Performance Punishment
Losing the good, ignoring the average, and leaving the poor to rot.
Recently I wrote about cognitive dissonance in the Grand Game of Software Engineering and, no word of a lie, it’s caused me a number of sleepless nights.
Naturally that’s not because I’ve had magazines calling me for more startling exposé articles or publishers lining up for book deals about the surreal world of modern day software engineering¹, as if, but because every time I think of anything in Grand Game there’s always some kind dissonance associated with it.
Let’s take another interesting use case, to coin a phrase.
Punishing Performance
I introduce yet another modern day phrase that neatly rolls off the tongue, “Performance Punishment” — the practice of loading up high performing employees with even more work as some kind of ‘reward’ instead of actually giving them something they deserve like more paid time off or, who’d have though it, a pay increase.
Why should it be that the harder you work, the more you get loaded up with further demanding tasks and additional responsibility?
If you’re doing a great job then surely the best option for a company is for you to continue operating at this excellent capacity and for them not to overload your boat with so much more…
