8 ms·

Quiet Quitting: Why Employees Are Demanding Fairness and Boundaries

78 points by rustoo 2y ago

cocacola1 2y ago
> Not all solutions require monetary compensation. Employers often overlook what employees find rewarding. This is where a culture of curiosity becomes invaluable—simply asking employees what motivates and empowers them can reveal unexpected insights. Acts like acknowledging sacrifices, allowing flexibility for parenting emergencies, or offering an afternoon off after a rough day can build goodwill and strengthen the employer-employee relationship. This reminds me of that recent SNL skit where Nate Bargatze plays George Washington and when Keenan Thompson asks him about the slaves, he changes the topic hastily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk What employees want is money. All that extra stuff is nice, in addition to more money for their work.
- 9283409232 2y ago
  My job doesn't have set hours. No amount of money can compensate for that flexibility.
  - t-writescode 2y ago
    Yeah, * remote work * no specific expectations of hours (beyond, normally, "a full day's work") * capable leadership that doesn't throw people under a bus * work that is non-exploitative and provides real value in the world Are worth more than top pay, to me. Edit: *THAT SAID* in most industries that aren't tech, higher pay probably means a lot more than that because they're ridiculously underpaid, in general.
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    It can, actually - because with enough money, you get to decide your own hours anyway.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    this implies that for a job without set hours you would take a pay cut to minimum wage to keep that flexibility. In short, I believe you will find that past a certain, probably very high amount, no amount of money can compensate
    - ghaff 2y ago
      It's a balancing act and, once people (hopefully) get to a high salary level many are willing to trade-off money against a lot of things. Maybe not if they're starting out or just scraping by.
- irishloop 2y ago
  Being compensated fairly is important. But so is empathy from management. So is being flexible when I have stuff going in my life or need a mental health day. It all adds up.
  - schneems 2y ago
    I think it boils down to quality of life. If you’re payed bank but feel abused you won’t be happy. If every day feels like a weekend with the buds but you can’t put food on the table you won’t be happy. People want and need: autonomy, purpose, mastery. Many (direct) managers can advocate for a raise but have no direct authority to grant it. All managers can provide employees with quality of life improvements that cost nothing without any approval at all.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > All that extra stuff is nice, in addition to more money for their work Given the choice, plenty of people choose fewer hours for less money. Money is part of it. But people will gladly work for a better company in exchange for less money and no be getting screwed for it.
  - rekabis 2y ago
    > Given the choice, plenty of people choose fewer hours for less money. Provided you are making enough in the first place. Many people are just living paycheque-to-paycheque, even with good budgeting and no frivolous expenditures, and a lower-paying job for less stress just isn’t possible. In that case, more money is the answer. Plus, if wages had kept up with productivity, most people currently earning $50k/yr would really be making over $150k/yr for the exact same work and with all the exact same costs and expenses of life. Where did all this extra money go? Look up. Waaaay up, to the very top. Yup, current abysmally-low wages are the only reason why billionaires even exist.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Provided you are making enough in the first place Fair enough. > most people currently earning $50k/yr would really be making over $150k/yr for the exact same work I’m sceptical. You’d automate a lot of jobs before that. > current abysmally-low wages are the only reason why billionaires even exist Trivially falsifiable, or tautological enough to be unfalsifiable. Villains are convenient. But fictional villains don’t animate against you. We can fix income inequality a great deal without declaring war on one class or another.
      - cudgy 2y ago
        Maybe you are a billionaire or not paying attention to trends for the average person. Not sure, but Billionaire's are at war with the population, so why shouldn’t the population fight back? By the way, the population fighting back will do the billionaire’s a favor as the current distribution of assets is at unprecedented levels. The backlash is inevitable and let’s hope things turn around quickly before AI advances potentially rip off the cover.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  A while ago I quit a job where I made significantly more money to take a different job where I have significantly less stress. It may be true that people only work jobs in exchange for money, but there's a point at which you realize you have enough, and want more time, more freedom, less weight on your shoulders instead.
crooked-v 2y ago
"Quiet quitting" as a phrase is just the latest bigcorp propaganda attempt to trick workers into doing more for free, now that previous attempts like "company loyalty" are dead and buried.
- christofosho 2y ago
  Companies need to set the bar and uphold it. Saying people are "quiet quitting" is synonymous with saying, "we don't know how to set and uphold standards". Putting the blame on the employee instead of having clear guidelines (i.e. making it a performance problem) is an unfortunate scapegoat used to shift the blame and accountability. A job is a contract. Ain't just one sided. Edit: Amending to mention that there are companies that do quite well at upholding standards. To those, thank you for trying.
  - baazaa 2y ago
    Same with the WFH debates. 'We're going to force workers into the office and hope they do some work out of boredom' is taken as a serious strategy because the average manager is mind-bogglingly incompetent. If you know how productive people are (i.e. your managers aren't morons), and you have incentives set-up (e.g. pay, promotions and hiring/firing is dictated by productivity), then there's no problem to solve. Workers who are more productive in the office will be forced into the office to meet standards, you don't need blanket rules.
    - steveBK123 2y ago
      Oh and the penny pinchers have consistently under-leased space and forced the worst setting imaginable on most of us - open floorpans. So RTO is disruptive, distracting and pointless. My small team of 3-4 will occasionally go to the office when someone is in town, ask for a room/office get denied and assigned random open floorpan seats. Usually sat next to the interns or the Helpdesk or some other noisy group we don't interact with at all. Often they can't even find contiguous seating so we are sat hodgepodge amongst people we don't work with. Would be better to go to a WeWork or something. They really think we are cattle.
cowanon34 2y ago
IMO, people generally only want a few things out of work: - Sufficient money so you don't feel ripped off or left behind compared to others in your social class - Agency over your day - you can take an afternoon off if you're feeling down, your kids are sick, etc - Enough free time to relax and have an out of work life - Lack of obstacle/roadblocks to actually doing good work Most modern companies get all of this wrong. They pay the bare minimum and raises are small and slow, encouraging job hopping. You have to beg for time off like a child. No clearly defined off hours for most employees. The daily job is filled with bureaucracy and excessive micromanagement that slow you down at every turn. Being disengaged is the logical response to these conditions.
- gnulinux 2y ago
  This is a lovely comment and I agree with your list. At least, it's been my experience.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Don't forget: - No pervasive surveillance, which is also a form of micromanagement
- alkonaut 2y ago
  The reason I’m on year 20 with an employer is because they tick those boxes. And also box 5: reasonably interesting/challenging/creative work. For me as a software developer that’s as simple as ”not making CRUD webapps”.
  - forty 2y ago
    No one interested in box 6: not f*cking our planet and other humans?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > No one interested in box 6: not fcking our planet and other humans?* Empirically, no. It's an exernality. Expecting private parties to manage externalities in economic transactions is nice, but demonstrably insufficient.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
Hizonner 2y ago
Now I'm supposed to know the difference between "quiet quitting" and "soft quitting"?
- jagged-chisel 2y ago
  Yes. It will be on the exam.
anarticle 2y ago
People are tired of killing themselves for low to no increases, and no loyalty from your company when things aren’t going well for you. If you want people in office, put your money where your mouth is. Prices are up and salaries are not.
palata 2y ago
> Gallup estimates that disengaged employees cost the global economy $7.8 trillion annually, or 11% of GDP, due to lost productivity, absenteeism, and turnover. Estimates from consulting companies are worth as much as estimates from LLMs or from rolling a dice: nothing.
discardedrefuse 2y ago
Fuck Forbes. They are a garbage SEO spam site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41670210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41670210
palata 2y ago
The gap between the rich and the poor keeps getting bigger, and somehow we still wonder why those "at the bottom" don't want to work more...
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
  They are just lazy. Quick, lets hire/import people, who have no protections, experience or other obligations, who will feel lucky just for being able to work for us.
  - cranky908canuck 2y ago
    Did you leave out a <sarcastic/> tag?
    - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
      I assumed it was implied.
dividefuel 2y ago
In a lot of modern corporate jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see. Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.
- autobodie 2y ago
  Exactly. If management communicated clear expectations and measured performance accordingly, this would all be resolved, but they encourage living in fear instead. What do they expect as a result?
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    In a large corporation, I don't think it's possible. In a small company, can look at revenues and profits, and maybe breakdown by product line, and then create a bonus pool according to how well the company did and let managers decide how to divvy it up based on their evaluation of their reports. At a very large corporation, how can you trace back credit for overall corporate performance to individuals? If individual contributors own stock in the company or RSUs, how do they know whether their actions are increasing the corporation's value?
    - ajmurmann 2y ago
      I don't think your individual performance as an IC should be measured in anything related to revenue under normal circumstances. As an IC engineer you aren't in control of product. You can give feedback on product decisions but that gets rarely heard. You mostly have control over deliverables that you are asked to produce and that's what you should be measured by. Empowering others around you is another factor that must be incorporated and arguably this is where things get fuzzy but a good manager should be able to tell. Of course it also matters that the company trusts the manager otherwise you end to in gaming metrics land. If your manager cannot be trusted you are off into shitb politics land. Those are the two major failure modes. Shit metric gaming and shit politics. Preventing those two from happening is hard and must come from the top
reader9274 2y ago
Ah stop the whining, you're getting paid, do the work as asked by your employer. If you don't like it or think it's unfair, quit. Quiet quitting is stealing in my book. Employers should be free to fire any employee for underperformance.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Yes, quit and go somewhere else more suitable. What these "quiet quitters" don't realise is they're poisoning their own well, if they use in their lives the services directly or indirectly of their employer. Everyone else suffers too. Go ahead and downvote, you can't deny the truth.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
  Why should I quit? Fire me if you really think I underperform. You don't know? Oh well..
- rexpop 2y ago
  > If you don't like it or think it's unfair, quit. That works once, maybe, but then you're at another firm copying the same model. Quitting again reveals a third firm with similar flaws. Getting together with our peers, we do a survey of working conditions in the industry and discover that the same unfair treatment is nigh-ubiquitous! That's when it becomes evident that "quitting" is an unsustainable strategy.
chasing 2y ago
Well, when “quiet working” gets overlooked and unrewarded, what’s an employee supposed to do?
karaterobot 2y ago
> Quiet quitting might just be more about employees setting healthy boundaries. I think it'd be dangerous to confuse quiet quitting with setting boundaries. If you want to set boundaries, you have to be proactive about it. Tell people that you won't do something, and why. Don't just silently drag your feet, it doesn't teach anyone the lesson you think it's teaching them, any more than a kid giving you the silent treatment teaches you anything.
- siltcakes 2y ago
  Quiet quitting isn't about being passive aggressive. The whole idea is to do as little as possible without being noticed. Being passive aggressive is still being aggressive, that's not a good strategy.
- whstl 2y ago
  Your method only works when you're also dealing with mature adults that can learn and won't retaliate you for verbally setting boundaries. Unfortunately this is very difficult to find these days in a lot of workplaces. Sometimes the best way of setting boundaries is by communicating as little as possible.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cudgy 2y ago
  Good luck changing companies as a single regular employee. Likely to backfire unfortunately. A union of employees on the other hand might have some pull.
xyzzy9563 2y ago
Quiet quitting is the intelligent response by employees who don't have effective incentive programs to reward them for more work completed. If there were better incentives, it would be less of a problem.
- cudgy 2y ago
  Yes. No incentives, no excess motivation. However, these companies don’t know how to accurately measure production in jobs other than sales, so there are no incentives for them to offer incentives. Classic chicken or egg problem.
siltcakes 2y ago
An easy formula to decide how hard you should work, is to take your compensation, divide it by the total comp of the CEO then multiply 100% of your effort by the result. For example: If your total comp is $250k and your CEO's total comp is $25M you should put in 1% of your maximum effort at work.
- glzone1 2y ago
  Where is this advice coming from? 250k is globally a solid wage. If you get fired and don’t have a better option lined up after doing 1 percent effort how does that play out?
  - siltcakes 2y ago
    If my boss makes 100X I do, I will be doing 100X less work than them. How hard you work doesn't really have anything to do with you being fired or not, just try to be nice to those above you in the org chart and you'll survive as long as anyone else who doesn't make waves.
susiecambria 2y ago
My first job out of grad school (MSW) was as a public policy wonk at a small nonprofit. I ended up being promoted over the years because others were brought in and the board decided to recognize my experience that way. Great. Throughout my tenure (~8 years), I worked more than 40 hours/week. I loved, loved, loved the work. In the early days, I worked way more than 40 hrs. Then I got married and I worked fewer more hours. The board chair noticed and said something. I agreed with her and told her it was because I got married. She understood. What she wouldn't acknowledge, though, is that my productivity at 30 hours a week surpassed every other staffer's. That was a problem and management was not gonna address general it. In some ways, I could not have cared less. When first married, my husband had a cancer scare and was in and out of the hospital over a couple of months. After a major surgery, I stayed with him in the hospital. He was so doped up that I got a ton of work done. When he got home, work sent food for a week. I worked from home and still got a ton done. Colleagues wondered why I got this treatment. Most board members understood what that said about my colleagues; the ED was, again, not gonna do the hard work of managing us. I really lucked out. But I often wonder what kind of good we could have done for kids and families in DC if we were all functioning at a high level. Such a missed opportunity.
root_axis 2y ago
Is that still a thing? At least from what I can see around me, employers have reigned in employees pretty tightly. Anyone in "quiet quitting" mode has already been laid off like a year ago.
- siltcakes 2y ago
  Management has no clue who has quiet quit and who has not. Any layoffs were arbitrary or based on who's been asking for raises.
  - root_axis 2y ago
    Fair enough. I guess the environment I see around me reflects one of fear, not one where people silently quit into the night. It might just be me though.
- giantg2 2y ago
  You know what's funny? I was quiet quitting last year and still did more work than my peers. Then I still got a bad rating.
ochronus 2y ago
An excellent, relevant blog post: https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/your-business-value https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/your-business-value

78 points by rustoo 2y ago

> Not all solutions require monetary compensation. Employers often overlook what employees find rewarding. This is where a culture of curiosity becomes invaluable—simply asking employees what motivates and empowers them can reveal unexpected insights. Acts like acknowledging sacrifices, allowing flexibility for parenting emergencies, or offering an afternoon off after a rough day can build goodwill and strengthen the employer-employee relationship. This reminds me of that recent SNL skit where Nate Bargatze plays George Washington and when Keenan Thompson asks him about the slaves, he changes the topic hastily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk What employees want is money. All that extra stuff is nice, in addition to more money for their work.

9283409232 2y ago
My job doesn't have set hours. No amount of money can compensate for that flexibility.
- t-writescode 2y ago
  Yeah, * remote work * no specific expectations of hours (beyond, normally, "a full day's work") * capable leadership that doesn't throw people under a bus * work that is non-exploitative and provides real value in the world Are worth more than top pay, to me. Edit: *THAT SAID* in most industries that aren't tech, higher pay probably means a lot more than that because they're ridiculously underpaid, in general.
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  It can, actually - because with enough money, you get to decide your own hours anyway.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  this implies that for a job without set hours you would take a pay cut to minimum wage to keep that flexibility. In short, I believe you will find that past a certain, probably very high amount, no amount of money can compensate
  - ghaff 2y ago
    It's a balancing act and, once people (hopefully) get to a high salary level many are willing to trade-off money against a lot of things. Maybe not if they're starting out or just scraping by.
irishloop 2y ago
Being compensated fairly is important. But so is empathy from management. So is being flexible when I have stuff going in my life or need a mental health day. It all adds up.
- schneems 2y ago
  I think it boils down to quality of life. If you’re payed bank but feel abused you won’t be happy. If every day feels like a weekend with the buds but you can’t put food on the table you won’t be happy. People want and need: autonomy, purpose, mastery. Many (direct) managers can advocate for a raise but have no direct authority to grant it. All managers can provide employees with quality of life improvements that cost nothing without any approval at all.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> All that extra stuff is nice, in addition to more money for their work Given the choice, plenty of people choose fewer hours for less money. Money is part of it. But people will gladly work for a better company in exchange for less money and no be getting screwed for it.
- rekabis 2y ago
  > Given the choice, plenty of people choose fewer hours for less money. Provided you are making enough in the first place. Many people are just living paycheque-to-paycheque, even with good budgeting and no frivolous expenditures, and a lower-paying job for less stress just isn’t possible. In that case, more money is the answer. Plus, if wages had kept up with productivity, most people currently earning $50k/yr would really be making over $150k/yr for the exact same work and with all the exact same costs and expenses of life. Where did all this extra money go? Look up. Waaaay up, to the very top. Yup, current abysmally-low wages are the only reason why billionaires even exist.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Provided you are making enough in the first place Fair enough. > most people currently earning $50k/yr would really be making over $150k/yr for the exact same work I’m sceptical. You’d automate a lot of jobs before that. > current abysmally-low wages are the only reason why billionaires even exist Trivially falsifiable, or tautological enough to be unfalsifiable. Villains are convenient. But fictional villains don’t animate against you. We can fix income inequality a great deal without declaring war on one class or another.
    - cudgy 2y ago
      Maybe you are a billionaire or not paying attention to trends for the average person. Not sure, but Billionaire's are at war with the population, so why shouldn’t the population fight back? By the way, the population fighting back will do the billionaire’s a favor as the current distribution of assets is at unprecedented levels. The backlash is inevitable and let’s hope things turn around quickly before AI advances potentially rip off the cover.
karaterobot 2y ago
A while ago I quit a job where I made significantly more money to take a different job where I have significantly less stress. It may be true that people only work jobs in exchange for money, but there's a point at which you realize you have enough, and want more time, more freedom, less weight on your shoulders instead.

crooked-v 2y ago

"Quiet quitting" as a phrase is just the latest bigcorp propaganda attempt to trick workers into doing more for free, now that previous attempts like "company loyalty" are dead and buried.

christofosho 2y ago
Companies need to set the bar and uphold it. Saying people are "quiet quitting" is synonymous with saying, "we don't know how to set and uphold standards". Putting the blame on the employee instead of having clear guidelines (i.e. making it a performance problem) is an unfortunate scapegoat used to shift the blame and accountability. A job is a contract. Ain't just one sided. Edit: Amending to mention that there are companies that do quite well at upholding standards. To those, thank you for trying.
- baazaa 2y ago
  Same with the WFH debates. 'We're going to force workers into the office and hope they do some work out of boredom' is taken as a serious strategy because the average manager is mind-bogglingly incompetent. If you know how productive people are (i.e. your managers aren't morons), and you have incentives set-up (e.g. pay, promotions and hiring/firing is dictated by productivity), then there's no problem to solve. Workers who are more productive in the office will be forced into the office to meet standards, you don't need blanket rules.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    Oh and the penny pinchers have consistently under-leased space and forced the worst setting imaginable on most of us - open floorpans. So RTO is disruptive, distracting and pointless. My small team of 3-4 will occasionally go to the office when someone is in town, ask for a room/office get denied and assigned random open floorpan seats. Usually sat next to the interns or the Helpdesk or some other noisy group we don't interact with at all. Often they can't even find contiguous seating so we are sat hodgepodge amongst people we don't work with. Would be better to go to a WeWork or something. They really think we are cattle.

cowanon34 2y ago

IMO, people generally only want a few things out of work: - Sufficient money so you don't feel ripped off or left behind compared to others in your social class - Agency over your day - you can take an afternoon off if you're feeling down, your kids are sick, etc - Enough free time to relax and have an out of work life - Lack of obstacle/roadblocks to actually doing good work Most modern companies get all of this wrong. They pay the bare minimum and raises are small and slow, encouraging job hopping. You have to beg for time off like a child. No clearly defined off hours for most employees. The daily job is filled with bureaucracy and excessive micromanagement that slow you down at every turn. Being disengaged is the logical response to these conditions.

gnulinux 2y ago
This is a lovely comment and I agree with your list. At least, it's been my experience.
userbinator 2y ago
Don't forget: - No pervasive surveillance, which is also a form of micromanagement
alkonaut 2y ago
The reason I’m on year 20 with an employer is because they tick those boxes. And also box 5: reasonably interesting/challenging/creative work. For me as a software developer that’s as simple as ”not making CRUD webapps”.
- forty 2y ago
  No one interested in box 6: not f*cking our planet and other humans?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > No one interested in box 6: not fcking our planet and other humans?* Empirically, no. It's an exernality. Expecting private parties to manage externalities in economic transactions is nice, but demonstrably insufficient.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

Hizonner 2y ago

Now I'm supposed to know the difference between "quiet quitting" and "soft quitting"?

jagged-chisel 2y ago
Yes. It will be on the exam.

anarticle 2y ago

People are tired of killing themselves for low to no increases, and no loyalty from your company when things aren’t going well for you. If you want people in office, put your money where your mouth is. Prices are up and salaries are not.

palata 2y ago

> Gallup estimates that disengaged employees cost the global economy $7.8 trillion annually, or 11% of GDP, due to lost productivity, absenteeism, and turnover. Estimates from consulting companies are worth as much as estimates from LLMs or from rolling a dice: nothing.

discardedrefuse 2y ago

Fuck Forbes. They are a garbage SEO spam site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41670210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41670210

palata 2y ago

The gap between the rich and the poor keeps getting bigger, and somehow we still wonder why those "at the bottom" don't want to work more...

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
They are just lazy. Quick, lets hire/import people, who have no protections, experience or other obligations, who will feel lucky just for being able to work for us.
- cranky908canuck 2y ago
  Did you leave out a <sarcastic/> tag?
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
    I assumed it was implied.

dividefuel 2y ago

In a lot of modern corporate jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see. Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.

autobodie 2y ago
Exactly. If management communicated clear expectations and measured performance accordingly, this would all be resolved, but they encourage living in fear instead. What do they expect as a result?
- jimbokun 2y ago
  In a large corporation, I don't think it's possible. In a small company, can look at revenues and profits, and maybe breakdown by product line, and then create a bonus pool according to how well the company did and let managers decide how to divvy it up based on their evaluation of their reports. At a very large corporation, how can you trace back credit for overall corporate performance to individuals? If individual contributors own stock in the company or RSUs, how do they know whether their actions are increasing the corporation's value?
  - ajmurmann 2y ago
    I don't think your individual performance as an IC should be measured in anything related to revenue under normal circumstances. As an IC engineer you aren't in control of product. You can give feedback on product decisions but that gets rarely heard. You mostly have control over deliverables that you are asked to produce and that's what you should be measured by. Empowering others around you is another factor that must be incorporated and arguably this is where things get fuzzy but a good manager should be able to tell. Of course it also matters that the company trusts the manager otherwise you end to in gaming metrics land. If your manager cannot be trusted you are off into shitb politics land. Those are the two major failure modes. Shit metric gaming and shit politics. Preventing those two from happening is hard and must come from the top

reader9274 2y ago

Ah stop the whining, you're getting paid, do the work as asked by your employer. If you don't like it or think it's unfair, quit. Quiet quitting is stealing in my book. Employers should be free to fire any employee for underperformance.

userbinator 2y ago
Yes, quit and go somewhere else more suitable. What these "quiet quitters" don't realise is they're poisoning their own well, if they use in their lives the services directly or indirectly of their employer. Everyone else suffers too. Go ahead and downvote, you can't deny the truth.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
Why should I quit? Fire me if you really think I underperform. You don't know? Oh well..
rexpop 2y ago
> If you don't like it or think it's unfair, quit. That works once, maybe, but then you're at another firm copying the same model. Quitting again reveals a third firm with similar flaws. Getting together with our peers, we do a survey of working conditions in the industry and discover that the same unfair treatment is nigh-ubiquitous! That's when it becomes evident that "quitting" is an unsustainable strategy.

chasing 2y ago

Well, when “quiet working” gets overlooked and unrewarded, what’s an employee supposed to do?

karaterobot 2y ago

> Quiet quitting might just be more about employees setting healthy boundaries. I think it'd be dangerous to confuse quiet quitting with setting boundaries. If you want to set boundaries, you have to be proactive about it. Tell people that you won't do something, and why. Don't just silently drag your feet, it doesn't teach anyone the lesson you think it's teaching them, any more than a kid giving you the silent treatment teaches you anything.

siltcakes 2y ago
Quiet quitting isn't about being passive aggressive. The whole idea is to do as little as possible without being noticed. Being passive aggressive is still being aggressive, that's not a good strategy.
whstl 2y ago
Your method only works when you're also dealing with mature adults that can learn and won't retaliate you for verbally setting boundaries. Unfortunately this is very difficult to find these days in a lot of workplaces. Sometimes the best way of setting boundaries is by communicating as little as possible.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cudgy 2y ago
Good luck changing companies as a single regular employee. Likely to backfire unfortunately. A union of employees on the other hand might have some pull.

xyzzy9563 2y ago

Quiet quitting is the intelligent response by employees who don't have effective incentive programs to reward them for more work completed. If there were better incentives, it would be less of a problem.

cudgy 2y ago
Yes. No incentives, no excess motivation. However, these companies don’t know how to accurately measure production in jobs other than sales, so there are no incentives for them to offer incentives. Classic chicken or egg problem.

siltcakes 2y ago

An easy formula to decide how hard you should work, is to take your compensation, divide it by the total comp of the CEO then multiply 100% of your effort by the result. For example: If your total comp is $250k and your CEO's total comp is $25M you should put in 1% of your maximum effort at work.

glzone1 2y ago
Where is this advice coming from? 250k is globally a solid wage. If you get fired and don’t have a better option lined up after doing 1 percent effort how does that play out?
- siltcakes 2y ago
  If my boss makes 100X I do, I will be doing 100X less work than them. How hard you work doesn't really have anything to do with you being fired or not, just try to be nice to those above you in the org chart and you'll survive as long as anyone else who doesn't make waves.

susiecambria 2y ago

My first job out of grad school (MSW) was as a public policy wonk at a small nonprofit. I ended up being promoted over the years because others were brought in and the board decided to recognize my experience that way. Great. Throughout my tenure (~8 years), I worked more than 40 hours/week. I loved, loved, loved the work. In the early days, I worked way more than 40 hrs. Then I got married and I worked fewer more hours. The board chair noticed and said something. I agreed with her and told her it was because I got married. She understood. What she wouldn't acknowledge, though, is that my productivity at 30 hours a week surpassed every other staffer's. That was a problem and management was not gonna address general it. In some ways, I could not have cared less. When first married, my husband had a cancer scare and was in and out of the hospital over a couple of months. After a major surgery, I stayed with him in the hospital. He was so doped up that I got a ton of work done. When he got home, work sent food for a week. I worked from home and still got a ton done. Colleagues wondered why I got this treatment. Most board members understood what that said about my colleagues; the ED was, again, not gonna do the hard work of managing us. I really lucked out. But I often wonder what kind of good we could have done for kids and families in DC if we were all functioning at a high level. Such a missed opportunity.

root_axis 2y ago

Is that still a thing? At least from what I can see around me, employers have reigned in employees pretty tightly. Anyone in "quiet quitting" mode has already been laid off like a year ago.

siltcakes 2y ago
Management has no clue who has quiet quit and who has not. Any layoffs were arbitrary or based on who's been asking for raises.
- root_axis 2y ago
  Fair enough. I guess the environment I see around me reflects one of fear, not one where people silently quit into the night. It might just be me though.
giantg2 2y ago
You know what's funny? I was quiet quitting last year and still did more work than my peers. Then I still got a bad rating.

ochronus 2y ago

An excellent, relevant blog post: https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/your-business-value https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/your-business-value