 1-2 tasks per week because it's better than 0, but don't reward the folks who can do 10 tasks per week.
If you feel stressed, you may be giving too much of yourself. If you are giving more then you like to, to compensate for your teammate, you might need to find teammates that are up to your level, that carr as much as you, an a business that care as much as you too.
I'm deeply concerned that the world is rapidly rushing in a direction that I no longer believe in. While I'm sitting here tapping away at a keyboard, species are going extinct, wealth inequality is reaching a point of no return, people are being marginalized to the point of slavery.. there are so many indicators that we are headed towards disaster that I almost can't bear it anymore.
Im really trying not to be negative so I want to paint a portrait of how I thought the world would be today. When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, my friends and I (who were about 12 at the time) were already keenly aware of how messed up the world was. We grew up with AIDS and the war on drugs, gas guzzling cars, the military industrial complex out of control, deforestation and desertification, all the same problems as today. So we had hoped that maybe after the wall fell that the world would finally begin to deescalate the arms race. Maybe we'd starting getting solar panels on our roofs, maybe they'd cure AIDS and legalize drugs. During adolescence, we hoped that things would start going right for us for a change. And the 90s were epic, the internet came out, music got good, counterculture seemed to be rising with the WTO protests and similar movements.
But then the dot bomb and 9/11 happened and the rest is history. We've regressed into a neofascist authoritarian culture driven by fear and mistrust. The few glimmers of hope like CRISPR and legalized weed and cheap solar panels and lithium iron phosphate batteries are great and everything, but from my perspective this has all been too long coming. Now we have insurmountable threats like all reefs dying by 2050 due to ocean acidification and temperature rise, which will lead to half a billion people from pacific island nations being displaced into southeast Asia when their supply of fish runs out and potentially world war III. And everywhere we look, the news along those lines is pretty grim.
Ok back on track to positivity: what could/should have happened is that when Clinton was elected, had he been more progressive and less moderate, we could have deescalated the arms race. We could have chosen diplomacy and financial assistance to eastern Europe and prevented the wholesale slaughter that happened as the USSR was diced up and claimed by strongmen. We could have used the money to pay off the national debt completely under the next president, maybe Al Gore, who would not have allowed Who Killed the Electric Car to happen. The tightening of the purse strings might not have happened, so the dot bomb could have been avoided. The housing bubble never would have happened. Instead we could be building sustainably by now with hempcrete and be using switchgrass and algae for biofuels. Instead of this race to the bottom marginalization of tech workers for the service economy, we could have had coops and democracy in the workplace like in Germany. We could have an automated industrial manufacturing base in the US bigger than China that would provide a UBI for everyone. We could have stopped cutting NASA off at the knees and perhaps had a SpaceX level of reusability in the public sector.
I guess writing this is a catharsis since nobody will read it. I'm trying to live and work the way I would have in 2000 had I known what I know now. But it's hard when the world has digressed so far from what it could have been that people don't really understand where I'm coming from anymore. We're so distracted with living under the realities of this local maximum that we can't see beyond it to what could be. So I guess at this point I will try to write more about what's possible because I don't really know what else to do.
It looks grim, and we're going to have to use the few things we've gotten right as a species to fix everything else we've allowed to go wrong.
Places like YC, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have been focusing on insignificant things like clicks and conversions and "content" for years. The public sector has been allowed to fester and become corrupted by people who understand they make more money through controlling the system than they do by actually running it as intended. Meanwhile, BOTH systems are run by a precariously small class of VC's and wanna-be VC's who have become further and further insulated from their consequences.
The real solutions will involve fixing both.
I'm not sure if you're aware or not, but going down that rabbit hole is the least positive thing you could have done (ok, I exaggerate but the point stands).
There's a saying in Arabic "if only" is the devil's work - it sometimes appears to be a positive or constructive thing but in reality, you're just digging yourself deeper into a depressing world view.
Don't focus on what could have been done differently: a) you can't do anything about it now, b) things rarely work out the way you'd think they would, so who knows how things could have gone wrong in that scenario.
Focus on the here and now. You seem to care tremendously about sustainability and the environment. Find a company working in battery tech or renewable energy (it doesn't have to be revolutionary, evolutionary improvements matter just as much, if not more so; e.g. improved Li-ion (LiFePO₄ or otherwise) today can save more species than NiFe or whatever batteries tomorrow) and apply. There are not just dozens of such opportunities, there are thousands - but you'll need to go out of your way to find them. Maybe you'll have to move (and move your family with you?) and maybe that's good for you.
Just do it.