Frankly I have little interest in being great at my job. It's a job. At the end of the day, I have exactly as much loyalty for the company as they do for me. None. [1] Furthermore, the "rewards" for being great at your job kind of suck, which at most companies is just slowly accruing experience until you get noticed and someone has the bright idea to make you a manager. [2]
I want to be great at software engineering. I want to use tech to build things. I see it as coincidence that there's enough overlap between that goal and the company's goal to at least make me good at my job.
[1] That's a lie. I wish I had no loyalty to the company, but my personal pride in a job well done unfortunately means I have a non-zero amount of company loyalty.
[2] Just happened to me, actually. My stress levels are through the roof, and I didn't even get a raise. Clearly I miscalibrated my job performance.
>someone has the bright idea to make you a manager.
maybe present your own manager with a copy of "The Peter Principle" book? This seems like a literal example of it.
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence":
employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
A few things. Pride, hubris, challenge-seeking, unwillingness to turn down an "opportunity", and, maybe more than anything else, I thought I'd do a better job than any of the other potential candidates (see: pride).
In life in general I seldom back down from a challenge. I even play video games on the hardest difficulty. [1] It's bitten me more than once, but I still seem to have this almost pathological desire to really go for it rather than leave well enough alone.
It was also an opportunity to see behind the curtain. In my time I've had to deal with a lot of boneheaded decisions handed down from on high, and I wanted to see if I could get a glimpse of where they came from.
My job now consists almost exclusively of being handed boneheaded decisions from higher up the chain, fighting tooth and nail for something realistic, and coming to an unsatisfying compromise only to have upper management go around me and communicate their boneheaded decisions to the team directly.
[1] And yet I don't much care for Souls-likes. I just don't enjoy the core gameplay enough to want to climb the mountain.
I want to be great at software engineering. I want to use tech to build things. I see it as coincidence that there's enough overlap between that goal and the company's goal to at least make me good at my job.
[1] That's a lie. I wish I had no loyalty to the company, but my personal pride in a job well done unfortunately means I have a non-zero amount of company loyalty.
[2] Just happened to me, actually. My stress levels are through the roof, and I didn't even get a raise. Clearly I miscalibrated my job performance.