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Comment by philbarr | Hacker News Reader

Some of the best advice I've ever had was, "when you start at a company, it's tempting to try and work your arse off to prove how worthy you are. Don't - you're not proving anything, you're just establishing precedent. Instead, quickly determine what the absolute minimum you can get away with is and do slightly above that. Then work harder for the month before review time so you can justify a raise. The extra effort will be noticed now, but if you'd worked your arse off then that would just be normal behaviour."

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You should spend your early time at a company gaining an understanding of its business needs (basically understand why you're there) so you can later take 'ownership' of important projects and tasks. Ultimately you'll be judged by your importance to the company, not much you work (although those two are positively correlated).

This comment horrifies me, and yet it's probably the single best piece of advice here (aside from "quit working in toxic environments").

You're also teaching your management chain to provide the minimum reward, fire frequently, and generally be unpleasant to force you to work more. And you turn your daily life into a struggle, as you and the management feel out and try to budge the line.

That may be good advice in the sense of being effective, but encouraging people to actively deceive their employers and intentionally do as little as possible is disingenuous and dishonest.

If you don't think that reflects on your integrity, or if you don't consider your integrity worth maintaining, then this really is advice that you could consider good. But telling this to impressionable people who are inexperienced and new to Real Life in general would do them and everyone they'll ever work for a huge disservice.

I think a better version of the parent comment's advice would be figure out what is a reasonable, healthy, sustainable level of productivity and try to work as close to that as possible - and no more.

Yes, this is good advice. It centers on the person and advocates a work/life balance. It doesn't center on the employer and how they can be manipulated and cheated for the employee's benefit.

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