p90+ effort for p90+ comp. I imagine there are businesses out there with the gross revenue to support hoards of median engineers doing clearly defined jobs wit

p90+ effort for p90+ comp. I imagine there are businesses out there with the gross revenue to support hoards of median engineers doing clearly defined jobs with unsurprising workloads. I used to do that at a well funded public org. It was easy and required little effort. It required the opposite of grit. People with grit find their own problems, solve them, and you don’t even hear about half of what they did unless you ask. Initiative, drive, and the ability to actually execute to completion autonomously, or even better to autonomously organise a group of ICs to make impactful change — those are the people with grit I want to work with, and how I see myself. If you are deliberately adversarial about the amount of effort you are putting in — a common canard is bringing up work/life balance, as if it’s something unique only they care about — then you’d probably be much happier working for HP or Cisco!