This is true outside of programming too. I work at an engineering consultancy and I was highly motivated to "prove my worth" going in. I shipped like crazy on

This is true outside of programming too. I work at an engineering consultancy and I was highly motivated to "prove my worth" going in. I shipped like crazy on my job in the initial few days. X numbers of procedures written, Y number of proposals evaluated, Z number of reports generated where X, Y, and Z were much higher than average. It was mostly to see how much I could get done, and I was getting a lot done. Initially my boss was happy but then more work kept piling up on my desk because I could obviously get this work done while some of my co-workers continued to work at snail's pace. I don't fault them because they obviously knew that it was better just to do the minimum amount of work to not raise questions and then chill in the break room or just catching up on each other's lives. Anyway long story short I learned that unless it is a make or break situation where the upside is written in a contract, it is just better to coast along when working at MegaCorps (I can't comment on startups as I haven't worked at one). On another note, one of the things we do is we train and certify people. This is a high volume service and most companies want certificates for each individual that they contract with us for a training. One of my co-workers used to manually copy fields such as ; FirstName, LastName, NameOfTraining, DateofAttendence, Validity, NameOfCompany, NameOfTrainer, CertificateNo, etc. from an Excel file for each individual on to a word document and then hit print. She would do this 100 times if there were 100 attendees who were trained. It was her full time job because it was so time consuming. All I had to do was setup MailMerge on MS Word that took data from Excel and generated all the certificates in one batch to reduce her full time job to 10 minutes. Obviously I need to switch companies soon lest I go crazy too.