It can also be a rational response to a company that follows "management to rule". For example, I was once on a team where almost all of my time was spent coordinating with other teams and helping other developers instead of developing myself. When performance reviews rolled around I was told that none of that stuff mattered; only the number of tickets that I completed matter.
So I switched my focus to completing tickets. A few weeks later I overheard my manager complaining about a breaking change made by another team that I had previously been coordinating with: "Why is this happening so much? We didn't used to get surprised by these sorts of problems."
This is super common in engineering organizations. Any shop with a standard performance review will have a "score card" where your contributions are summarized in a method that can be compared to others.
Being a great team player can't be quantified, and gets dropped.
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It can also be a rational response to a company that follows "management to rule". For example, I was once on a team where almost all of my time was spent coordinating with other teams and helping other developers instead of developing myself. When performance reviews rolled around I was told that none of that stuff mattered; only the number of tickets that I completed matter.
So I switched my focus to completing tickets. A few weeks later I overheard my manager complaining about a breaking change made by another team that I had previously been coordinating with: "Why is this happening so much? We didn't used to get surprised by these sorts of problems."
This is super common in engineering organizations. Any shop with a standard performance review will have a "score card" where your contributions are summarized in a method that can be compared to others.
Being a great team player can't be quantified, and gets dropped.