It's true, was there through 2016-2023.
People just have different definitions of what coasting means. In general don't think "doing nothing" or "avoiding work" think "add certainty to process + decision making like everyone else does", and much more importantly "avoiding friction because as soon as there's even a little bit, people leverage it"
More detail on what causes this:
- processes become elongated through what Steve Yegge called cookie-licking, more specifically, anyone above line level doing "I am the 10th person who needs to give a green light for this to happen"
- the elongated process taking so long with that many people that some people lose interest or move on or forget they already approved it
- business disruptions (ex. now Sundar told VP told VP told VP who told director to add GenAI goals)
- bad managers are __really__ bad at BigCo, there's so much insulation from reality due to the money printer, and cultural bias towards "meh everythings good!"
- managers trying to get stuff done rely on people who slavishly overwork to do the minimum possible for their _direct manager_ to be happy
- only needing to keep your manager happy, and your manager being focused on deploying limited resources, creates a suspicious untrusting atmosphere. The amount of othering and trash-talking is incredibly disturbing.
- _someone_ has to slavishly overwork on any given project because there's very little planning. due to the "meh everythings good!" inclination, coupled to software being pretty hard to plan accurately anyway. so what's the point of planning it all?
- newly minted middle managers are used to clinging onto anything their manager cares about and overworking, so they end up being a massive bottleneck for their reports. New middle manager on my team's profile page looked like a military dictator's medals, 6 projects they were "leading", 1 of which they were actually working on and actually got done.
- The "coaster" realizes "if I go outside the remit of what my manager asked for, they A) won't care because they didn't ask for it B) which exposes me to non-zero friction because they'll constantly be wondering why I'm doing it at all C) I'll have to overwork because they won't help plan or distribute work because it was my idea to go beyond the bare minimum D) its very very hard to get promoted, especially based on work my manager didn't explicitly ask for E) the cultural bias here is strongly towards everything is okay all the time no matter what, so any visible friction will be attributed to me personally being difficult
And that's _before_ you account for the genuine sociopathy you see increasingly as you move up the ladder.
Anecdote:
I waited _3 years_ to launch work I had done and 3 VPs asked for. Year 3, it came to a head b/c one of the 3 was like "wtf is going on!?" My team's product manager outright pretended our org's VP didn't want it, had 0 interest in it, after first pretending it didn't _come up at all_ in a meeting arranged to talk about it.
Within a couple weeks this was corrected by yet another VP meeting where they called in the PM's boss' boss' boss and the VP was like "fuck yeah I want this yesterday", but engineering middle manager and PM closed ranks to blame it on me. Engineering went with "Where's the plan / doc!?!?" (I won't even try to explain this, trust me, after 3 yrs they knew and there were docs), and both pretended I was interrupting meetings regularly (I was the only one who ever wrote anything on the agenda, and once we hit year 2.5, I was very careful to only speak when called upon because it was clear it was going to build up to this, as they were assigned the new shiny year-long project to rush a half-assed version of Cupertino's latest, as they were every year).