One's salary and career will advance more quickly by job hopping. Loyalty isn't just no longer encouraged — it's actively punished. You'll get a pay cut every year despite your productivity going up.

Where im from that guarantees you never get promoted. To get promoted you need to fuck up so badly (also be the bosses friend too) that you get promoted away from where you can cause damage.

I just got a bit of praise and more work

The way it worked for me:

Go out of my way to make things better -> get promotion and pay raise -> go out of my way to make things better again -> no promotion or pay raise -> do the absolute bare minimum -> big pay raise

Maybe they thought I enjoyed improving processes just to do it and saw it takes money to keep me doing it once I stopped.

Or maybe the forces that determine whether I get more money are beyond my understanding.

The only possible promotion from my position is to manager and I don't want to be in a leadership position.

And everyone clapped too

I had already learned this lesson, but then I changed careers, thought it might be different in the new industry, and I got sabotaged by a nepobaby.

Its sad we live in a world where we have to ration our asses. I hope someday to live in a world where I can more freely share my ass with any and all who desire it. But today, alas, it is not that day

If you are at risk of losing your job and have no financial security half assing things it is not an option.

The original post strikes me as privileged in more than one way. Not everyone is equally gifted and not everyone can afford the risk of being punished for their carelessness.

Unless the definition of half assing has changed it's not doing it good enough. It usually just means the work will have to be done again in the near future because it was done poorly the first time.

Yes, the guy that slopped an entire tube of rtv on his oil drain bolt instead of replacing the worn out crush washer was just another person's perfection. Didn't even fix the leak.

The guy that kept slapping unions on the septic tank output because the pipe kept breaking was saving a ton of time doing the same thing four times. If he had done it right and dug down the line he would have found the stump that someone else half assing had buried on top of the line when it was installed.

Why would anyone waste their own time and other's time like this?

Also your Star Trek example is doing the best you can with what you have, and not doing a half ass job even though you were capable of doing a good job. A half ass job would be getting the whales and not bothering to get the water.