> Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business.

They pay you to increase their profit. As you see yourself running a business, it's important to understand what your customers actually care to pay for.

If you want your pay to go up, they need to see the impact you can make or are making to their profit.

A lot of engineers think they are paid to work through tasks assigned to them and what not, or to increase code quality, or to add a feature to the app, or backend, etc. As they focus on that, they can find themselves really surprised when they're told they aren't performing or are going to be let go. "I did everything you asked me?" Yes, but none of that was what they were interested in. To them it felt like they had to step in and find things for you to do otherwise you'd be sitting idle while they pay for nothing, which is work they had to do that they'd had rather not have too.

What they actually want you to do, is immediately begin understanding what makes them money, immediately start engaging with ideas to maximize that, and immediately start focusing on how the tasks you pick up should be done in order to maximize the impact to their bottom line, by figuring out if it's the right thing or not, if it's worth doing it well or doing it quickly, etc.

> Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest".

I'm not fully going to disagree here, but most engineers are not paid for "hours-in-seat" at least in big tech. They're salaried, not hourly wage workers.

And what you say is true if you consider "working hard" to be the same as "pretending to work a lot of hours."

Putting in lots of hours is actually quite easy, if at the sacrifice of your personal time, but anybody can do it.

Actual hard work though is often quite engaging, fun, and rewarding. Many engineers look for opportunities to work on hard problems for example.

It is very difficult to create an environment that makes people work hard. Meaning, having them truly tackle innovation, truly raise efficiency, truly prioritized on what matters, truly in the loop of what they need to solve for, truly assigned to what they are best at, etc.

It is very easy to create an environment that makes people work longer hours or weekends, but on a bunch of easy irrelevant things and with procrastination throughout.

> without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this

That you must be willing to take risk, believe you are the best, willing to play dirty, willing to stomp on others, and so on, yes for sure to some extent.

But out of all those with some of that, most of them are average or below average leaders even with respect to being a tyrant and everything else required.

Sometimes applying a bit of pressure, dangling a carrot, a bit of a threat, it does motivate people to put on more effort and try harder and it does extract more value out of them (at no added cost).

And a good manager will do that, and you should expect it. But going back to your business analogy, customers do the same. They complain, they want more for less, they threaten to go to your competitor, etc.

But this part is the easiest one to do. And because it's so easy, you'll find it's what most managers do to try and be a "good manager". That makes it average at best.

Beyond that, a really good manager will do everything else I mentioned.

And so, my point remains, if all your manager is doing is just telling you why you're not better and things aren't done and to try harder, they're a bad manager, as that's just going to be what the average or below average manager will do, since it's literally the easiest thing to do as a manager.