Hacker News Reader

If you're in an environment where rolling up one's sleeves and taking on the grunt work leads so quickly to negative reinforcement loops, in the way you describe... then that's a sure sign that you've found yourself in the wrong environment.

In healthy environments (and yes, they do exists) good deeds are actually rewarded, not punished.

View on HN

I don't think it's so black and white. In this case, the "punishment" isn't literal. It simply comes in the form of more grunt work, which people trust you with because you have taken it on before and did a good job with it. You may actually be rewarded too when the annual review comes, if you know how to spin it.

Furthermore, grunt work can be an excellent opportunity to shine. For example, you can figure out a way to automate it so that the next person who works on it (which may be you again) has to spend only a fraction of the time on it. Things like running reports or generating documents tend to lend themselves really well to automation, and a little programming ability can take you a long way.

So yeah... think twice before turning away grunt work, even if you believe that you may be given more of it in the future if you agree to take it on now.

I was thinking more in terms of this

http://www.daedtech.com/the-gravitational-force-of-wage-labo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com