I appreciate the thorough response, and concede my communication hasn't been very clear. I have been both types as well, I thought that could be inferred from my first comment you replied to.

I think you have a Deming perspective, which I agree with, that employees work within the system which the company has created. Or more specifically, management has created, because management is responsible for the system. Where our disagreement lies is probably how much employee responsibility and output variance that actually bounds. Maybe we also disagree on how much influence non-management employees, particularly software engineers, have in inducing management to change the system, and perhaps even whether they should bother to try and what the range of likely outcomes is when people do try.

It is in those things that I think there is a lot of opportunity for alternatives an individual has to just doing the job "however", or doing the job "while just following the incentives", that don't require working overtime.

I also still see many alternatives to "however" that boil down not to increased time but just to increased thought or knowledge. Maybe you'll argue there's often no incentive for acquiring or utilizing such thought or knowledge, or maybe not if you think it's reasonable to expect competence and studiousness. But whichever, fine; still, if I already have it, well, I can use it or not. My irrelevant examples were trying to get at this. I'll try once more with something rather trivial: there is no time difference, really, in whether you return null or an empty collection from some function when there are no things. There's no time difference really when writing the calling side to do the null check before you loop vs. just going into the loop. There's no time difference really to write the arrange-act-assert unit test on this behavior, if unit testing is your thing. So do whatever, right? There's nothing in the system to incentivize either option? Regardless of what you do, you'll go home by 5, and you haven't had to rob the story of time (aka delaying it) in order to do something in a slower but correct way. I submit though that one of these options is "the correct way", and will flag it in a review if I see the wrong one done.

I didn't say anything about expecting extra things of individual employees -- management should only expect what they incentivize. Though thinking about it, I will say now that if we're to call ourselves engineers, it's reasonable to expect an engineer to have certain professional ethics and standards, something that makes them say "actually, as an economic free agent, I'll go find a different game to play." No, I don't think something like "doesn't or isn't allowed or isn't incentivized to write unit tests" rises to that level of standard, but I can see others disagreeing (some think no one should ever write in a non-statically typed language), and if they want to leave a place because of that, especially after trying and failing to spearhead a change, more power to them.

Anyway, my point was not that something like "passion" is expected, but that when it's there, it's yet another alternative way besides staying past 5 that can lead to actually getting more and/or higher quality work done. If "passion" is present, or can be incentivized somehow, I care enough to make use of it.

> When the company removes ticket-closing rates in its metrics, and replaces it with "quality" (however you define it) then you won't see "hacked together crap".

All I'll say to this is: "Were it so easy."