When the org that I was working for was doing TSP (https://segoldmine.ppi-int.com/node/67631), our coach told me a story about another team and an engineer I knew very well. He got high praise for all the late nights and weekends he worked to get a product out the door. But on analysis of what he was working on and the bugs he had to deal with, if he had taken the TSP approach that my team was using, most of those bugs would never have been created in the first place and the product would have been finished much sooner.
Drama gets noticed, just quietly ticking along, producing high-quality output really doesn't.
Exactly. I've worked at software companies where the executives wouldn't believe any work was being done unless they could visibly see activity, and hear the "buzz" of "people doing things" and feel the drama of production emergencies and heroics. It felt like they were listening for intense movie-like typing on keyboards, watching for theatrics in front of whiteboards, project leads calling for standups, and so on. Those were the teams truly DoingThings™ and those teams were rewarded for their performance art. The team silently plugging away at their desks in chat, while they calmly deployed another build that passed all test automation--I'm not sure if leadership even knew who they were.
EDIT: These folks almost certainly overlap with the ones pining for Return To Office instead of remote work: They miss the "hum" and "buzz" of SeriousBusiness™ happening all around them in the physical office.
Its exactly this. Their approach produced lots of weekends and late nights and broken releases and they could be seen to be fixing things and responding like lightening to every issue. My team on the other hand was 9 to 5, everything just worked when we released it with few bugs and we and the business worked like normal human beings. The problem is that its invisible and there are no heroics, its just good solid engineering. Which considering it was a back end system for a bank is the right way for things to be.
Management likes people who make heroic effort even if they are the cause of needing it they are visibly working hard even if they are making less progress.
Management also often doesn't track the amount of drama products created by "fast" teams cause later in production. Because the negative impact is often delayed, those problems are rarely attributed to the original authors of the code, who often move to new projects by that time. I've seen it so many times: a "hero" gets praised for writing a software component in a day and putting it into production quickly, despite a massive evidence showing that the maintenance of the previous N projects done by that person turned out to be literally a PITA and a constant source of drama later.
I'd love to see engineering bonuses / promotions work similar to how hiring bonuses work. You don't get a hiring bonus immediately when you recommend a new hire, but you get it once the new hire stays for N months. You shouldn't get a bonus/praise/promotion for just delivering software quickly. You should get it after it runs consistently and painlessly in production for N months.
Drama gets noticed, just quietly ticking along, producing high-quality output really doesn't.