The Comfortable Cog

March 8, 2025

There are hundreds of articles, thousands of blogs, and ten thousand LinkedIn posts a day exhorting the "grind". The push for achievement, to never be satisfied with ones position in the pecking order, to measure one's value by one's competitive edge. And all that certainly holds water to some extent. But a less commonly shouted virtue, and indeed a trait that is more often decried and disdained, is that of being a comfortable cog in a machine.

And the phrase "cog in the machine" is the first sin. It conjures the image of complacency, stagnation, and mediocrity. The timbre of the metaphor eclipses the meaning of the words themselves. Every business, organization, or project is a machine, and every machine has parts working in tandem. Twisting Monty Python, "every cog is precious". Isn't it crucial to have reliable, high quality parts in your machine and doubly valuable when they are broken in, tuned, and precise?

To bring this belabored analogy back to earth, there's unmistakable value in employees who are capable, adequate, effective, and... nothing more. A business relies upon a capable foundation of individuals who understand the general business goals, the technological or procedural avenues toward those goals, and can perform the work efforts to achieve those goals. The role of upper leadership is to course correct, better clarify and understand the specific business value propositions and tradeoffs, and down select the company goals towards an investment objective.

There's a disconnect between incremental self-improvement and awareness, which allows one to remain consistently effective as time, technology, and technique evolve, and competitive self-improvement, where the focus is partly performative - others need to see and know that you are "cutting edge" or "ahead of the curve".

By Jeremykemp at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10547051 The Gartner hype cycle - the type of curve that performative self-improvers are ever hovering at the peak of.
It almost feels as though employment as a whole (although I acknowledge I'm seeing this through a tech industry lens) is at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, where the sensations of "thrive or die" and "fake it till you make it" are the driving force behind hiring and retention. I think that feeling comes, at least in part, from social media narcissism flooding its way into work. Careers have always been a central part of individuals lives, and they've always been a point of comparison and competition, but now its "Facebook-ified" and the little dopamine hit of a LinkedIn like or comment is enough to motivate people to adopt the grind of performative punditry.

In any workplace I've been a part of, at whatever scale, I have observed that 9 times out of 10, the truly crucial people who prop the organization up and remain indespensible are the least overt, least credit-motivated, most work-life balanced, and most willing to share their knowledge and enthusiasm. In the scope of tech industries, I always think of this xkcd comic that perfectly captures how reliant we are on those who are "cogs in the machine" and satisfied with it.

I don't want to discount or completely denigrate those who are truly motivated, ambitious, and resourceful who do truly enjoy being at the cutting edge, pushing for personal advancement, or driving towards individual achievement. But those people are cogs in the machine of their making and their choosing. And its okay to be a cog in someone else's machine.