internetman55

This pretty much happened to me at a project. Coworker was positioned as leader of our project and thought I was a genius and could make her look really good. Starts pushing me really hard to do stuff I had no experience doing really quickly.

Another MBA-type coworker starts drafting me into his own initiatives. They actually were essential to the stuff we did running at all, but apparently no one actually knew that.

I overwork for a while. Eventually I get pretty burnt out and I stop being able to work at a supranormal pace. Coworker/pseudo-PM gets mad and starts badmouthing me to my actual manager. I get butthutt since I'm working 10x harder than anyone else on my project yet I'm being harassed constantly.

Eventually I have enough savings that I stop caring about getting fire. In my mind, management had unreasonable deadlines, so I began to rely on myself to decide what a reasonable level of output was. I start doing about 4 hours of work a day and stop caring about anything beyond my "daily minimum".

I started to get in really good shape, since I'd constantly sneak to the parking lot and do laps or run to the gym when no one was looking. I started returning to my religion and started reflecting a lot, and really meditating on the situation. I realized that I was being punished for my pride and arrogance and became a much more humble person.

Instead of working hard on my own work to glorify myself, I would focus on making my team members as helpful as possible. Since I was fine losing my job, I was also fine jumping on basically any metaphorical grenade for any reason and absorbing political fallout.

Eventually my entire team was absolutely in love with me, except my pseudo-PM, the MBA coworker, and my actual manager. I realize they are all just stressed out folks trying to make a living. The Pseudo-PM seems mad at me for some reason, and constantly complains about me while the rest of my team talks about me as if I am a saint. Soon pseudo-PM is let go from the company.

Eventually the whole project just gets transfered to another manager, who has reasonable expectations and seems to look out for his employees. Now life is pretty good. It was just a really surreal experience.

I think integers mod p (p prime) is a field

That is about what I have been eating naturally (~150-250g carbs daily, pretty much from oats, potatoes, sweet potatoes, dairy, and 1-2 servings of fruit per day).

The famous educator John Taylor Gatto thinks one of the keys of elite education is the ability to speak extemporaneously and intelligently for a few minutes on topics you know nothing about.

Where does this meme come from? As a young person man, I have no debt, no kids, no elderly parents to support, and so on. Since I'm in software development and didn't try to make it in SV, I had enough cash to cover multiple years of living expenses after about a year of working. Hell, even just collecting unemployment would cover my living expenses. Entry level jobs are plentiful, while my understanding is that senior dev and management jobs are harder to find.

I've only been at one job so far, but my opinion was that I would suffer literally zero short-term effects for getting fired/laid off. I probably would just end up at a better job since I've got a bigger network and time to spend grinding out interviews if that happened.

So in the end my employers would act the way you described, but I would be confused about how to respond to them as they had zero objective leverage over me. As a result I could pretty much just work a regular 40 hours and my boss could just blow smoke out his ears if he didn't like it.

As an aside I actually don't have an issue working extra hours sometimes, but 100% of the time I'd been asked to, I thought it management was responsible via poor planning or making shitty technical choices. I'm fine helping out to cover someone else's bad work, but people would just become more rude/demanding. So I would just stop since I was only working extra out of kindness in the first place.