Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.
> It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic similar to those folks who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad.
Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.
That could be also because of the employer's rising expectations. The baseline expectation goes up as soon as one person overdelivers. The "making us look bad" doesn't mean you underdeliver, just that it's all of a sudden proven that all of you could do more.
When another employer offers higher salary you might also go to your current job suddenly pissed at your employer or boss. Not because your current salary is low but because it could be higher.
So I don’t get to do interesting things but my ego doesn’t feel stupid.
That said there are lots more ways to be good at your job than a narrow focus on hours worked and raw brain power.
This was in the US too--there was a "Gen-X slacker" ethos that persisted into mid-millenial "culture". Radically different for people born even 5 years later, I think it largely reflects the relative (perceived) security back then.
Under-explored topic perhaps.
Gen-X in a nutshell, isn't it? People rarely seem. To remember that that generation even exists.
I don’t think I’m an exceptional programmer or anything like that for example (on a whole I’d say I’m average), but the ability to keep a codebase in my head just kind of appeared after hitting a certain threshold of experience. It’s not something I intentionally developed. To meet social expectations, what am I supposed to do, pretend I don’t have that capability and handicap myself, ultimately making my workday harder? That doesn’t make any sense.
One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch.
If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but they'll drag you down in your 30s.
But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of a friendship group.
Plus a shitload more that reached enough maturity to be broadly useful. CNN's Vr Cheap Thermal cameras
You seem a bit too pessimistic to google things for yourself, but technology is genuinely moving pretty fast
Btw there hardly was a new technology in iPhone at the time of the launch.