DEV Community: Axel

Unhealthy Competition

Axel — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:59:38 +0000

Competition is everywhere: at work, at school, in sports, in the way people chase promotions, grades, wins, recognition and status. Some countries have even changed their entire school system to be competition based and I get why.

Competition can make people sharper, it can push us to prepare better, move faster, and stop accepting mediocre work from ourselves. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve and there is nothing wrong with wanting to win.

But I think we confuse two very different things:

Competing against a standard is healthy.
Competing against the people who are supposed to help you build something.

The second one is where things start to break. I have seen this happen at work, a team builds something useful and instead of asking how to build on it people start asking who owns it.
Someone presents a good idea and the room starts looking for weaknesses before it looks for value. A project starts creating impact and suddenly the conversation shifts from adoption to credit.

It creates a race to deliver the minimum viable solution that can be claimed as your own instead of the best solution that can be built on top of what already exists. The mentality becomes:

“My solution is better than yours.”

“My team needs to be credited for this.”

“This should belong to us.”

That is when competition stops raising the bar and starts slowing the work down. The problem is the scoreboard. When the scoreboard rewards visibility over impact, people chase visibility and then everyone acts surprised when collaboration becomes difficult but people usually behave according to the scoreboard in front of them. If the scoreboard rewards internal winning people will compete internally.

This is why useful ideas start becoming political objects. A solution is no longer judged only by whether it solves the problem; it's judged by where it came from, who owns it, who gets credit, and which team looks better if it succeeds.

That changes the energy and now instead of asking: "How do we solve this better?", people start asking:

How do I make sure my idea wins?

How do I make sure my team owns this?

How do I prove their solution is weaker than mine?

That kind of competition does not create excellence, it creates politics and politics is expensive.

It creates duplicated tools, disconnected platforms, slow adoption and teams solving the same problem from different corners of the company and all because the incentives are pointing in the wrong direction.

The hard part is rarely just building a digital solution. The hard part is getting people to trust it, use it, improve it, and let it become part of how the business moves and that requires collaboration. Not the polished version where everyone says the right thing in meetings, the uncomfortable version where teams share context, expose constraints, reuse each other’s work, and admit when someone else already has a better answer. That last part is hard.

It takes maturity to see another team’s solution and say:

This is good. We should build on it.

It takes discipline to say:

This does not need to be ours to be valuable.

It takes confidence to say:

The goal is not that my team wins, is that the business stops losing time.

That is the kind of competition I believe in, not team versus team. The question should not be, “How do we beat the other team?” it should be “How do we make the work better than it was before?”

Healthy competition	Unhealthy competition
Raises the standard.	Attacks ideas that come from somewhere else.
Asks for better ideas.	Creates duplicated effort, hidden resentment, and slower execution.
Creates momentum.	Adds blockers, friction, and politics.

To be clear, I am not arguing for a culture where every idea gets applause, that is not collaboration and good work needs tension, ideas should be challenged and solutions should be tested but the challenge should serve the work, not the ego.

If I criticize your solution because I see a risk, that is useful.
If I criticize your solution because I need mine to win, that is politics.

The behavior can look similar but the intention changes everything. That is why I do not think the answer is less competition, the answer is better competition.

Compete against:

Manual process that still wastes hours.
Duplicated report nobody trusts.
Platform nobody adopts.
Workflow that breaks every time one person is unavailable.
Meeting where everyone agrees and nothing moves.

That is what we should be trying to beat because the enemy is not the other team is the friction everyone has learned to tolerate. Once that becomes clear, collaboration stops feeling like a threat and someone else’s good idea becomes useful and the goal is to mature it.

Ambition without collaboration becomes ego. Collaboration without ambition becomes comfort but ambition aimed at a shared problem can create real progress. That is the balance, we need to compete with your own standards, against waste, against slow execution, against the version of the process that everyone complains about but nobody changes.

But do not confuse beating your colleagues with building something meaningful. The company does not win because one internal team looks smarter than another, it wins when the work moves better than it did before. That should be the scoreboard.

All In or Not At All

Axel — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:40:22 +0000

I have never been good with middle grounds. I like things clear. Black or White, Zero or One, True or False. Maybe that is why computers made sense to me before many other things did.

A machine does not care about your intention, something either compiles or it does not, a condition is met or it is not. A system responds or it fails, is that simple and there is peace in that.

Real life is not built that way. Most things don't work in absolutes ~only the sith~. Most decisions are not straight forward. Most conversations do not end with a perfect answer. Almost everything important eventually becomes the same boring sentence:

"It depends." And I hate that sentence.

Not because it is wrong. It is usually right and that is the problem. It is the responsible answer, the mature answer. The answer people give when they understand complexity and context.

But sometimes “it depends” becomes a hiding place.

A way to avoid choosing.
A way to avoid committing.
A way to stay close enough to an idea to feel involved, but far enough from it to avoid responsibility.

That is the part I struggle with. I do not like doing things halfway.

I do not go out often, I know, shocker. But when I do, I want to actually go all the way out. I do not want the light version of going out. I do not want to dress up, drive somewhere, eat quickly, and go back home before the night has even started.

If we made the decision to go, then let’s go. Not because every night has to become legendary. Because once I cross the line from “no” to “yes,” I want the yes to mean something.

I know not everyone operates with the same intensity. Sometimes people are tired. Sometimes the correct decision is to keep it simple. I understand that. But this says something about me: I do not just dislike indecision, I dislike partial commitment and that shows up in the way I work too.

I think that every idea deserves obsession. Some ideas should die early. Some projects should wait and some problems are not worth solving right now.

But when something does matter, I think it deserves more than polite agreement. At work, I have seen good ideas get trapped in the indecision. A project appears with an opportunity that is real, with business value that is clear. Everyone agrees it makes sense, everyone can see the potential and then... nothing moves with enough force.

Not because people are lazy, that would be too simple, the problem is usually quieter than that: The idea has agreement, but no owner. It has visibility, but no engine.

It has support, but no one willing to carry the uncomfortable part: leading it, defending it, organizing it, and pushing it when attention moves somewhere else. That is how good ideas die without anyone officially killing them.

A good idea can survive disagreement. Sometimes disagreement makes it stronger. What it usually cannot survive is passive agreement. I saw this happen recently with a project I still believe in.

The opportunity was there from the beginning. Some people saw it and raised awareness, others agreed with existence of the opportunity but it took months before someone truly stepped forward and carried the change with the force it needed... and now the work is urgent.

That is the cost of delayed commitment. The work does not disappear while people decide who owns it, it waits, then it comes back with less time, more pressure, and fewer options.

Ownership is not having the idea. It is staying with it after it becomes inconvenient and when nobody owns the weight, it shifts by itself (Usually onto the person who cares the most).

That is how someone becomes the unofficial owner, translator, driver, firefighter, and eventually the bottleneck. Not because they wanted control, but because everyone else left the responsibility unclaimed.

I cannot be support, developer, strategist, business expert, product owner, and change leader all at the same time. Even if, from the outside, it sometimes looks that way and that is why I care so much about ownership.

Not ownership as a title. Not ownership as a corporate word people put in presentations. Real ownership. The kind where someone says:

This matters.
I will move it.
I will make the trade-offs visible.
I will not let it stay in the comfortable middle forever.

Of course, the danger is rigidity. Being all-in does not mean forcing your intensity onto everything. That is not leadership. That is ego.

The goal is not to eliminate gray areas. It is to bring full presence into them, to accept complexity without becoming passive, to understand nuance without losing direction, to stay flexible without becoming vague.

That is the balance I am trying to learn. I still prefer clear lines. I still like yes or no. I still trust action more than endless discussion. But the real world is not asking to become less intense. It is asking to aim that intensity better, the things that do matter deserve more than half-energy.

If a project is worth doing, I want someone to own it.
If an idea is worth defending, I want it to survive beyond the meeting where everyone nodded.
And if it is not worth that level of presence, maybe the answer should have been no from the beginning.

For me, the lesson is simple, even if applying it is not:

Do not confuse agreement with commitment.
Do not confuse nuance with hesitation.
Do not confuse balance with half-energy.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is choose fully. Yes or no. In or out. All in, or not at all.