When I started out, I thought you would be assigned work with the expectation that you could complete it. I basically murdered myself for a half a year and developed minor health problems, since I was broke and worried about losing my income. As my energy and stuff deteriorated I lost the ability to concentrate or do much work, and I started getting warnings for not working fast enough etc. At that point I felt manipulated and got angry, and thought that actual work output counted for nothing, since it just lead to raised expectations, accusations of not working hard enough, and no upside.

So I spent half a year doing the minimum amount of actual work I thought I could get away while spending the rest of my time socializing and helping out coworkers. I think this basically made my manager lose her mind. She started badmouthing me to my skip level and using me as a scape goat for our project not working out (we were a small team and I went from the highest output worker to the slowest) but all my skip level manager would hear from other employees was how great an employee I was. Eventually she seemed to start avoiding me, and then went psycho and left the organization.

Overall, I think that this only works if everyone is straight forward and doesn't do any creepy things out of greed or ambition.