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Comment by p2t2p | Hacker News Reader

Not unless I'm getting paid or recognised in some other way for going extra mile.

More often than not no one (bug some rare customer probably) gives a damn about you going extra mile. Often it is actually punished, not directly but I've had plenty of examples when people instead of doing extra ventured into doing some fun shit for other teams and uh-oh, cross-team impact, here's your promotion while your actual team is struggling to get right the boring but actually money bringing stuff.

So no, money first please.

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:) There will be recognition if you perform tasks that continually uplevels your team. There is only so many buttons one can push in a day (doing more). What the author calls "Extra" is often called "Glue" work (think improving test coverage or isolation, creating a bank of interview questions, improving onboarding documents).

If you ask for "money first", response will often be "IDK, we're not too sure about that". If you improve the organization, there will be money & promotions. There will be a gap in this reward.

Somehow there’s no gap when people are hired for this positions externally and “money first” doctrine applies. I’m not going to spend my personal time and life on saving few bucks on hiring for some corp. If it is easier to change my job for a promotion, I’ll do that.

If you working as a consultant you really need to be careful about doing to much extra work. The customer normally pay for your time. The extra time could end up being something the customer refuse to pay for. In that case your time is better spend on other customers.

More annoying some clients are just weird. We did some client work, and we did what the client viewed as extra work. The project involved some small amount of Ansible to written. We greated a few roles and playbooks, tagged up everything as we normally would.. and the client exploded. Every tag would need to be documented, what did, how to use it, which tags could be used togther and so one. We ended up just ripping out all tags. Something that was a little extra work, but a nice convinience was a major problem to the customer.

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