If you are really important strategically and your boss does not want to use you , keeping you from leaving to competitors would be a really good deal for the company.
But frankly, “coasters” are much more common in other industries. Overwork and high stress is the work like for common people in tech. Many of the coasters are simply burned out after years of overwork and they are just fortunate to be sufficiently important strategically to the company
In some other industries, everyone works 9-5 so it would be 100% coasters. Engineers call a regular 9-5 work day as coasting, but that should have been a normal day indeed. Their overworked days are not normal, they are evil days to hurt people’s health and reduce the total number of jobs
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Years later, he landed at Microsoft and says he saw how Microsoft used high-paying jobs strategically, within both its engineering ranks and its research-and-development unit, Microsoft Research. The company, he says, would nab hard-to-find experts in up-and-coming fields like artificial intelligence, robotics, natural speech language, quantum computing, and so on, often allowing them to collect their Microsoft pay while maintaining a job as a professor or researcher at a university.
“You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it, and that’s very valuable,” he said. “It’s a defensive measure.”
Another person confirmed the tactic, telling us, “That’s Microsoft Research’s whole model.”
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Got my mom an Inada for her birthday this year. That thing is amazing. This chair looks pretty crappy. No surprise, with the amount of abuse it probably has at the office.
