8 ms·

Everyone should be ‘quiet quitting’

70 points by llimos 4y ago

blinded 4y ago
I go hard and let off the gas or “quiet quit” at different times throughout the year. I have work and non work goals that get varying priority. I suspect those that don’t would benefit from a hobby. But also if they are grinding for a work goal who are you to stop them?
- jart 4y ago
  Is it possible to have hobbies as a tech worker, if you're a programmer and your hobby is programming? Don't most employment contracts say that anything you build as a hobby belongs to the company? In that case it's not a hobby.
  - alextheparrot 4y ago
    If I build and give away bird houses, that could still be a hobby. I don’t follow how lack of ownership means it can’t be a hobby.
    - jart 4y ago
      Because depending on which birdhouse factory you work for, the birdhouse manager might take it as an insult that you're building birdhouses on your own time and giving them away for free. He'd think you were not only reallocating his resources (i.e. your time) without permission, but to make matters worse, you're undercutting him in the marketplace. Since why would anyone buy birdhouses from the factory if you're giving them away for free? That thinking doesn't apply to all places. For example if you work at the bird sanctuary, then they might think your birdhouses are cute. Then you can have a hobby.
  - zwkrt 4y ago
    Well if what you do for work is also your hobby maybe that’s the issue. It might be time to “touch grass” as the kids say.
  - handoflixue 4y ago
    > Don't most employment contracts say that anything you build as a hobby belongs to the company? I see these sorts of contracts at a decent number of jobs, but I wouldn't say the majority. Every time I've been presented with one, they've been fine adding an exemption for my hobby work - as long as it's distinct from my professional work. I believe California requires such an exemption - I've gotten a fair number of contracts where it was already specified that they only owned the right to code that was related to my professional duties.
  - blinded 4y ago
    Yes it totally is. You have to become good at doing great work and staying focused in the time window you have and prioritize the hobby. For example do 10 hours of work in 8, then cut out and do your hobby. Mine this summer is running and climbing. Its counter intuitive but doing well in the hobby will feed your 9 to 5. In your case you're talking about a specific technical hobby which is also cool. Just code all of it on your personal comp not during work hours. Once it get big hire a lawyer and get a llc. Don't limit yourself, identify problems and find solutions. Be an engineer. You got this.
  - blep_ 4y ago
    To add more anecdata, I have never been asked to sign such a thing. This may be specific to some subfields or locations?
Flankk 4y ago
Doing the minimum or being lazy is pretty bad advice. The smart move is to educate yourself on how to organize a union and put together a game plan. This is what corporations are really afraid of and that is because it's the one thing that gives you power. Get bent with the Bolshevik revolution crap. The goal isn't to end up in a worse place.
- PenguinCoder 4y ago
  I'm done busting my ass, doing top tier work as the expectation, for shit pay. Pay me the bare minimum you can, don't expect me to work more or harder than then minimum _I_ can. Especially after years of nothing but stellar reviews, and a token 3% raise yearly. The goal isn't to end up in a worse place, but you also shouldn't let yourself be taken advantage of out of fear of the unknown. I agree and identify strongly with this article. > Turn up on time. Do your job. Do it right. Do whatever is asked of you provided it's lawful, reasonable. [...] Do not one thing more than that.
  - tpmoney 4y ago
    >Pay me the bare minimum you can, don't expect me to work more or harder than then minimum _I_ can. Especially after years of nothing but stellar reviews, and a token 3% raise yearly. I struggle to understand this mindset a bit. Barring early "first job" jobs, when you were hired, presumably you agreed to / negotiated a compensation that was not the absolute minimum your employer could pay or that you would agree to. So to start, they're already not paying you the least they can. But then, if you're not doing anything more than the minimums/what you're expected to do, why would you expect anything more than minimum compensation raises? If you want more pay, and higher pay, you have to be doing more than you were originally hired to do. Especially because part of the hiring process is acknowledging that you will not actually be up to speed for anywhere from a few months to a few years. Do I think companies should do more to retain and compensate their employees? Yes. Do I think that most companies are short sighted as to the true cost of losing valuable employees over compensation issues? Yes. Do I think that companies should try to do more than "the minimum"? Yes. But I also think all the same things about being an employee. I'm not saying you give up everything to the company, but I've known more than a few people in my life who were hardline "minimalist" employees, and they were always surprised by the fact that they were treated equally minimally by the employer.
gu0xeibaiBiequo 4y ago
You aren't hurting the corporation. You're hurting the people who will be fired if they don't pick up your slack. I left an employer without notice not long ago where the prevailing attitude was more or less to do the minimum you could without being terminated and let the on-calls pick up the slack, after being "accidentally" placed on-call for roughly 7 weeks. It literally destroyed my life in every possible way. I'm not even open to working in that industry anymore. The buck has to stop somewhere or the checks stop coming. This is essentially open advocation for sociopathy.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  You’re blaming your previous colleagues for management apathy/incompetency and your own choice to not have left sooner. I have sympathy as someone previously in on call rotations, but I’m also sufficiently experienced to know to get out at the first sign of boundaries violations (7 weeks!?). Take better care of yourself going forward, no one else will. That is what the message is, self care over a nebulous business.
  - gu0xeibaiBiequo 4y ago
    I'm absolutely blaming my previous colleagues for their actions of dodging their responsibility and letting it fall where it may. I don't want to work any more than you do, but it's not my fault or management's fault that you're not doing your job when nobody's watching. It's a choice you make to shirk the responsibility you've been paid to assume, and it affects your colleagues much more than the corporation.
    - pizzaknife 4y ago
      its your choice to play mother teresa, however. edit: honesty is important. call it as you see it. if that doesnt work: join em or walk
      - gu0xeibaiBiequo 4y ago
        I didn't play Mother Teresa. I walked, instead of checking out and letting everyone assume I'm doing my job. I think that's a much stronger signal than warming a chair. My point is that there's a contradiction in this argument. A work culture where everyone is held accountable is a culture of authoritarianism, blame and metrics gaming. A work culture where everyone is expected to act like an adult and do their job even when nobody's watching with the red pen, is a work culture in which the least you can do to not get fired is exactly nothing. Everyone can't "quiet quit" by any reasonable definition, as that amounts to doing nothing and when nothing is delivered nobody gets paid. It does not compute.
scarmig 4y ago
There is a reason unions use "work to rule": it shuts the company down. So when they say > Turn up on time. Do your job. Do it right. Do whatever is asked of you provided it's lawful, reasonable. [...] Do not one thing more than that. they are essentially saying do nothing that is not asked of you; that is to say, do nothing that requires agency on your part. That's not something that organizationally companies are able to afford. As an individual worker, that strategy probably will work in keeping your job, at least in good times. That's not to say it'd be a fulfilling job--I need some sense of personal agency at work for happiness, but plenty of people don't--but it satisfies the goal of maximizing income while minimizing stress. But if that attitude becomes more widespread than it already is, companies will then create or prioritize jobs categories that assume no agency on the part of employees. These jobs are both more depressing, more subject to automation, and lower paying than the ones that expect personal agency.
- Ycombigatorz 4y ago
- pydry 4y ago
  >But if that attitude becomes more widespread than it already is, companies will then create or prioritize jobs categories that assume no agency on the part of employees. These jobs are both more depressing, more subject to automation, and lower paying than the ones that expect personal agency. Companies have a strong preference for this kind of job. They need no additional encouragement to create them and havent since the beginning of the 19th century. Ironically, I think they tend to be a lot less subject to automation even if the companies clearly want it more. Amazon automates the hell out of its warehouses and for the remaining tasks it tries to robotize humans.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    > Companies have a strong preference for this kind of job. They need no additional encouragement to create them and havent since the beginning of the 19th century. They might prefer it, but there are always tradeoffs. The equilibrium we are at now has a certain proportion of agentful jobs. In a world where hiring for them is riskier than the world we have, at the margin companies will shift away from them toward agentless jobs. > I think they tend to be a lot less subject to automation even if the companies clearly want it more. Companies generally prefer humans over automation. Automation is a capex; humans are an opex. Automation runs the risk of flagrant failure; humans can fill in gaps in rulesets and ignore or modify bad ones on the fly to get work done. Automation requires complete legibility into the problem space; humans have private knowledge that is often essential to the problem. As of now, we don't have automated systems that can exhibit agency. Deconstructing jobs into ones that require agency for smaller and smaller problems makes automation much more tractable, because you've already done a lot of the work. I do agree that we're likely to build systems that can exhibit agency before we get to the point where robots can perform as well in the physical domain as humans do; radiologists are more at risk in the near term than nurses.
listless 4y ago
We used to call this “doing the least amount you have to do to get by”. And it is what I did in high school - kinda before I learned that having pride in what you do - no matter what that is - is essential to your success and happiness. I wish these folks the best in figuring that out that hard way.
- charles_kaw 4y ago
  The problem is that having pride in your work no longer gets you as far as it used to. Many jobs have no room for advancement, and many people are stuck in cog-like retail roles in which rising through the ranks yields an extra few dollars an hour. The people on HN are more likely to be in well-paying roles that have lots of room for advancement. >They’re disillusioned and it’s because they are better acquainted with today’s labour market than their critics. It’s not the Eighties anymore. You can’t graft your way to an ex-council house, uPVC windows, a Ford Escort and two weeks on the Costa Brava. You can’t go in at the bottom and work your way to the top. Men born in the late 1980s were at least twice as likely to begin their careers in low-paid jobs than those born in the 1970s. They have also climbed the ladder more slowly. Women born in the late Eighties started their careers at the same level of the labour market as those born in the Sixties. I do think this is bad for society, and it is bad for people; but, it's also the reality for a lot of people.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    > having pride in your work no longer gets you as far as it used to. You've already missed the point. You can have pride in your work regardless of payoff. I worked at a restaurant while in highschool and took pride in my work.
    - snapcaster 4y ago
      Doing this to enrich some other person is what many would refer to as "being a sucker"
  - listless 4y ago
    That last sentence is accurate and I agree with it. I feel the malaise myself and I have a great job. I struggle to give you 100% each day. It didn’t used to be like this.
8bitsrule 4y ago
Doing the expected well ('quality work') is fairly safe. But, once you start putting out more product/effort than is required by the job description, 1. That level becomes the new norm - and is expected of you regardless of your pay. (Expect to be treated better? Probably not.) 2. You may set yourself up for resentment from your fellow workers (a lesson I was once taught in hard and multiple ways in an industrial setting.)
- anovikov 4y ago
  Stories of people doing things like that being badly beaten up abounded in the old Soviet Union...
- susiecambria 4y ago
  > That level becomes the new norm In my nonprofit public policy advocacy (lobbying, really) job out of grad school (I was 33 when I got my MSW), I worked my butt off. Went in early, stayed late, worked most weekends. I LOVED the work. This continued until I got married at 40. And then I wanted to spend time with my husband and his kids. Guess what. . . The weekend work stopped, at least the bulk of it. My board chair said something to me one day about my productivity tapering off. I took it as an observation, not complaint or criticism. And then I explained I got married blah blah blah. She totally understood. I have to say, though, that the hard work and commitment was worth it. Not long after I was married, my husband had a cancer scare. The board and executive director gave me all the time off I needed to help him recover and none of the time was charged to PTO. A colleague was given the day off of work to hang with me while he had surgery. I took a month off and then left work early for probably another month. Work sent food the day we got home from the hospital. Sure, I worked when my husband was sleeping, but I was not anywhere near 100%.
w3gv 4y ago
In my experience, this mentality or approach ends up being terrible for a few (i.e. the ones that end up having to do the work) and a net-negative for all. It breeds a culture of deception that feeds on itself and creates widespread insecurity. Not an enjoyable way to spend a big chunk of your life.
- dfadsadsf 4y ago
  It ends up being terrible for people doing the work temporarily until they get promoted. Correlation between actually doing the work and career progression is pretty strong until you get into middle management/sr IC levels.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Don't you switch employers to get promotions nowadays anyways?
plantwallshoe 4y ago
I’m guessing a lot of the people in here bashing this attitude towards work are employed in tech jobs with good salaries, high levels of autonomy, and company stock options. I don’t think this article is geared towards people who have it that good.
- suprjami 4y ago
  This. I watch the "job crisis" and Great Resignation and the rise of places like r/antiwork. I support those people and want better for them. Like the work I already have.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
RalfWausE 4y ago
"As long as my boss pretends to pay me well i will pretend to work well"
- euroderf 4y ago
  A spin on the Communist version, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."
  - tut-urut-utut 4y ago
    „They can’t pay me so little how little I can work“.
    - euroderf 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)
avastmick 4y ago
Not sure I can fully agree; it will just create a downward cycle. The approach doesn’t allow for excellence or gaining satisfaction through doing quality work. However, many jobs are joyless and I think it’s vicious cycle and something has to be done to address these empty of value businesses that are the typical culprits of crappy, overworked jobs. The problem is the seemingly ubiquitous paucity of quality management - there is literally no one appreciating your effort. Many managers, right up to a CX level are so detached from the purpose of the business they manage they can’t determine whether work done good or not. My belief is this general lack of appreciation of excellence and intrinsic disinterest in excellence is the creation of the Friedman/Welch school of business - that the purpose of a business is to maximise value to shareholders. I see this as abstract and empty. It removes any value placed on, “we create great products that out customers love,” and replaces it with the dollar reward for shareholders. Make great products everyone wants? Why bother when you can create crap products with misused staff that are cheaply produced that returns more dividends for our shareholders. If you have talent and can produce quality go somewhere where you are appreciated. If you don’t, maybe go with the Homer Simpson approach and sink those companies who equally can’t deliver.
anovikov 4y ago
Big question is: with GDP still growing at an (averagely) healthy per-capita rate, where does the difference go if whole generation - and in 40 years, real per capita GDP doubled in the U.S. - is worse off than the one before? Is it the inequality that sucked in all difference - that is, that money is all taken by top 1-10%?
- elliotto 4y ago
  This is a really important question; the answer is yes. Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st century is a thesis on this topic and I would highly recommend it if you are interested in hard data on wealth inequality.
  - anovikov 4y ago
    Wealth inequality is OK, it can go as high as needed because poor people live off work - they don't need any wealth. My concern was about income inequality...
    - truckerbill 4y ago
      Are you poor or wealthy? How do you define what is ‘needed’?
      - anovikov 4y ago
        My point was: INCOME issue is certainly mentioned in this article, not wealth issue. I see a disconnect between per capita GDP doubling in a generation and median person seemingly losing some buying power in same time - hard to understand where the money goes. It's easy to explain where the WEALTH goes, sure, but not where INCOME goes. As for "needed" - well, goal of this whole thing is to provide overall growth. Concentration of wealth boosts growth. Concentration of income reduces growth. That's the principal difference.
        truckerbill 4y ago
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
> If you still arrive at work early and leave late, without extra pay or time off, you’re a chump. 100% agree. upper management does almost zero real work and gets paid 5-50x more than you. relationship with employer is purely business transaction, if not from you, then 110% from them.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
If quoting Marx didn't convey the ridiculousness of this article, I'll state it clearly: this is a sure way to depression and no-one will start a revolution while they're busy scrolling Twitter on their leased iPhones. You shouldn't do more than you're contracted to do, don't work overtime, work smart. Within the hours you're working and within the amount of stress you can tolerate, give your best, take responsibility and take the best decisions. Sure, if your employer win you're not guaranteed a win (hence why you're not overworking, and why people with equity tend to overwork more) but there is a higher chance of personal fortune if your employer doesn't go broke.
tomohawk 4y ago
When you have a quiet quitter on your team, it's obvious to the rest of the team that they're carrying that person, and they resent it. They'll claim they're doing acceptable work, but only in their own eyes. They invariably have a bad attitude and make work more of a drudgery just by being around. Team morale suffers because of their insufferable selfishness. Everyone has to be a hero in their own narrative, and the quiet quitter is a hero in their own mind by sticking it to the man. What they don't see or care about is the rest of the team.
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  > When you have a quiet quitter on your team, it's obvious to the rest of the team that they're carrying that person, and they resent it. I have no problem with quiet coworkers. Their salary does not go out of my pocket. In contrast to them, I can appear even more competent. If the team does not meet some arbitrary deadline, it's not my problem -- I can show you the list of Jira tickets that I completed, and it's not my fault that the company decided not to hire more people for the project. I am not in the business of persecuting my fellow human beings. Not because I am an angel, but simply because I literally have no incentive to do so. Hypothetically, suppose that I get super resentful towards a quiet colleague, and I expose his behavior, and I get him fired. Congratulations! What happens next? Most likely, instead of hiring a replacement, the company will simply split that little amount of work he used to do among the remaining team members. Without increasing our salaries, of course. So now I have successfully harmed all team members, including myself. Why would I do that? Also, you often do not know what is happening in your coworkers' private lives. Maybe their parents or their kids are dying of cancer, and they just can't find in themselves the energy for enthusiastic unpaid overtime. Or maybe not, and they are merely exhausted. It's not my business to investigate.
  - tomohawk 4y ago
    > quiet coworkers The discussion is actually about "quiet quitters". A totally different thing. > I am not in the business of persecuting Good for you. What does this have to do with the discussion or what I said? > you don't know what is happening in your coworkers lives If you show up an put your shoulder to it like the rest of us, that's all we ask. If you show up but habitually don't put your shoulder into it and everyone else has to continually make up for your slacking, then, guess what will happen?

70 points by llimos 4y ago

I go hard and let off the gas or “quiet quit” at different times throughout the year. I have work and non work goals that get varying priority. I suspect those that don’t would benefit from a hobby. But also if they are grinding for a work goal who are you to stop them?

jart 4y ago
Is it possible to have hobbies as a tech worker, if you're a programmer and your hobby is programming? Don't most employment contracts say that anything you build as a hobby belongs to the company? In that case it's not a hobby.
- alextheparrot 4y ago
  If I build and give away bird houses, that could still be a hobby. I don’t follow how lack of ownership means it can’t be a hobby.
  - jart 4y ago
    Because depending on which birdhouse factory you work for, the birdhouse manager might take it as an insult that you're building birdhouses on your own time and giving them away for free. He'd think you were not only reallocating his resources (i.e. your time) without permission, but to make matters worse, you're undercutting him in the marketplace. Since why would anyone buy birdhouses from the factory if you're giving them away for free? That thinking doesn't apply to all places. For example if you work at the bird sanctuary, then they might think your birdhouses are cute. Then you can have a hobby.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  Well if what you do for work is also your hobby maybe that’s the issue. It might be time to “touch grass” as the kids say.
- handoflixue 4y ago
  > Don't most employment contracts say that anything you build as a hobby belongs to the company? I see these sorts of contracts at a decent number of jobs, but I wouldn't say the majority. Every time I've been presented with one, they've been fine adding an exemption for my hobby work - as long as it's distinct from my professional work. I believe California requires such an exemption - I've gotten a fair number of contracts where it was already specified that they only owned the right to code that was related to my professional duties.
- blinded 4y ago
  Yes it totally is. You have to become good at doing great work and staying focused in the time window you have and prioritize the hobby. For example do 10 hours of work in 8, then cut out and do your hobby. Mine this summer is running and climbing. Its counter intuitive but doing well in the hobby will feed your 9 to 5. In your case you're talking about a specific technical hobby which is also cool. Just code all of it on your personal comp not during work hours. Once it get big hire a lawyer and get a llc. Don't limit yourself, identify problems and find solutions. Be an engineer. You got this.
- blep_ 4y ago
  To add more anecdata, I have never been asked to sign such a thing. This may be specific to some subfields or locations?

Flankk 4y ago

Doing the minimum or being lazy is pretty bad advice. The smart move is to educate yourself on how to organize a union and put together a game plan. This is what corporations are really afraid of and that is because it's the one thing that gives you power. Get bent with the Bolshevik revolution crap. The goal isn't to end up in a worse place.

PenguinCoder 4y ago
I'm done busting my ass, doing top tier work as the expectation, for shit pay. Pay me the bare minimum you can, don't expect me to work more or harder than then minimum _I_ can. Especially after years of nothing but stellar reviews, and a token 3% raise yearly. The goal isn't to end up in a worse place, but you also shouldn't let yourself be taken advantage of out of fear of the unknown. I agree and identify strongly with this article. > Turn up on time. Do your job. Do it right. Do whatever is asked of you provided it's lawful, reasonable. [...] Do not one thing more than that.
- tpmoney 4y ago
  >Pay me the bare minimum you can, don't expect me to work more or harder than then minimum _I_ can. Especially after years of nothing but stellar reviews, and a token 3% raise yearly. I struggle to understand this mindset a bit. Barring early "first job" jobs, when you were hired, presumably you agreed to / negotiated a compensation that was not the absolute minimum your employer could pay or that you would agree to. So to start, they're already not paying you the least they can. But then, if you're not doing anything more than the minimums/what you're expected to do, why would you expect anything more than minimum compensation raises? If you want more pay, and higher pay, you have to be doing more than you were originally hired to do. Especially because part of the hiring process is acknowledging that you will not actually be up to speed for anywhere from a few months to a few years. Do I think companies should do more to retain and compensate their employees? Yes. Do I think that most companies are short sighted as to the true cost of losing valuable employees over compensation issues? Yes. Do I think that companies should try to do more than "the minimum"? Yes. But I also think all the same things about being an employee. I'm not saying you give up everything to the company, but I've known more than a few people in my life who were hardline "minimalist" employees, and they were always surprised by the fact that they were treated equally minimally by the employer.

gu0xeibaiBiequo 4y ago

You aren't hurting the corporation. You're hurting the people who will be fired if they don't pick up your slack. I left an employer without notice not long ago where the prevailing attitude was more or less to do the minimum you could without being terminated and let the on-calls pick up the slack, after being "accidentally" placed on-call for roughly 7 weeks. It literally destroyed my life in every possible way. I'm not even open to working in that industry anymore. The buck has to stop somewhere or the checks stop coming. This is essentially open advocation for sociopathy.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
You’re blaming your previous colleagues for management apathy/incompetency and your own choice to not have left sooner. I have sympathy as someone previously in on call rotations, but I’m also sufficiently experienced to know to get out at the first sign of boundaries violations (7 weeks!?). Take better care of yourself going forward, no one else will. That is what the message is, self care over a nebulous business.
- gu0xeibaiBiequo 4y ago
  I'm absolutely blaming my previous colleagues for their actions of dodging their responsibility and letting it fall where it may. I don't want to work any more than you do, but it's not my fault or management's fault that you're not doing your job when nobody's watching. It's a choice you make to shirk the responsibility you've been paid to assume, and it affects your colleagues much more than the corporation.
  - pizzaknife 4y ago
    its your choice to play mother teresa, however. edit: honesty is important. call it as you see it. if that doesnt work: join em or walk
    - gu0xeibaiBiequo 4y ago
      I didn't play Mother Teresa. I walked, instead of checking out and letting everyone assume I'm doing my job. I think that's a much stronger signal than warming a chair. My point is that there's a contradiction in this argument. A work culture where everyone is held accountable is a culture of authoritarianism, blame and metrics gaming. A work culture where everyone is expected to act like an adult and do their job even when nobody's watching with the red pen, is a work culture in which the least you can do to not get fired is exactly nothing. Everyone can't "quiet quit" by any reasonable definition, as that amounts to doing nothing and when nothing is delivered nobody gets paid. It does not compute.

scarmig 4y ago

There is a reason unions use "work to rule": it shuts the company down. So when they say > Turn up on time. Do your job. Do it right. Do whatever is asked of you provided it's lawful, reasonable. [...] Do not one thing more than that. they are essentially saying do nothing that is not asked of you; that is to say, do nothing that requires agency on your part. That's not something that organizationally companies are able to afford. As an individual worker, that strategy probably will work in keeping your job, at least in good times. That's not to say it'd be a fulfilling job--I need some sense of personal agency at work for happiness, but plenty of people don't--but it satisfies the goal of maximizing income while minimizing stress. But if that attitude becomes more widespread than it already is, companies will then create or prioritize jobs categories that assume no agency on the part of employees. These jobs are both more depressing, more subject to automation, and lower paying than the ones that expect personal agency.

Ycombigatorz 4y ago
pydry 4y ago
>But if that attitude becomes more widespread than it already is, companies will then create or prioritize jobs categories that assume no agency on the part of employees. These jobs are both more depressing, more subject to automation, and lower paying than the ones that expect personal agency. Companies have a strong preference for this kind of job. They need no additional encouragement to create them and havent since the beginning of the 19th century. Ironically, I think they tend to be a lot less subject to automation even if the companies clearly want it more. Amazon automates the hell out of its warehouses and for the remaining tasks it tries to robotize humans.
- scarmig 4y ago
  > Companies have a strong preference for this kind of job. They need no additional encouragement to create them and havent since the beginning of the 19th century. They might prefer it, but there are always tradeoffs. The equilibrium we are at now has a certain proportion of agentful jobs. In a world where hiring for them is riskier than the world we have, at the margin companies will shift away from them toward agentless jobs. > I think they tend to be a lot less subject to automation even if the companies clearly want it more. Companies generally prefer humans over automation. Automation is a capex; humans are an opex. Automation runs the risk of flagrant failure; humans can fill in gaps in rulesets and ignore or modify bad ones on the fly to get work done. Automation requires complete legibility into the problem space; humans have private knowledge that is often essential to the problem. As of now, we don't have automated systems that can exhibit agency. Deconstructing jobs into ones that require agency for smaller and smaller problems makes automation much more tractable, because you've already done a lot of the work. I do agree that we're likely to build systems that can exhibit agency before we get to the point where robots can perform as well in the physical domain as humans do; radiologists are more at risk in the near term than nurses.

listless 4y ago

We used to call this “doing the least amount you have to do to get by”. And it is what I did in high school - kinda before I learned that having pride in what you do - no matter what that is - is essential to your success and happiness. I wish these folks the best in figuring that out that hard way.

charles_kaw 4y ago
The problem is that having pride in your work no longer gets you as far as it used to. Many jobs have no room for advancement, and many people are stuck in cog-like retail roles in which rising through the ranks yields an extra few dollars an hour. The people on HN are more likely to be in well-paying roles that have lots of room for advancement. >They’re disillusioned and it’s because they are better acquainted with today’s labour market than their critics. It’s not the Eighties anymore. You can’t graft your way to an ex-council house, uPVC windows, a Ford Escort and two weeks on the Costa Brava. You can’t go in at the bottom and work your way to the top. Men born in the late 1980s were at least twice as likely to begin their careers in low-paid jobs than those born in the 1970s. They have also climbed the ladder more slowly. Women born in the late Eighties started their careers at the same level of the labour market as those born in the Sixties. I do think this is bad for society, and it is bad for people; but, it's also the reality for a lot of people.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  > having pride in your work no longer gets you as far as it used to. You've already missed the point. You can have pride in your work regardless of payoff. I worked at a restaurant while in highschool and took pride in my work.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    Doing this to enrich some other person is what many would refer to as "being a sucker"
- listless 4y ago
  That last sentence is accurate and I agree with it. I feel the malaise myself and I have a great job. I struggle to give you 100% each day. It didn’t used to be like this.

8bitsrule 4y ago

Doing the expected well ('quality work') is fairly safe. But, once you start putting out more product/effort than is required by the job description, 1. That level becomes the new norm - and is expected of you regardless of your pay. (Expect to be treated better? Probably not.) 2. You may set yourself up for resentment from your fellow workers (a lesson I was once taught in hard and multiple ways in an industrial setting.)

anovikov 4y ago
Stories of people doing things like that being badly beaten up abounded in the old Soviet Union...
susiecambria 4y ago
> That level becomes the new norm In my nonprofit public policy advocacy (lobbying, really) job out of grad school (I was 33 when I got my MSW), I worked my butt off. Went in early, stayed late, worked most weekends. I LOVED the work. This continued until I got married at 40. And then I wanted to spend time with my husband and his kids. Guess what. . . The weekend work stopped, at least the bulk of it. My board chair said something to me one day about my productivity tapering off. I took it as an observation, not complaint or criticism. And then I explained I got married blah blah blah. She totally understood. I have to say, though, that the hard work and commitment was worth it. Not long after I was married, my husband had a cancer scare. The board and executive director gave me all the time off I needed to help him recover and none of the time was charged to PTO. A colleague was given the day off of work to hang with me while he had surgery. I took a month off and then left work early for probably another month. Work sent food the day we got home from the hospital. Sure, I worked when my husband was sleeping, but I was not anywhere near 100%.

w3gv 4y ago

In my experience, this mentality or approach ends up being terrible for a few (i.e. the ones that end up having to do the work) and a net-negative for all. It breeds a culture of deception that feeds on itself and creates widespread insecurity. Not an enjoyable way to spend a big chunk of your life.

dfadsadsf 4y ago
It ends up being terrible for people doing the work temporarily until they get promoted. Correlation between actually doing the work and career progression is pretty strong until you get into middle management/sr IC levels.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Don't you switch employers to get promotions nowadays anyways?

plantwallshoe 4y ago

I’m guessing a lot of the people in here bashing this attitude towards work are employed in tech jobs with good salaries, high levels of autonomy, and company stock options. I don’t think this article is geared towards people who have it that good.

suprjami 4y ago
This. I watch the "job crisis" and Great Resignation and the rise of places like r/antiwork. I support those people and want better for them. Like the work I already have.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

RalfWausE 4y ago

"As long as my boss pretends to pay me well i will pretend to work well"

euroderf 4y ago
A spin on the Communist version, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."
- tut-urut-utut 4y ago
  „They can’t pay me so little how little I can work“.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)

avastmick 4y ago

Not sure I can fully agree; it will just create a downward cycle. The approach doesn’t allow for excellence or gaining satisfaction through doing quality work. However, many jobs are joyless and I think it’s vicious cycle and something has to be done to address these empty of value businesses that are the typical culprits of crappy, overworked jobs. The problem is the seemingly ubiquitous paucity of quality management - there is literally no one appreciating your effort. Many managers, right up to a CX level are so detached from the purpose of the business they manage they can’t determine whether work done good or not. My belief is this general lack of appreciation of excellence and intrinsic disinterest in excellence is the creation of the Friedman/Welch school of business - that the purpose of a business is to maximise value to shareholders. I see this as abstract and empty. It removes any value placed on, “we create great products that out customers love,” and replaces it with the dollar reward for shareholders. Make great products everyone wants? Why bother when you can create crap products with misused staff that are cheaply produced that returns more dividends for our shareholders. If you have talent and can produce quality go somewhere where you are appreciated. If you don’t, maybe go with the Homer Simpson approach and sink those companies who equally can’t deliver.

anovikov 4y ago

Big question is: with GDP still growing at an (averagely) healthy per-capita rate, where does the difference go if whole generation - and in 40 years, real per capita GDP doubled in the U.S. - is worse off than the one before? Is it the inequality that sucked in all difference - that is, that money is all taken by top 1-10%?

elliotto 4y ago
This is a really important question; the answer is yes. Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st century is a thesis on this topic and I would highly recommend it if you are interested in hard data on wealth inequality.
- anovikov 4y ago
  Wealth inequality is OK, it can go as high as needed because poor people live off work - they don't need any wealth. My concern was about income inequality...
  - truckerbill 4y ago
    Are you poor or wealthy? How do you define what is ‘needed’?
    - anovikov 4y ago
      My point was: INCOME issue is certainly mentioned in this article, not wealth issue. I see a disconnect between per capita GDP doubling in a generation and median person seemingly losing some buying power in same time - hard to understand where the money goes. It's easy to explain where the WEALTH goes, sure, but not where INCOME goes. As for "needed" - well, goal of this whole thing is to provide overall growth. Concentration of wealth boosts growth. Concentration of income reduces growth. That's the principal difference.
      - truckerbill 4y ago

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

> If you still arrive at work early and leave late, without extra pay or time off, you’re a chump. 100% agree. upper management does almost zero real work and gets paid 5-50x more than you. relationship with employer is purely business transaction, if not from you, then 110% from them.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

If quoting Marx didn't convey the ridiculousness of this article, I'll state it clearly: this is a sure way to depression and no-one will start a revolution while they're busy scrolling Twitter on their leased iPhones. You shouldn't do more than you're contracted to do, don't work overtime, work smart. Within the hours you're working and within the amount of stress you can tolerate, give your best, take responsibility and take the best decisions. Sure, if your employer win you're not guaranteed a win (hence why you're not overworking, and why people with equity tend to overwork more) but there is a higher chance of personal fortune if your employer doesn't go broke.

tomohawk 4y ago

When you have a quiet quitter on your team, it's obvious to the rest of the team that they're carrying that person, and they resent it. They'll claim they're doing acceptable work, but only in their own eyes. They invariably have a bad attitude and make work more of a drudgery just by being around. Team morale suffers because of their insufferable selfishness. Everyone has to be a hero in their own narrative, and the quiet quitter is a hero in their own mind by sticking it to the man. What they don't see or care about is the rest of the team.

Viliam1234 4y ago
> When you have a quiet quitter on your team, it's obvious to the rest of the team that they're carrying that person, and they resent it. I have no problem with quiet coworkers. Their salary does not go out of my pocket. In contrast to them, I can appear even more competent. If the team does not meet some arbitrary deadline, it's not my problem -- I can show you the list of Jira tickets that I completed, and it's not my fault that the company decided not to hire more people for the project. I am not in the business of persecuting my fellow human beings. Not because I am an angel, but simply because I literally have no incentive to do so. Hypothetically, suppose that I get super resentful towards a quiet colleague, and I expose his behavior, and I get him fired. Congratulations! What happens next? Most likely, instead of hiring a replacement, the company will simply split that little amount of work he used to do among the remaining team members. Without increasing our salaries, of course. So now I have successfully harmed all team members, including myself. Why would I do that? Also, you often do not know what is happening in your coworkers' private lives. Maybe their parents or their kids are dying of cancer, and they just can't find in themselves the energy for enthusiastic unpaid overtime. Or maybe not, and they are merely exhausted. It's not my business to investigate.
- tomohawk 4y ago
  > quiet coworkers The discussion is actually about "quiet quitters". A totally different thing. > I am not in the business of persecuting Good for you. What does this have to do with the discussion or what I said? > you don't know what is happening in your coworkers lives If you show up an put your shoulder to it like the rest of us, that's all we ask. If you show up but habitually don't put your shoulder into it and everyone else has to continually make up for your slacking, then, guess what will happen?