Passing on personal productivity gains to management is always a HUGE L for the individual worker. As a dev, you can use the saved time to slow down and not be

Passing on personal productivity gains to management is always a HUGE L for the individual worker. As a dev, you can use the saved time to slow down and not be stressed, spend more time chatting with colleagues, learn new skills, maybe improve the quality of the code, etc. Or you can pass it on to management which will result in your workload being increased back to where you are stressed again and your slower colleagues will be let go, so now you get to feel bad about that and they won't be around to chat with. I have never in my life seen workers actually get rewarded with pay raises for improved productivity, that is just a myth the foolish chase, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I have also tried being the top performer on a team before (using automation tools to achieve it), and all I got was praise from management. That's nice, but I can't pay for my holidays with praise, so not worth it.