Thoughts on QUIET QUITTING

Show me pensions, show me really solid pay rates/salaries, show me loyalty toward employees, show me benefits including health insurance with very small deductibles and copays, ALL of which are mostly gone in most workplaces, and I'll show you motivated, loyal and valuable employees.

Corporate America decided decades ago to treat employees like disposable garbage, and to find the cheapest labor in Asia, and f-ck the American employee, so the employee long ago decided that employers are not trustworthy nor worth 'going long' for. You get what you give, executives.

Unpaid internships are not a good idea. Exceptions? Yes, but exceptions are not the rule. You work, you get paid. end of story.

The exception might be if you have senior people really and truly sacrificing time and energy to teach and train you, personally, throughout your internship. But that never happens in a real world workplace. Get paid if you are working.

"Mailing it in" was popular 20-30 years ago and pretty commonplace. This is just new branding for a concept that Millennials and Zoomers think that they invented.

At a large corporation that I used to work for, it was pretty well known that if you worked your tail off, went drinking with the cool kids and your boss most nights, ignored your family, and pledged your life to the company, then you would get a great work rating and garner the maximum 5% step raise at year's end.

"Mail it in" by doing quality work, go to happy hour occasionally, maintain a positive persona in the office, and go home to your spouse and kids each evening would get you a very good rating and a corresponding 3.5-4% step up in pay.

It was always astounding to see how many people would sell their souls, kill their livers, lose their marriages, half of their assets, and alienate their kids for an extra $1000 and some vague promise of a major promotion that often never materialized.

I don’t see that as “mailing it in”. Mailing it in would involve LOWER than basic quality work during normal working hours. Doing a half ass job.

Quiet quitting is a term being used to shame mid and low level employees by executives who make their living on squeezing every last bit of life from people at the lowest cost possible.

Take my current place of employment for example. Formerly privately family owned manufacturing company bought out by venture capitalists and turned into a public corporation whose executives only care about the stock price. Manufacturing plants in the US have been shut down and moved to Mexico and China to save on labor. During COVID we had to endure several week long furloughs to save on payroll for the company, with one coming on short notice right before the Christmas season. No bonuses, minimal pay raises, and no culture.

Not only that, but the board decided over the summer to force everyone back to the office for 5 days a week, despite that most of the office work can be done remotely. Now we are having a mass talent exodus and the leadership refuses to do anything to improve employee moral.

In my own department, in which we were already short staffed, 2 employees have left for better jobs and we have yet to replace them. I am now being expected to fill in the gap until we can hire replacements, but without any compensation in return.

I'm already busy enough with my own job, so no, I'm not going to take on additional responsibilities for nothing. I will continue to excel at my current job until I too find a new one, but no more. That is quiet quitting.

I'm 38 by the way.

We were inspired by the movie "Office Space". The scene where Peter is meeting with The Bobs and explains that he does just enough work to not get fired.

30 Millennial. Sr. Manager in Finance.

As I understand, quiet quitting is going into or logging on to work, doing what you are asked to do, and thats it. You take all your vacations, you take your full lunch and coffee breaks, and you are only available during work hours. And if someone doesn't ask you to do something and its outside of your normal job responsibilities, you don't do it.

I guess I am confused why anyone would consider this controversial or lazy or anything. This is how work obsessed we have become that if you aren't giving 50+ hour weeks and volunteering for more work, you are lazy and not doing your job.

Top 3 movie of ALL TIME

35: I'm not entirely sure what is meant by quiet quitting. I only read one article which suggested it meant meeting expectations and not trying to exceed them--but not doing a bad job. Don't volunteer to lead the extra project, don't volunteer for overtime. My dad always said you live to work or work to live. Seems like "quiet quitting" is simply the same thing--working to live.

We have a problem in our culture (not placing blame) in that workers see themselves as mercenaries. High yield expensive innovation problems (the ones that provide good jobs and a better world) require large collaborative efforts of people pulling more than their weight for an extended period of time which is difficult to do with mercenaries.

It's a hard thing to fix because even where I am with an ESOP, the ESOP is not a meaningful portion of my net worth, the company would have to grow 10x for it to be meaningful money. I know at the defense contractor I worked before, the employee match in the 401K was all stock in that company, I suppose over a long enough time I would have been tied to the company in terms of wealth. But either way as a staff engineer, it seemed that going above and beyond in terms of effort has minimal effect on the companies outcomes and wasn't really appreciated.

I don’t think that’s quiet quitting.

Thats working at a 100 index. Honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Straight up. Good to go. That’s what we (employee and employer) agreed to.

I think “quiet quitting” would be working, during normal working hours, at below a 100 index. Working in a way that might get you fired, but you are clever enough to not get caught. Knowing full well that you are half assing it.

100%. When people started WFH in the Pandemic, I think the peer pressure to appear to be always working or going above and beyond fell by the wayside.

Most of what people refer to as "Quiet Quitting" is just fulfilling the job requirements. As prior posters in this thread have noted, if companies aren't happy with this they can look to motivate/incentivize workers or expand the scope of the job.

The much smaller part that is being referred to in the trend is "Mailing it in." Again posters here are right on that this has existed for years and was celebrated in "Office Space." In a competent company, if you do a sub-standard job eventually you will be let go or at least be put on performance plans etc. There are some companies that are so bureaucratic or have so many safeguards for employees that you can hold on for years.

But again, I think most of the trend is not about doing the bare minimum to avoid getting fired. It's about doing the bare minimum to fulfill your job responsibilities well and earn your paycheck. Instead of finishing at noon on a Friday and tackling a voluntary project, you start your weekend. Finishing the year with ten extra PTO days no longer should be the norm. Nor should feeling guilty about having a slow workday and using that time to run errands, or pursue other passions.

Reminds me of a situation I ran into a few years back. I had worked for a company for 6 years and put a lot of heart and grind into it. We lose a major contract due to crap leadership, so I got laid off with a severance package. I had a higher salary and was non management so I was nice, fat target for them.

I joined a creative agency as a contract employee right away and was promised the world. When I arrived, they had switched my job title and responsibilities and I nearly quit on day one, but stuck it out because I had nowhere to go and a family to feed. Classic bait and switch, which led to a whole assortment of issues (gaslighting, bullying, unprofessionalism, passive aggressive leadership).

In fact, I went to a movie once during my lunch break because I loathed that place so much. I also put in an 85 hour work week, and they would not give me a day off to recover, so I skipped work anyways. From that day forward, I absolutely phoned it in until they rightfully and thankfully canned me. They weren't all in on me, why should I go all in for them? I was done with their bullsh*t.

All good now, I got my dream job a year later and make double what I did then. But I understand the attitude people develop due to terrible office politics and toxic work environments.

Decades ago the world got a lot more competitive, especially if your competitor can use slave labor. I don’t but into a sinister theory about “corporate America”. Business is not easy.

That said, you have to look out for yourself. You have to be extremely careful about working outside of normal work hours in exchange for some kind of nebulous / uncertain future benefit. Don’t do it unless you’ve really thought hard about it (with a very critical eye) at it makes sense for you in your specific situation. Ever once in a while? Sure, s#it’s gotta get done. But “every once in a while” often creeps into “the norm”. Nope.

Just reminded me of another job I had that was in professional sports. I'm not going to say which league. This was a long time ago. But we started our day at 8am and wrapped up at 5pm, but with games starting up at 6pm-7pm and some on the west coast starting at 10pm our time, we were expected to work extra hours to "keep the show going". This was before remote work. It became an around-the-clock job, and when we had several people quit we almost lived in the office for awhile.

I had a beer with one of my co-workers one night and he basically said "this is just not healthy". This was 2004 and we were seeing a major cultural shift in the move to mobile and our users being "always on". Back then, we didn't know how to handle the enormous expectations - not from a tech standpoint - but from a human limits standpoint.

And 17 years later, we still haven't solved the problem on how to not overwork ourselves.

just a click bait term for "going through the motions" or "doing the bare minimum."

you do your job, but you dont do extra and you arent looking to advance or take on more.. think 90% of most government workers.

For most jobs, "doing what you said you were going to do" should not have a negative connotation. That is not "going through the motions" or "doing the bare minimum".

Doing a good job at your job. That's legit. It's good.

That is not slacking, nor is it going above and beyond as if you held an equity ownership interest in the company.

Where did I say it was "slaking" or something bad? It just is what it is, doing the job without looking to do more and move up in the company.

Bullsh-t. You let the corporate vultures and their oligarch overlords, and of course the political forces that allow them to feed from the social contract itself, off the hook WAY too easily here. Employment is simply another portion of the social contract between the structure of a place and its citizens. In a reasonable system, the oligarchs are simply not allowed to exist, or exist greatly reduced by regulatory structures that limit their predatory capacity. In such a system, they are not able to buy the political/tax/regulatory processes and must balance their thirst for our very souls with the needs of the citizenry.

That hideous feeling of endless exploitation and utter valuelessness that exists among many workers in America is the result of all of the reasonable processes and rules having been tilted/rigged almost exclusively for the benefit of the oligarchy and their thin first rank of elites/executives/political functionaries. A very cursory look at the American economy and SES strata/data will demonstrate that there exists an ever-thinning rank of extreme affluence and endless access to spoils, sitting on top of massive numbers of those who now struggle to maintain any sort of reasonable quality of life in the US.

Even the once strong middle class has been hollowed to the point that even those educated and well-employed are typically ONE negative life event away from personal catastrophe that can easily lead to ruin and even homelessness. This is all pretext and provides context to the discussion points in this thread about work environment, and it's easy to see that employment in the US consists almost entirely of glorified gig/casual/contract people. You may see yourself as a salaried and valued employee, but you are truly a glorified casual who can/will be dumped at the next poor quarter. Tenuous. Exploited. Dumped at will.

And you want to avoid discussing the genuine evil that obviously underlines and underwrites this system we live in?

I said it above. Show me a genuine DEFINED BENEFIT PENSION with reasonable vesting and excellent benefits and I'll show you a massive supply of hard-wording and loyal employees. You don't want to offer those? P-ss off.

This is exactly the situation that I don't want to be in if I can help it. Everyone's situation is different (the tradeoffs may be worth it), but I would be actively looking for different opportunities. The pay would have to be very high to accept an "always available" type work situation. Some industries are just like that. For me, I'd find a different industry.