You want the company to make more revenue from you than you're costing. I agree with this, and try to keep this balance myself in my job. > The alternative is

You want the company to make more revenue from you than you're costing. I agree with this, and try to keep this balance myself in my job. > The alternative is far worse: if you are costing the company ore than the value you're providing, a rational company should fire you to improve their company. That they haven't means you're working for incompetent leaders in the best case (and leaders who are about to fire you in a worse case). I think the big problem comes from this largely overlooked next part. Companies are rarely rational. Some leaders will keep people on staff just to show that they are a big team. Some leaders have cronies. Some are just super incompetent themselves; and seem to use the Dilbert Principle [1] as a guiding light by promoting their incompetent cronies or flatterers to high positions. Often, they will snare workers in a lot of make-work tasks while awarding huge bonuses to themselves. Anyone in management is rarely fired -- you will often see managers who have been at the same job for 20 years coasting by just as much as, if not more than their employees. It seems to me that the overlooked part of "quiet quitting" is due to workers noticing this sort of problem in their management; and taking that into account while deciding how long they work. And, oddly enough I don't think this is at odds with what you said -- basically, the more irrationally a company seems to behave, the more they will get people who want to coast since they realize the irrationality. I feel like a good way to right the ship is to promote a lot more rationality into management; and quickly get rid of managers who seem toxic, prone to cronyism, or having a lot of attitude about "these people work for me". ---------------------------------------- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle, says (semi-humorously) that the most incompetent people usually get promoted to management to prevent them from doing more damage in IC positions