Hard Work is Overrated

So Stop Thanking For It

It's another vacation-time short essay. This one is for those who praise overwork, hoping their team will be seen and rewarded.

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"Thanks, everyone, for your hard work and dedication!"

You know the drill—another quarterly all-hands meeting, another cheerful speech from the management. Cue the cascade of 👏 emojis in Slack.

Here's an uncomfortable truth: Nobody cares how hard you work.

The Great Hard Work Theater

Don't get me wrong; dedication is admirable. But when was the last time your company celebrated sheer effort over a successful outcome?

Picture this: your engineering team just shipped a groundbreaking feature. Customers love it. Revenue spikes. Does anyone honestly pause to say, "Wow, this success feels less satisfying because it only took moderate effort"? Of course not.

Yet, somehow, we've built an entire performance around effort. We celebrate the engineer who stayed up until 3 AM (The Hero Engineer). We praise the PM who attended seventeen meetings in one day.

We've confused motion with progress and busyness with business value.

"How was your week?" "Oh, look at my calendar, it was super busy!"
We wear busyness like a badge of honor.

The Effort Justification Trap

Here's where it gets psychologically twisted. Once we've invested significant effort into something, our brains perform a neat trick: they inflate the value of whatever we produced to justify the energy we spent. It's effort justification bias, and it's everywhere in our industry.

But step back for a moment. Was any of it actually moving the needle? Or did we convince ourselves it was valuable because we bled for it?

Imagine if your bonus depended solely on how many real problems you solved, not how many hours you logged.

The Busyness Trap

Daniel Kahneman explains that our brains run two modes: System 1 (fast, automatic, reactive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, thoughtful). When we're perpetually busy – drowning in meetings, racing to ship features, fighting fires – we're essentially forcing our brains to live in System 1 mode.

System 1 is ideal for dodging traffic, navigating the day, or fighting or fleeing on autopilot. It's terrible for strategic thinking and creative problem-solving.

The busier you are, the less you think. The less you think, the more likely you are to work hard on the wrong things. It's a vicious cycle wrapped in productivity theater.

Hope For Success Management Philosophy

Here's the most cynical interpretation of the "stay busy" culture: A manager is essentially running a lottery. Instead of providing context, strategy, and clear problem definitions, they're simply increasing the workload and hoping that something succeeds randomly.

It's management by probability: outsource the thinking to chance and volume. Keep your people busy for long enough so the law of large numbers will save you.

But here's the thing about lottery tickets – the house always wins. In this case, the house is entropy, technical debt, and opportunity cost.

What We Should Actually Be Celebrating

Imagine an alternate universe where all-hands meetings went like this:

"I want to thank you for realizing that our most requested feature would actually make our product worse for 80% of users – and having the courage to kill it."

"Let's applaud Mike for spending two weeks talking to customers and discovering we were solving the wrong problem entirely."

"Shoutout to the team that deleted 10,000 lines of code last sprint, making our system simpler and faster."

Sounds strange, doesn't it? We're so programmed to celebrate effort that celebrating intelligence, restraint, and strategic thinking feels almost... lazy?

And don't worry, it’s just nature making us struggle with subtraction activities.

Busyness or Outcomes?

The most valuable thing your engineers can do isn't always to code harder. Sometimes it's to think deeper. To question assumptions. To solve the right problem elegantly rather than solving the wrong problem heroically.

Here's a slightly uncomfortable challenge for you: Consider what your team actually rewards. Busyness or outcomes? Effort or impact? Are your team's heroics celebrated because they solved the right problems, or simply because they stayed late solving unnecessary ones?

Perhaps it's time to stop applauding effort alone and start applauding the courage to think slowly, deliberately, and strategically.

Next time you're tempted to praise someone's effort, flip the script: Ask what problem they solved and why it mattered. Because working smart isn't the opposite of working hard—it's working hard on what truly matters.