It is not the first time I have heard it, and it will probably not be the last.
“Other teams are putting in overtime. We rarely see that from your team.”
After 13 years in the industry, I assumed overtime had stopped being a benchmark. It has not. Different company, different manager, same sentence.
It started in my internship
During my internship I could finish the tasks I was assigned in about an hour. Then I sat there for the rest of the day, bored, because the office closed at a fixed time and leaving early was not an option.
Later, the team estimated a set of integrations at 40 to 56 hours. I finished them in 26. Those were the days when you read the documentation and did everything by hand, no shortcuts.
You would think that earns trust. In many places, it quietly did the opposite. The people who stayed late and worked weekends were called dedicated. The work I did early was called easy. Nobody said I was lazy, but the picture in people’s heads was clear: if it did not look like a struggle, it must not have been much.
Calm reads as “not trying”
Here is the version I heard most recently. One team is moving around all day, escalating, staying late, putting out fires. My team is steady and calm. Releases go out, problems get handled before they become problems, nobody is panicking.
To the management, the first team looks like a team in a do-or-die situation. Mine does not look like it is in one at all.
And the company really is in a tough spot. B2B is shrinking. Marketing is saturated. Competition is at an all-time high. MRR is stable, which in this market is not nothing.
That is the part that confuses me. When the pressure is real, you want the team that is quietly holding revenue steady. Instead the praise goes to the team that looks busy.
Firefighting is visible. Prevention is not.
This is the core problem. A fire is dramatic, and everyone sees the person who put it out. A fire that never started leaves no evidence.
Overtime is easy to count. Hours, messages at midnight, weekend commits. Good planning, small safe releases and a team that does not get surprised are much harder to see, because their whole job is to make nothing happen.
So managers measure what is easy to measure. Effort is visible. Outcome takes more work to read. And a calm team looks like an effortless team, even when the calm was built with a lot of effort.
The visibility game
Every team I have worked in had a mix: strong players and some who were just getting by. And in several of them I watched the same pattern. Some people put their energy into being seen. They stayed close to the management, so that management saw through their eyes and heard through their ears.
It is unfortunate, but it is true. When a leader’s picture of the team comes from the people who talk most, the picture tells you who is loud, not who is good.
I do not think most of these people are villains. They are responding to what the system rewards. If the system rewards visible effort, you will get visible effort.
The new boss who changes everything
There is a second version of this I have seen more than once. Someone new joins at the top of the hierarchy and starts changing everything at once. New structure, new process, new people they trust.
Fixing things step by step is slow, and nobody notices slow. Changing everything is fast and looks like leadership. But a big rewrite of how a team works is not a fix, it is a reset, and the cost lands on the people who were already doing the work.
Then it goes wrong, as it often does. And the explanation that arrives is the oldest one: the team was the problem.
How to handle
I have not solved this. But I have stopped pretending the work speaks for itself, because it does not. Work that looks effortless needs a translator.
- Make outcomes legible. A short weekly note: what shipped, what did not break, what we decided not to do and why. Results in plain words, not hours.
- Count the fires that never started. If a risk was caught in planning, say so. Prevention you do not mention does not exist for anyone else.
- Ask what is being measured. “How do you want to judge my team: hours, or outcomes?” Asked calmly, early, before the comparison happens.
- Do not fake the chaos. Adding overtime to look committed teaches the whole team that calm is a mistake. I would rather lose the argument than teach that.
- Do not become the loudest voice either. Being visible and performing visibility are different things. The first is communication. The second is the game.
The question for managers
If your calm team is shipping and holding revenue steady while another team is always on fire, which one are you actually rewarding?
Overtime tells you how much someone suffered. It does not tell you what they achieved. In a market where B2B is shrinking and every competitor is hungry, the second one is the number that pays salaries.
Have you been the calm team that got doubted, or the busy team that got praised? I would like to hear which side of it you saw.
Tahir Shahzad
Tahir Shahzad is a Product Manager, Product Owner, and technology consultant with over a decade of experience helping startups and organizations build products people actually use. If you are working on a product problem worth solving, reach him at tahirshahzad.com/contact/
