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You make this mistake when you're young until you're laid off thebfiest time. Then you're bitter and jaded and DGAF.

If a company was smart they'll hold onto you for life because you will care and give it 110% because that loyalty used to be gaurentee good output.

Obviously none of this exists anymore and it's a damn shame.

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I think lifers tend to be pretty high on the “phoning it in” spectrum.

An exception I've seen is in the US Navy's R&D activities (NRL and NUWC, specifically).

Plenty of those civilians are lifers with a serious sense of purpose for their work.

You get the occasional dead weight, but it's far less common than you might expect.

I dunno, I've seen this in multiple FAANGs.

Ladder climbing lifers don't phone it in.

Senior SWE lifers? Phoning it in pretty hard.

Other industries are probably different.

Some call it "phoning it in", some call it "working sustainably and avoiding burnout". It's fine to "phone it in" for the daily grind if it helps you maintain your reserves for actual emergencies. As the author point out, early Facebook instead instilled a "sense of urgency" which means everything is treated as an emergency all the time, which just means nothing is.

I think you need to have a special kind of outlook on life to go work in a navy R&D department.

How so?

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