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Andreas K

@anderseknert Actually, going above and beyond is a sure way to get fired, in my experience.

How?
Ah, you padawans, let me tell you a story from my adventures as an IT freelancer. Happened over a decade ago, in a galaxy far away, when xmpp was still alive. As it happened, the customer needed some standard XMPP transport extended with “custom proxy” support, as the 3rd party networks were literally blocking their IP addresses by the minute.

3 comments
Andreas K

@anderseknert So I worked hard, like a mad man, basically living in the office of the customer for 3 days, I think I had on average 3 hours sleeptime per day in these 3 days, but after 3 days I had an initial alpha release, that could be used to avoid the IP blocks.

I explicitly let the customer know, a) that the release had some medium severity errors (like leaking file descriptors, and other tiny edge cases)
b) that the initial burst of development speed was unsustainable

Andreas K

@anderseknert end result: after 10 days my contract was terminated because I was incapable to fix all the bugs in the “after-midnight-written” code of mine.

(the only funny side note is, as the bug fixing speed dropped even further after I left the customer, the project manager got fired too for firing me, ah, the joys of industry gossip.)

So kids: keep your output consistent, there are generally NO business procedures to reward substantially an excellent worker.

Andreas K

@anderseknert Sorry for the typo in the last paragraph, but it should be clear.

Businesses in general do not reward excellent workers, nor do they have in general business processes to do so.

At best, you can expect that bad workers might be let go.

And yes, the reality is, if you are not in a strongly unionized place, expect real wage losses if you stay for longer in a job, even if you are a great employee.

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