There is also a 'slowdown'[0] or a go-slow-strike which doesn't have to be overt, i.e alerting employers that you're going to work slowly. You can quietly not put in the effort required of you.
It's a way for some people to try and reinforce the hustle culture status quo that doing unpaid labour for your employer, even to the detriment of your own physical or mental health is a moral or worthy goal that will definitely (maybe) be rewarded. Label/name it in a way that seems derogatory and many people will make the implicit assumption that it's derogatory for a good reason
I agree that your definition would be more intuitive, but I think that ship has sailed. It seems to be almost universally used to mean "performing the required duties of your role, and no more"
I think it's an indication of a totally dysfunctional work culture that "not doing extra" can be synonymous with "not working at all"
The fact that the author claims to have given "200% of [their] energy" to their job "throughout their career" is, to me, depressing rather than admirable
It also reeks of the typical productivity theatre I see in my parents generation. Highly visible self-sacrifice, everything for work.
But putting in 80 hours a week, going to work even when sick, neglecting rest and family, all these things reduce overall work output, often sharply. Especially when it's just performative, but even when it's honest.
I find it very similar to the mentality induced by rating systems, where 5 stars is 5 stars and 4 stars is 1 star. I remember a discussion about that some time ago here but haven’t been able to find it again.
A term getting around at the moment is "Acting your Wage" which I like a lot better. Employers shouldn't be surprised when people do what they're paid to do.
That attitude is childish at best. If you're not happy with the wage, quit and go get it somewhere else. Employers would feel the pressure of "lack of labor" and wages would rise. Accepting a job and then deciding the wage is not enough for the duties you have to perform after the fact just slows the process down for everyone and usually puts extra work load on your colleagues.
I'm assuming of course that you mean what I ususally have seen which is "i arbitrarily decide how much work to do". If you mean this is just "not go above and beyond", then sure.
> Accepting a job and then deciding the wage is not enough for the duties you have to perform after the fact just slows the process down for everyone and usually puts extra work load on your colleagues.
Uh,no. It's usually getting more and more work coz someone left/got fired and employer goes "well, productivity looks the same" (coz everyone is working that bit more) "why hire more?".
Or frankly you just learned more and are more productive than you were year ago... for same wage.
This is like an employer failing to gauge the number of people needed to do a job, just tell you to do a little extra...
Never ever will you get the benefit of a cut from the cost of the missing people, but your employer WILL get the benefit of delivering something more valuable to the market.
Wait! You signed a contract saying A and you do A, meanwhile there's an "expectation" that you actually do A+B... That is not a healthy expectation.
Imagine if you were a contractor tasked with painting a room. Mid painting the expectation changes to "you're also expected to reinstall window and door trim, and paint it" (at no extra cost and by staying at jobsite longer), but with a remote probability of increased pay later. Or... The customer fires one of your colleagues and tells you that you and one more person must now deliver the job at the same pace.... but with only two thirds of the pay.
I think this is a miscommunication. Acting your wage would be doing your job as you should be fairly expected to do it. The culture of overwork and hustle is what people are opting out of, but by calling it quiet quitting they are making it sound like people are doing the bare minimum to not get fired.
I remember work to rule well. As a kid my teachers union were going through negotiations and on the verge of striking and we got to see first hand what that's like. Turns out all those sports and extra curricular activities your kids enjoy in school aren't in the contract. Same with staying late and providing any extra help, or supporting anything like a school dance. The contract is just show up, lecture, mark homework during prep. periods, leave. Parents were frustrated to say the least. Anyways, you can't expect your employees to go above and beyond for free. Any extra responsibilities need to be spelled out in the contract.
I can't imaging how that'd work for a developer. There can be an innumerable number of tasks different developers do and as they grow in a position, it can change enormously. I guess it would force contract and pay renegotiations every year? Otherwise your new team lead could just.. stop.. in the case where they were hired as just a senior developer.
FWIW: I taught high school English for about ten years. In addition to my regular 40 hrs, I routinely prepped, marked up writing, etc for an additional 15-20 hours per week.
I left in June and took a new job at a small tech consultancy here in Minneapolis. Teaching is a special job in many ways, but the material benefits of exiting education are stark (at least for me).
Because I signed a contract that specifies contractual hours and duties?
Edit: I’m also sympathetic to the argument that students shouldn’t be required to do school work outside school hours; however, that is a much more involved conversation than we are going to have here.
This is going to depend on how much you are monitored, if you have key performance indicators, if management really has a useful gauge of your productivity to use.
If it's a 3-tier scale, the middle "doing your job" means you use your 8 hours / day to get work done (mostly). You don't push off as many duties as possible while "waiting" for more information. You don't go fishing while logging hours. You continue to see what you can get done throughout the day, and you do it, even if you're not being watched and monitored.
On that bottom tier, unless something is specifically measurable, unless there's a solid grasp of accountability that management can use to ensure the work you're doing is meaningfully productive from their point of view, you don't have to do much of anything. You could be in sales but not selling anything. You could show up for required meetings, but make up reasons why you didn't get anything done. You could spend 7 of your 8 hours watching Netflix. Basically, you quietly (as in, without being noticed) quit (as in, stopped doing your job.)
> "doing the absolute smallest amount you can get away with without getting noticed and subsequently fired."
The delta between that and "normal work as required" depends hugely on the job type and company culture. If you're flipping burgers, that difference may well be zero - if you're working as a programmer, it may be huge.
Personally I suspect Quiet Quitting is a quasi-immune response to an employer's expectation that your job should be your life's main activity. Again, how well justified that expectation is comes in a huge spectrum.
In a recession, this response is (reasonably) heightened by an inability to enjoy the economic or personal benefits that an employee expects to come with "giving 110%" for the company.
I too found this definition perplexing, and I can only attribute it their knowing that "the minimum to not get fired, often including deceptions about the quality and quantity of work" sounds a lot worse, even if the reasons behind both attitudes are for generally the same reasons.
I am somehow a millennial despite being born in the early 80s and so I straddle the divide here somewhat. I share their cynicism and distrust of corporations and capitalism. Your employer is trying to minimize the amount they are paying you and maximize the amount of work you produce, so it only seems fair for a worker to have the inverse incentive.
At the same time, I can't really bring myself to do bad work or generally shirk my responsibilities. Part of this is due to the relationships with my bosses and coworkers, knowing that they are largely trapped in the same circumstances and that they will likely have to pick up the slack, and part of it is just a personal value on doing a thing as well as I can.
> At the same time, I can't really bring myself to do bad work or generally shirk my responsibilities. Part of this is due to the relationships with my bosses and coworkers, knowing that they are largely trapped in the same circumstances and that they will likely have to pick up the slack, and part of it is just a personal value on doing a thing as well as I can.
Sort of in the same position as you im terms of late millenial. I have always gotten kicked in the ass for doing this. I put a high personal value on the work that I do and go (what I consider) above and beyond. But at all my employments there was a time when I needed help (medical emergency, life emergency, burn-out, family issues etc.) and have always found that I didn't get the support I expected and needed; even from the bosses that I appreciated.
Ultimately, that always drives me to keep a more open eye on new offers.
> Fulfilling my duties but not doing overtime seems like "doing your job" rather than "quiet quitting."
Yeah, but the employers see 'just doing your job' as you not working enough. They want you to go 'above and beyond' and 'dedicate yourself to the mission' with 'passion'. Hence, quiet quitting.
I've never heard young people use this term the way the author claims - that's the definition used by people of the author's generation. Young people, by and large, seem to call it "doing your job", as you say.
In my experience, young people saying "quiet quitting" are referring explicitly to the judgmental attitude around work-life balance that's held by some older members of the workforce.
It's pretty well-understood that a company does not function if everyone performs only the duties written on paper. There's even a counterproductive strategy that uses that as the hallmark: "malicious compliance." People aren't robots (if they were, they'd have been automated by now so owners could keep all the wealth by owning all the capital) and the challenges businesses face are too dynamic to survive a script-only approach to meeting people's needs.
I think the most important question to ask is "If the company dies, why don't the employees care?" And unpacking that box can answer all sorts of unasked questions about power imbalance in the modern (mostly service, non-union) economy.
We don't demand that. But (for a small one-off home installation job) we do expect carpenters to finish with a broom-clean workspace, even if that's not explicitly in the contract. It's a basic professional standard and "common sense."
This is an excellent point and goes to the unasked questions I was referring to.
Among the reasons this can happen is a variant of race-to-the-bottom cost / value creep due to competition. If some other carpenter is offering complementary deep-clean, then everyone else in the space has to offer it too (or risk losing work).
Now, they should of course ideally pay their staff to do the thing that has become the new norm. But it's easy for a frog-boil to cause something to creep into the new norm without corresponding compensation increasing (especially if the guy offering the deep-cleans originally has some kind of economic advantage the competition doesn't that allows him to offer it for free... Maybe his partner is co-owner and does the deep cleans, or they have kids who work for them for free).
There's a lot of power imbalances that I think become obvious if one asks the question "Why would the employees not care if this company went belly-up tomorrow?" The kids / partner circumstance, for example, involves employees working for below-market rate but they do care if the company goes belly-up tomorrow.
It's absolutely being used loosely, people arguing against it are usually talking about doing the absolute bare minimum and people arguing for it are usually talking about working as expected without going above and beyond. It's very frustrating to watch and a pattern that occurs quite frequently
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might even suspect that the term "quiet quitting" was actually coined by people who were cynically looking for a way to goad people to work more unpaid overtime.
On top of that, using the term "millennial" to refer to "kids these days". A lot of millennials are pushing forty, own houses, and have multiple kids now.
I had a conversation with my wife about this just about a week ago. We have a different background (America vs Europe, me being Europe). When she explained “Quiet quitting” to me, my reaction was the same as yours. Quiet Quitting is just doing the job which you are paid for. Which to me is perfectly reasonable.
Culture probably plays a role here. Like that joke about an American making calls / texting for work while in the hospital, and a European taking 4 weeks vacation for the summer, just dropping everything work related.
In the programming world, there is no clear definition of just "doing your job". Two programmers can both work 8 hour days, doing their best work, and one can literally provide 10x or more value than the other. It seems like in programming the only definition of "doing your job" is "do your best".
With such a range of skills and loose definitions, it it is almost impossible to tell who is doing their job and who isn't.
In creative fields - it's hard to define, but engineering is not exactly an open ended profession. We as programmers have a clear objective to get to. The ways of getting there are different, but it's akin to asking a portrait painter to paint a portrait - the result isn't a novel impressionist painting.
It was never about "doing the smallest", it's a result of corporate culture demanding that you work extra as part of your job.
Which results in people saying that "quietly quitting" is "doing the smallest", when it's actually just sticking strictly to your contract obligations.
I think the issue is that articles are trying to tie something that is a mentality to something physical. My analogy for quiet quitting is the lame duck time after you've put in your two weeks but extending that to full time. It's doing your duties, but not being engaged; going to meetings, but not participating; doing your job per say, but reducing your role to absolute minimal possible. You have mentally checked out from the job and your team, more so than normal or what is expected at a position.
> Loss of purpose, lack of fair recognition and the need to preserve work–life balance seem to be the main motives of the younger generations for quiet quitting.
It's because the cost of everything keeps increasing but pay doesn't, especially housing costs. Why work my ass off if I'm never going to be able to buy a house?
The economy can cool down, but it won't matter - if rent is $2000/mo., no one is going to take your $11/hr jobs unless you're very flexible, because people will need multiple such jobs to survive if that's all they can get.
Not mentioned at all is most people's salaries cannot buy you the same life that it was able to afford baby-boomers. The work-life balance re-assessment is partially based on a recognition that they are getting less benefit per hour spent at work, and for many the tradeoff is no longer worth it.
If the best that people with degrees, trade qualifications or good ol' fashioned hard work can look forward to is just scraping by, forever on the rent treadmill, then what was all the hustle for? They may as well scrape by and enjoy their life.
No-one is under any illusion that just by making it to the next tier in their company they'll suddenly be bonafide middle-class Americans either. They can tell their management is in the exact same boat.
I won't bother mentioning dollar figures, because that really doesn't translate well across the conversation. People are looking for a good life in their chosen community, whatever that costs is what is fair for a hard worker. If I were to mention a salary amount it would mean a different level of living for everyone who read it, depending on where they live.
I do this by only working 20hrs a week while enjoying the legal worker benefits of my country. It works out financially without generating too much money.
If i need savings, i'm better off working for it in 10 years than doing three times the work now for the same money number.
You can't compare raw salary numbers. You need to compare total lifestyle / purchasing power.
It's a totally different game now. Job security is gone in both directions. Oh and the world in general is a much more chaotic place. The younger generations are just trying to come to terms with it.
us baby boomers own one of the largest asset classes in the world. so much wealth tied up in ~70 million people. i wonder if any of the children of this class are stepping off the gas knowing the windfall that eventually is passed on to them.
One of the quotes from younger people is "I realise the things I’m doing are above my pay grade" – "above my pay grade" is definitely not a term invented by the youth. Nothing being attributed to young people here is new. If the author can't see that, and thinks this attitude wasn't present in the Boomer generation, then they themselves aren't putting in the necessary reflective work.
Yes, I also interpret it similarly, but also see it used when a task involves engaging with company politics or strategy that is organizationally above where the person is or where it feels inaccessible. Like if you are asked to do something and it requires help from some other group, and they say no, you might say that resolving the issue is above your pay grade... even though you _could_ hassle those other people to get the work done. In that sense saying "that's above my pay grade" can indicate you aren't prepared to hustle within the corporate structure.
Quiet Quitters are very different from the Overemployed, best not to get them mixed up.
The former (badly named, see other posts) cohort is doing their job diligently (and more intelligently than burn-out headed peers) so should be fine in decent companies with competent management, and will presumably be later in line for the chop in those contexts.
I consider myself fortunate to love these damned infernal machines such that my passion and the-good-work aligns. Early in my career at AWS, after a bit of ego alignment, I realized the tremendous opportunity to just grind and get things done.
Going above and beyond was learning more and more. I read years of COE reports learning why and how massive distributed systems fail which made me a better team mate, better code reviewer, and help me help managers. Sure, I had a job to do, but the going above and beyond should be self interested.
There has been an erosion and change in the nature of the employee-employer relationship.
Back in the day that the author initially started working, the nature of the relationship was probably much more balanced: the employee got a decent wage, was trusted to fulfil their duties with reasonable concessions and freedom (sometimes possibly doing overtime if necessary, but also being able to leave early on days when they had to take care of their kid), and they probably had much better implicit labor protections: in the event of economic downturns, the company was much more accommodating and tried its best to take care of the employee. In other words, the employer was trusted and the employee was trusted to "take care of each other". The job was "for life", after all.
Fast forward to these days: companies have stripped away a lot of the care they took for employees; in the event of economic issues, big corps will fire people basically at random. Most employees are monitored to the minute, and leeway from the employer is unheard of in most situations. All of this "taking care of your employees when things go awry" is expensive (like insurance) and employers have tightened their belts.
It's not surprising then that the employer also starts looking for ways of not doing more than they are contractually obliged to do.
It is mostly about the erosion of trust both ways.
In general, the relationship between employer and employee has never been balanced. One thing that induced balance in the middle of the 20th century was the power of unions in the middle of high-demand industries; after World War II, manufacturing and transportation were massively valuable to rebuild tracts of the world bombed to bedrock, and this put bargaining power in the hands of labor because labor in e.g. heavy manufacturing and rail had already organized; bosses were incentivized to work within those power structures because there was so much money to be made hitting quotas that it was in nobody's interest to slow process. Your company was your extended family because the union had made it so (it's not like bosses would be offering those pensions out of the goodness of their hearts).
That balance began to unravel as the world rebuilt, manufacturing moved out of its traditional bases, and labor shifted from industry to service without a corresponding shift of service to unionized workplaces.
The Boomers' attitude towards work is shaped by experiencing the benefits of the closest the US came to strong labor representation and national-level socialism, if not outright communism.
You have massively over estimated the power of Unions, and completely overlooked what I believe is the real reason for the shift. The institutional investor.
401K's, Pension funds, and other funds of funds that since WWII have pushed the business cycle from being a 5 year + picture to being a Quarterly Earnings report
That more than anything has had the biggest impact on what the parent comment is talking about
Agreed. You can still see the five year planning thing at GE. I thought it was cute. We couldn't predict our business environment next month let alone five years from now.
No, you only think that because you believe unions had any power to begin with. They could only ever move the needle by a few percentage points, never anything drastic
Taking care of employee requires the need to be able to look at the long term viability of the company, and understand that experienced work force is far more valuable than not.
However, when you are measuring your performance in 1 quarter goals no on give a shit about profitability in 5 years or how to service the customer in 5 years, that is the next CEO's problem
I think the problem is when you start trying to get away with doing less than what you're paid for. For example, taking short cuts, hiding issues, or neglecting other responsibilities. In many roles, this would probably work for quite a long time but create massive long-term issues for the company.
Does that matter if the company allows the culture of 18 months then new job?
It's the company's job to create a long term culture. If anything people who can hide bad stuff for 18 months then get a 30% pay raise are simply optimizing for the reward mechanisms in front of them.
I know people that try to extract the maximum amount of value from their job with the least amount of effort. This typically entails taking extended mental health leave. They get 6-24 months of 0-100% base pay, healthcare, pto, and rsu vests while providing negative value to the organization.
I feel like these "take advantage of the system people" are partially the cause of stricter monitoring and leeway.
They're only partly responsible. Management has a tendency to optimize everything and big structures/corps are rarely fine grained, they like synthetic and uniform rules that are easy to monitor. It's a subtle cultural shift.
> I feel like these "take advantage of the system people" are partially the cause of stricter monitoring and leeway.
But these people are so obviously detected it makes no sense. They are not even trying to hide. They could be the cause of stricter legislation, not monitoring.
I think everyone has a good measure about the value of the people they are directly in contact: direct coworkers, bosses and subordinates. You can ask other people when in doubt. I'm not claiming this solves every problem, my point is that monitoring is usually completely unnecessary and creates an oppressive atmosphere.
> But these people are so obviously detected it makes no sense. They are not even trying to hide.
Why would they try to hide? If their employment agreement or their company's benefits clearly spell out a way to get 6-24 months of leave, how is it wrong to simply choose to do what's spelled out? How did "making use of benefits that are clearly written out and allowed" turn into "taking advantage of the system"?
I take advantage of 100% my company's 401(k) match. Am I taking advantage of the system? How about someone who takes their full maternity leave? Should too many people who do so be a cause of stricter legislation?
If the entire company fully utilizes their unlimited PTO, then open ended policies will become less open ended... Unlimited PTO and sick days become tracked PTO and sick days. Which brings us to the original point of employers tracking their employees more.
> What if they're experiencing mental health issues?
The people I know that do this use the time and money for a full time vacation as they travel the world. I am not sure public or private healthcare should fund people's (mental health) vacations.
Well, a vacation probably isn't hurting their mental health. I assume it's short term disability insurance that's picking up that bill. I wonder who actually ends up working more days - a French worker who gets all kinds of leave by law, or an American who maxes out their private insurance benefits? I really couldn't say, but I just can't get all that angry at a worker getting the benefit here.
I would also argue that this correlates with the weakening of pro-labor political blocs. This includes but doesn't necessarily only include labor unions. I'm also talking news reporting (muck-raking) and labor watchdog orgs. Companies stopped feeling like they are obligated to society (including their workers) and are now mandated to operate only to make more money for the select few owner class.
Most of the anti-labor sentiment I’ve heard from non managers has been about systemic quiet quitting by union members. Some of those examples are 30 years old.
I think the basis of your comment is incorrect. Employees have never had more freedom. Work from home is now widespread. Working hours are more flexible than ever. Workplace benefits have improved drastically over the last 10 years. Percentage of workers with access to maternity/paternity leave is increasing year-over-year.
> There has been an erosion and change in the nature of an employee-employer relationship.
This however, is correct. I believe the cause is counterintuitive. Workers simply have more choice today.
For the last five years (excluding a brief hiccup during the worst of COVID lockdowns) demand for workers has outstripped supply. Low earners can choose between ultra-flexible gig work (Uber, etc) or endless less flexible options. Knowledge workers/tech have enjoyed a hot market where recruiters largely come to them once. The result of this? Average tenure at companies is decreasing. There is always a better opportunity around the corner. Why work hard at your current role for a 10% raise (at best) when you can focus on improving your interview skills and get a 30% raise at the next company?
Young people aren't "quiet quitting", they're just no longer subject to the Stockholm syndrome workers have exhibited over the last 20 years. They realize that maximizing their income means gaining 18 months of experience and moving on. If companies want to get 100% effort out of their employees, they should make sure that internal opportunities are as good as, if not better than, external opportunities.
But for how long, I ask? There is now a pretty strong tendency to get people back to the office. It may seem like trying to turn back the clock, or put the genie back into the bottle, but in these times of economic downturn, I guess they figure they have a chance of succeeding...
It's not. Look beyond the HN bubble. Where applicable, hybrid is the status quo, and hybrid is still a far cry from complete WFH. Traffic jams certainly speak of the opposite.
As long as most individuals are limited by their location regardless of legal issues, WFH is not widespread.
>Working hours are more flexible than ever.
Marginally. Most places still have core business hours and soft-enforce synchronicity. A lot of this also happens naturally thanks to pushing daily standups or whatever the equivalent is in another branch around the late morning, in a way that requires participants to look presentable.
>Workplace benefits have improved drastically over the last 10 years
Eeh.. questionable, really depends on the context. And that's without mentioning the obvious: benefits exempted from tax vs straight cash.
>Percentage of workers with access to maternity/paternity leave is increasing year-over-year.
True, with the obvious caveat that one-and-a-half income households are practically required to even start a family now. Those benefits are primarily a countermeasure to the issue of having any of the two parents spend time with kids, and paternity leave in particular tackles the "issue" of moms quitting work.
>Knowledge workers/tech have enjoyed a hot market where recruiters largely come to them once.
I fail to see how you make this conclusion. The service industry exploded and with them, recruiters. Recruiters got to eat too. It's nigh on zero effort to cold call or post something, either directed or undirected. Alternatives exist, but the culture of recruiters as middlemen has firmly taken root. Even managers tend to complain about their existence.
Meanwhile, job ads have noticeably blown up in demands over the past few decades. Every job went from requiring a bachelor if not a master, when most individuals could do with a few months and proper documentation. On top of that we have YoE for starters (wtf) and a giant wishlist of skills with no rhyme or reason. Despite your claim of demand and supply, competition is far more fierce than before, with popular companies getting their ridiculous wish list job ads blown up.
WFH is more widespread, but have you seen all those videos and memes of people attaching their mouse to a fan or whatever so their employer can't see that they're stepping away from their laptop? That would be unthinkable at my cushy tech job, but some employers are clearly using it as an opportunity for even more employee surveillance and asserting more control over their employees' time.
Yea I think us HN'ers are in a bit of a bubble here and many of us are unaware of the unprecedented amount of monitoring and measurement being done on employees in "normal" companies today, and not just office workers having their keystrokes counted. Service workers, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, everyone is now subject to monitoring and measurement of their behavior at a microscopic level! The last 20 or so years have been a real permanent sea change.
If I could have a job with a private office where I could close the door, have peace and quiet, and open the window as I wished, and I had a manager who simply gave me tasks to solve, like our parents had, I would also never quit and work there for 35 years. The working environment and conditions today are terrible in comparison, and people insisting to work from home is probably mostly a symptom of that.
I always liked going to the office to hang out (as a 35ish year old) but I would go home if I wanted to get something done. When afternoon hit the office was always too noisy. This was a typical cubicle office environment.
I got a pair of Sony WH-1000XM5's and they're like magic. Lightweight, incredibly comfortable, and the active noise canceling is like getting transported into another reality.
It's the first pair of headphones I've been able to wear for a full 10-hour flight and never feel uncomfortable.
The office is handy to confer with others when necessary, but you waste a lot of time just getting there and back. So much easier and less stressful to grab coffee in your boxers and just get on the computer at home. I realize some people need the brownian bounce of personalities, but a lot of people just don’t and managers and execs need to realize this, especially for work that is not people-facing.
At the time I cared about my career, so I couldn't hang out looking like a pod caster. And this doesn't solve the problem of people standing there waiting for me to take them off.
I work not in dev but in the operations side of IT, and for system administration and help desk there has been a DRAMATIC shift away from WFH job offers, 8mos ago I would say 80% of the admin jobs I saw posted were remote... today that is less than 50%
I wonder if the housing market is also impacting this. It is a lot easier to pick up and move jobs when you don't own a house or have kids. It will be interesting to see how this changes in the future.
From post-WWII and into the 70’s, American[1] workers had it good. Not because employers were nice but because the work of socialists had eventually payed off in the form of social democratic concessions. Enter the Baby Boomer who entered the workforce in the 60’s: employers were probably “nice” and “fair”.
Now the “Mills” and “Zs” get to enter the workforce after decades of neoliberalism. Employers are no longer “nice” and “fair”. Not because they are worse people but because they don’t have to be.
[1] This Swiss website uses American pop-sociological concepts for some reason.
I just had a thought that there's a turning point in parts of the economy, whereas before the group/company was always attractive, usually they were people smarter and better organized, you'd want to join in because the benefits were obvious. Nowadays network/software is flipping that relationship around. Many many people are only perceiving negative aspects of workgroups (management, politics, commute, salary games) because being on your own is possible now.
Boomers look surprised, and I think they fail to see the reality of current times. Decades ago, an university teacher, could afford to buy a home for his family , not too far from where he/she/* worked. Nowadays, even with FAANG salaries you can't buy a decent size home for your family even in a "30 minutes drive" radio from where your offices are. Imagine other professions who are not paid as much. People see through the "hustle mentality" grindset, usually only the ones telling you to hustle and grind are the ones making the big bucks. I understand there are outliers , people who did hustle and became very wealthy, but the problem I see is, the older generation fails to see the evident changes in the social and economical landscape that push their people towards this type of attitude towards work.
A lot of this is, IHMO, looking back at the past with rose colored glasses:
People look back at home prices but don't account for interest rates. So yes, homes were cheaper for the boomers in the 70s and 80s but they were paying 10%+ interest on those homes. The actual monthly cost isn't much different.
Cities were much cheaper but they were also much more violent. So those people that bought in Harlem for a song in the 70s and have a million+ home today went through some shit. Even today you can get a home basically for free if you're willing to have a crappy home in a shit neighborhood if you want the Boomer experience.
Also, people had to move. Most of those boomers in California that made a bunch on their home moved from somewhere else because homes were cheap in California. People today can repeat that experience. Probably not the "greatest real estate appreciation ever" part but definitely the "cheap home with decent job prospects" part.
Similarly with cost of living. Outside of a couple notable exceptions things like appliances, cars, clothing, etc. are cheaper and (at least arguably) better today than what it was back then. The big differences are health care and education. But even these are a mixed bag.
Exactly, here in silicon valley the housing is so expensive that even if you can afford a house with FAANG salary you'd have to keep doing it for next 30 years to be able to actually own the damn thing. I don't know how any of this is sustainable without having some kind of familial or mental breakdown.
There have been generational changes which may explain the different attitudes. I am an older millenial, and was brought up on the idea of putting in extra to learn and develop my career. I followed the leads of my boomer seniors.
But I don't get the benefits they did. For my line of work (not IT), I work harder, I am paid less, I pay more on my mortgage, I live in smaller, less salubrious places than they do, I will get a smaller pension, I need my wife to continue working to pay for everything. My children will have less opportunities, their university education won't be funded.
I think my specific generation were the suckers, and I can't, hand-on-heart, tell the Gen Z juniors that if they just work their arses off, they will be given some career with these kind of rewards.
Yet another aspect is that the boomers were largely male, with wives and kids who hardly saw them. This is far less tolerable these days. For every keen junior who committed 200%, there was an unhappy partner doing all the housework and bringing up the kids.
> I also shared with them my view that going “above and beyond your work” was the only way to continue learning and developing in the workplace and that it would pay off eventually … but I realised that I did not convince them at all.
I totally love my job. But sometimes I wonder if I would love something else even more. I make tons of money but unfortunately I spend tons of money. If I did like those FIRE folks do, maybe I could take years off of work and try something totally new and different - thru-hike the AT or PCT or take a crazy long boat trip or just code on fun projects at home.
Keynes said we'd be working 15-hour work weeks [1]. Sounds like some of this younger generation might just embrace it? I'm too chicken to try the stuff I list above.
>>> Loss of purpose, lack of fair recognition and the need to preserve work–life balance seem to be the main motives of the younger generations for quiet quitting.
Work-life balance and over-and-beyond are opposites. You can get one or the other. Lack of fair recognition for going over and beyond is a thing. I would say recognition should have a significant monetary component to compensate for loss of work-life balance.
Loss of purpose is dual edged. A lot of times there is a part where you have to experiment and throw away certain implementations. People go “above-and-beyond” in some of these situations and end up with nothing to show for their effort. It can get very demoralizing. In that, maybe failed experiments need to be recognized as well as successful ones if sincere effort has been put in.
Either way a successful upward trending career and work-life balance are at odds with one another. It’s for individuals to make the choice. Not giving 200% isn’t quiet quitting. Not giving 100% is.
It's interesting to see this from CERN, which is essentially an institution that enables young people to work unlimited hours for next to no pay and virtually no chance of ever attaining significant recognition of their work.
In my brief time there, it was not uncommon to hear stories of people who had moved there and not even unpacked all of their belongings after a year or more.
On the plus side, if you love particle physics and/or the surrounding context, it's one of the best places to be. On the minus side, you'll have to give up everything else and be quite smart in addition to move ahead.
My current as well as last two jobs, the only thing i brought in was a single coffee mug, and no other personal effects. (The mug was because i'm doing my little bit to help the environment by re-using my cup...I know, I know, its a very small bit, but still.) I have long seen myself as merely a mercenary. But, my latest job - started only 8 months ago - was supoosed to be the company where i retire from. That is, where i stop being the merc. But in just those 8 months, i already have seen the awful apporoach senior leadership takes towards its employees. So, i guess i stay as a merc. (and slowly plan my pivot towards being my own boss...charging these senior leaders exorbitant consultant rates. ;-)
Maybe I should've been clearer, but I didn't mean personal effects at work. The people I knew had not even unpacked their things in the apartments they were renting because they were too busy working, particularly professors.
And this applied to both tenured and untenured professors. Don't want to name names but one of the high up profs I chatted with there worked roughly 60 hours a week, 6 10-hour days. I mean, he loved it, and he had a lot of responsibility, but I think it's fair to say it's pretty much all he did. His wife mostly traveled and his daughter was already in undergrad by then.
It is genuinely unclear to me how a new prof could hope to compete with that or make a meaningful contribution when even the "old guard" have given up everything to just work.
I once had my temp contract terminated on my way home from work one day.
I was called by the staffing agency halfway back on my commute and they said "Don't go into work tomorrow. They'll mail you your things."
I'm not sure if I ever got those things back (to be fair, it was only like six things).
Also, I was so insulted that they didn't just tell me in person at the end of the day and let me pack up my stuff and take it home with me. But the staffing agency claimed it was the company's policy to do that with contractors.
...after that I stopped bringing much of anything to the office. Currently my office has a ton of crap in it, but it's a home office :).
I was getting paid very well in a junior position at CERN, rarely working more than 7.5 hours a day, doing interesting things, and with a hefty bonus when I took a three day long weekend business trip.
I'm not sure this is much of a counterbalance? I think you can generally expect junior positions to have less responsibility and stress, at the expense of virtually no chance of moving up unless you really, really grind, and even then, there's not a lot of space at CERN. I think you really have to love it to the exclusion of all else and be smarter than your already smart peers to succeed there.
These are the places where the person sitting next to you and doing pretty much the same job as you could be making half of what you are making simply because you have a CERN contract and they work for a contractor.
I don't have any sympathy for CERN and neither do they have any for their employees. The people that run CERN are entirely focused on a particular path of scientific progress and their handling of the situation will only change if they can't find people to do the work that needs to be done.
An article like this is a nice alarm bell that maybe they should reconsider their approach, but nothing will really change until it impacts their bottom line, which is getting correct work done on a timely schedule.
That said, I think it's fair to say particle physics hasn't had any major discoveries since the Higgs and no sure-fire theoretical path toward one, either, so the best and brightest may start looking at other fields.
> I tried to explain that, when I started to work, and throughout my career, I gave 200% of my energy to my job and it would never have occurred to me to question this.
It did not occur to him that values above 100% of something may be excessive? Somehow, I don't find that convincing.
> I also shared with them my view that going “above and beyond your work” was the only way to continue learning and developing
That's a strong argument against investing effort and enthusiasm, right there. It's saying that even doing your job properly and well means no development and no "learning".
> it would pay off eventually
1. It probably wouldn't.
2. Today's labor market is much more precarious; chances of a person staying at the same workplace for more than several years are mediocre-to-low. So by the time "eventually" comes around, the employee will need to be someplace else, doing something else, i.e. no payoff.
3. Even if the employee stayed put - they will live in poor material conditions while waiting for that eventuality to materialize.
I had the same thought about the 200% thing. Actually I think it is either empty boasting or a difference of terminology. I understand giving 100% to mean: I give as much as I possible can. Giving 200%(or anything above 100%) sustainably for all your career sounds impossible by definition to me.
As an aside(since you used him for the author) I found it interesting that the author (according to her LinkedIn profile) is a woman. My initial prejudice was that giving so much more than everything to your work sounded like something that is only possible if you have a partner taking care of everything at home. And I immediately assumed this must be due to traditional family roles.
And people usually make more morning switching jobs every couple of years than staying in the same place. I have been hired several times, with better compensation than people more senior than me who have "been around" for a long time.
> I read an interesting Korn Ferry article on the term that the newest entrants to the workforce have for not going “above and beyond” their specific work duties: they call it quiet quitting.
No they don't. Only opinion columnists call it that.
I worked 200% for over 15 years in Silicon Valley. You know how many raises I got without changing jobs? Zero. You know how many promotions I got? Zero. You know how many bonuses I got? Zero. You know how much more work I got assigned? A TON.
Hard work only begets hard work these days and not further compensation. The old paths to higher compensation and career growth are dead, and employers killed them. There's no reason to go above and beyond anymore unless you want to be overworked to death. You won't get compensated more for it.
Times used to be you'd be recognized for your hard work and get raises, bonuses, and promotions but those days are gone. Now you have to change jobs to get ahead. So why put in any extra effort at a temporary job?
> You know how many raises I got without changing jobs? Zero. You know how many promotions I got? Zero. You know how many bonuses I got? Zero. You know how much more work I got assigned? A TON.
And this is the problem - even away from SV. It was recently suggested to me that the only way to earn more in my current company is if I ended up managing a team (purpose not defined, reasoning unclear). I'm in a great company with great management by the way - or at least I think I am.
I asked, what if I make a material positive impact on the company or its finances? The initial answer was - everyone else is working hard too.
It didn't take long for me to find the exit, and the moment I did the tune changed. I think some managers/CEOs can also lose sight of the value of hard work especially when it can be linked to some positive gain for the company.
What irks me most about this no-raise mentality is that you make less effective money year over year than your starting salary due to inflation but your value to the company has increased from experience and institutional knowledge.
> your value to the company has increased from experience and institutional knowledge
It's my understanding that regular raises used to be the standard practice in the private sector of the US employment market for this exact reason.
Every year, you'd have your performance review, and assuming it wasn't bad, you'd get some sort of a raise.
I'm not sure where this nonsensical "no-raise mentality" comes from, when clearly it will hurt retention and lose the employer some of its most valuable employees with their knowledge, skills, and experience.
Multiple companies are paying to increase veteran retention, and I've generally been working for these companies, but the complaints here make it seem like it's the exception rather than the rule.
I agree completely. Everyone who worked in the big tech hubs knows you typically get the best raises by job-hopping. Still, 5-10% raises are at least trying to prevent that. I cannot fathom a company doing zero, as implied by the "no-raise mentality" comment.
And now, since the start of inflation, in the last year, the value of a dollar has eroded 13%. Have you gotten a 13% raise just to maintain your cost of living?
Of course we haven't. Of course we never will. To paraphrase my current CEO: "Cost of living adjustments have never been a part of our pay raises."
And also, of course, as a public company they won't cut into their record profits and growth to take care of their employees. To quote Wall Street: "Grow or Die."
Intern conversions and new hires. Business people see us as cogs, not skilled craftsmen. Skill, in their eyes, is the domain of interacting with - manipulating - people, because thats the domain they excel in themselves.
And while you keep skilled resources, you replace cogs.
Plus, there’s always those who have drunk the koolaide and, despite being seen and treated like cogs, can’t imagine ever leaving the company; can’t imagine their leaders as anything but benevolent.
> Times used to be you'd be recognized for your hard work and get raises, bonuses, and promotions but those days are gone. Now you have to change jobs to get ahead. So why put in any extra effort at a temporary job?
I guess it depends on what you're looking for. If you just want to chill, that seems reasonable.
But if you're a climber, it seems reasonable to put in work and ask for extra responsibility that will help you get a better job the next time you switch companies. As long as you put yourself on a timer and switch regularly, I don't see that as being taken advantage of.
I certainly wouldn't fault people for disagreeing with me about this, though.
Perhaps your approach is wrong. “Put in work and ask for extra responsibility that will help you get a better job the next time” doesn’t mean fluffy resume padding, it means putting in effort at the next level so the bosses see that you deserve that promotion. It means gaining actual skills and experience, not some resume talking points that a tiny bit of scrutiny would reveal as fluff.
and Highest Cost of living, I would need to increase my income 250% or more to maintain the same living as I do where i am today if I lived in San Fransisco.
From what I see, that would be about 80-140% higher than most non-Senior SV Jobs our there. Meaning my standard of living would drastically decrease even though my income would likely go up by 100%.
Example, I own a 3 bedroom home, on 3/4 acre lot with a 15 year mortgage, my payment is less than $900/mo... I would not even rent a Closet in San Fransisco for that
If the value of living in Bay Area was that low, you'd have a drastic decrease of rental prices. The same is with NYC - rents are considerably higher than pre-pandemic.
Calling California a "cesspool" is at best personal opinion.
In my own working experience and speaking with others, this is the part of "quiet quitting" that is too often missed. This is 100% about the question "does extra professional effort on my part, to the point of sacrifices in my personal life, lead to any benefit or reward?"
In game theory terms, if we have a system that increasingly disincentivizes cooperation and incentivizes defection, it should surprise no one to see less cooperation.
> I worked 200% for over 15 years in Silicon Valley. You know how many raises I got without changing jobs? Zero. You know how many promotions I got? Zero. You know how many bonuses I got? Zero. You know how much more work I got assigned? A TON
I’m baffled by this based on my 33 years in tech in Silicon Valley and Seattle. I worked at a bigcorp where my salary doubled in 2 years based on recognition from me busting my ass. I worked at another bigcorp where it doubled again. My promo history has been like clockwork (with the exception of 8 years I spent in startup land, where titles and roles were almost nonexistent), and I’ve never once set my goal on getting a promotion. I just work hard. I have spent a lot of my career going above and beyond, and been pleasantly surprised that it gets noticed and rewarded. Am I just the luckiest gen x tech dork alive? (No, I am not, because I passed up an opportunity to interview at google in the late 90’s because I was happy where I was. But I’m still pretty lucky.)
I mean I worked my ass off for years (and got raises every year, so lucky me). But when I asked for a promotion they gave the post to some new comer with less experience. (???) Lesson learned.
From my own experience and my SO's, a 2-5 percent per year seems normal.
What seems to happen is your manager's manager gets approval from finance to offer 2-5% raises per report. If your manager thinks that is unfair he/she needs to complain (spending their own political capital on someone other than themselves). Your manager gets told to figure out raises and thinks there is no reason not to just give everyone the max raise. I then get told I'm getting 5% and it feels woefully inadequate because I do the majority of the work. Knowing that my buddy makes much more than me, I start looking for a job.
What was anyone supposed to do here? If my manager could give 20% per employee he/she would (maybe the company really can't afford it). If my manager was told they had a pool of money to distribute that then turns into stacking (also something people are really unhappy about).
The employee with the least amount of power (me) requires someone above me to advocate on my behalf. Because your manager has to pick-and-chose their battles, it always seems to happen when I threaten to quit.
I finally 'quiet quit' when I realized being a minority in tech means I'll never break the glass ceiling past senior engineer regardless of how hard I work or how visibly I help. Even in school I was shoved into secretarial work until I finally convinced professors to let me work solo and would smoke entire groups.
People for some reason think I am good enough to interview for lead or architect then seem surprised when I show up and saw "Ooo, hmm. I think you are a better fit for senior." or "Hmm. I think we'll hire you as a second or third hire instead" or when I am inside, I am told for years "you're up for a promotion".
I am disregarded and mistreated, treated like a pariah. I thought if I worked hard enough, people will like me and see my value; a meritocracy! Nope. It's got nothing to do with actual skills and everything to do with who you are and who you schmooze.
It's weird as fuck that they are interested and crawling over me until they talk to me as a person. I am doubtful it is my abilities. It's because I am autistic and a little eccentric (talk fast / ADHD & a little overwhelming to talk to if I am being honest). I am well-spoken and fairly clear to speak to. I just chalk it up to wanting a square when I am pretty clearly and happily a circle.
I can either bury myself and personality to become a grey corporate square or I can shut my mouth and disregard the dudebros that seem to only promote fellow dudebros that ask me how to solve their problems then pretend they didn't.
I'm in a similar situation like you are, but i haven't attributed it to being eccentric or weird. It is because im not a low-friction person, in a social sense.
I think you probably have some fundamental cause & effect arrows backwards here.
Specifically, every single tech recruiter and tech executive is doing everything they can to increase the diversity of their company. The fact that you're getting interviews for lead or architect but then being assessed as a better fit for senior shows that you're actually getting preferential treatment in recruiting stage and opportunities that an otherwise identical non-minority candidate wouldn't have even been interviewed for.
> It's weird as fuck that they are interested and crawling over me until they talk to me as a person
That's not weird at all. That's incredibly common. That's a sign that your resume looks good, but you interview poorly. Maybe you're the "talented jerk" who they fear will negatively impact other employees. Maybe you overestimate your abilities.
It's possible that the whole world is just out to get you and refuses to acknowledge your greatness. But it might be more likely that if many different groups of people have all been interested in you on paper but then you didn't meet expectations, that the common element here is how you interview and/or interact with others.
> That's a sign that your resume looks good, but you interview poorly.
Yeah, exactly. If you're 'leaking' at one point, that's what you should focus on.
I just don't think there is much more I can do without feeling I am being fake. I could _probably_ take ADHD meds and zone out a bit but certainly isn't great.
I don't ever disclose any of this even to current employers. I don't think I come across as "talented jerk", I think I come across as probably more of a pushover than I actually am so that I don't veer into people thinking I am a "stuck up bitch" (to be quite blunt about my concern).
I will consider other factors I can tweak that may give a better impression, but I do think I come across more as "eccentric fast talker who lives tech" than "buttoned up white collar" and that may be part of the problem; that I am trying the wrong kind of 'puzzle' and there is a company out there that does want my type.
> But it might be more likely that if many different groups of people have all been interested in you on paper but then you didn't meet expectations
This is likely what it is to be quite honest. It's that constant issue of "need experience to get experience". No one is willing to take a 'risk' on me being a principal or architect because I don't have on paper experience on that title despite doing that level of work.
I have all the hallmarks: mentorship, well-written documentation, talks, open source work. The only really left to consider is:
1) I come across as insane, people see that, I don't, and they choose not to involve themselves.
2) They have pre-conceived notions of what someone of that 'tier' looks / acts / sounds like.
I do understand that at that tier there is a concrete expectation of external communication but the weird part is I already do that anyway.
I'm gen X so sort of right in the middle. I consider my generation on of the last of the american dream is attainable for the average worker.
I was able to buy a home in my early 20s and climb the wealth ladder. I busted my ass working a 40hr a week job and doing side hustles to make it happen.
If you are looking for a home now outside a major city and don't want a 2hr commute things are so slim even if you work your butt off why do it then?
Its not that they don't want to work its why work? Its not a work issue but its a wage issue. Wages haven't kept up with inflation and cost of college.
Kids have been pushed by their parents to take office jobs when they could be making 2 times what they are currently working if they went into a trade.
My dad owned a sand/gravel company and sold it because he couldn't find young people that wanted to drive a truck or run a frontend loader. He was offering $25/hr in a low cost of living area and no one wanted to do it because they've heard since they were 8 years old how bad working with your hands are and they should get an office job
> no one wanted to do it because they've heard since they were 8 years old how bad working with your hands are and they should get an office job
In my area, youth soccer referees are being offered $50/hr and the age requirement has been lowered to 13 for U8 matches. They still have trouble getting enough people. Every soccer club in the area sends out multiple emails to parents asking them to get their teenagers to go through the USA Soccer online training program. But you can see that 90% of the kids that end up doing so are from low-income families for which college was probably not an option anyway.
I'm still big into competitive soccer and the Denver area is the same. Most leagues are even waiving the requirement to be certified. All you need is playing experience. My kids games are reffed by 12 year olds.
Reminds me about a guy I knew who was going on about his amazing contract rate and I was like "wow that's approaching a million a year" - only to be sheepishly told that it was for for a whole 4 days...
That's the thing, my grandfather started it and my dad and uncle took it over. My uncle passed years ago due to cancer. So it was just my dad.
My whole life growing up he told me he was making me do all the dirty work for his friends who were in the trades and to drive loader for him so I would go to college and get an office job. He didn't want me to take it over.
My grandfather on the other hand wanted to give me 75k out of highschool in 1997 to start a general contracting company. I'm 43 now and some days sitting in my office, I wish i took my grandfathers advice and did that.
I loved working on computers in the 90s. I was lucky as my mom was a programmer in the late 70s so I always had a computer around the house. That said if one of my kids didn't seem like school was for them I would 100% tell them a good career path is in the trades.
I have a neighbor thats a general contractor and he takes his family on first class flights and staying at night hotels. All because he buys everything on his amex card and takes vacations on points. He lives better then I do and we are about the same age. So ya its a good career option in my opinion.
Are the author's observations really representative of a generational difference? When I was younger, my attitude would have been "work hard and party hard", which was a commitment to an active rather than relaxed work-life balance. Among my fellow students, I could observe a whole spectrum from "work hard" to "party hard". My own current anecdotal evidence with young adults from my extended family still includes examples of both. Therefore, I am not sure if the average has really shifted.
Step 1: *systematically kill the middle class over a generation*
Step 2: "noooooo, why are these workers not pushing themselves like they used to? are you not believing in our mission statement? but we've introduced Pride Month this year! what else do you want???"
I think what happened in the last 20 years is that corporations changed. What the Boomers had, work for one company, move up the ranks, make enough income to support a family, buy a house, spouse not working etc disappeared. The value proposition of corporate jobs has declined dramatically. In both wages and in how you are treated. The question is why. I believe it is two fold:
1. Wages have not kept up with inflation and asset/housing prices.
2. We have imported a significant professional labor force from other companies via H1B visa.
3. Efficiency and automation has forced companies to cost cut. Older companies early on had less competition and so focussed less on how much work employees were doing.
In every large corporation I have worked in, and at this point it has been at three household names, there is constant pressure and tension. American employees are often the minority in their respective organization, especially in technical roles. This erodes not only the wage you earn, but also the social environment. Argue what you want, camaraderie is difficult to sustain when 70% of your coworkers don't share the same first language.
Humans have been doing this forever, just working hard enough to not be fired. If anything it's idealistic youth who tend to buck that trend and subscribe to hustle culture en masse. From the 1999 movie Office Space:
> Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
> Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
> Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation?
Companies need to figure out how to convert illiquid equity into actual liquidity. I don't get how it is fair founders get to sell their shares but employees don't. It's probably why startups are majorly lacking in really senior talent: only newbies think startups will do right by them.
That and focus on profitability to pay out employees with profit shares.
Equity doesn't really work once companies get past the 10-20 size. At that point you're at most getting back 5-10% of the increase in profit. So not much incentive to work your ass off to get an extra 100k in profit when you're only seeing 5-10k of that. Realistically your equity is less than 1% since investors and founders will have much of the equity. So now we're working our ass off for 500-1000.
IMHO bonuses are generally worse for everyone involved. They tend to quickly become expected compensation so lose their incentive value. Also can end up doing the opposite. If someone doesn't get an expected bonus their morale can go down. They might end up working less. And then there's the whole "wait to quit until my bonus pays out" problem.
Incredibly tonedeaf post from an ombud org; framing this phenomenon of setting boundaries and having healthy work-life balance as only negative thing and musing about how to eliminate it. Hey, how about considering that there might be good aspects there too?
Alot of young people are being influenced by stupid trends on reddit (like /r/antiwork) or this 'quiet quitting' nonsense. Alot of young people also believe that meritocracy doesn't exist in the modern workplace, which is dangerous, because we all know it 100% exists.
The whole trend is because people don't feel like it's there. You haven't actually respond to them, all you have done is dismiss their thoughts as "stupid" or "nonsense"
The whole trend is manufactured outrage from places like reddit, twitter, and the dull corporate "journalists" that for some reason act as a megaphone for these "ideas". Its anything but organic. Ending work, doing the bare minimum at your job until you get fired? Very strange to me. Its participants are chronically online, angry, and very jealous. Of course they're opposed to meritocracy.
If you really think that this world operates on meritocracy, talk to some dishwashers at your local fancy restaurant. See if you think they don't work as hard as someone that makes 30x their wages.
If you can't empathise with the exploited, perhaps is it because you are in the position to exploit?
So is all advancement based on nepotism/favoritism? No skill or talent? It 100% doesn't exist in the government/public sector, that's an absolute fact.
I don't consider skills of networking and promotion to count as 'merit', and that's at least as important as technical skill.
Also I was an employee of the federal government for several years, and at least at the general service level promotions were as close to merit-based as I've seen anywhere.
I wonder if there's any interplay here with the "radically flat" organizations of our generation, especially in tech.
For better or worse, when I first started out, and the first 2 companies I worked, there were something like 10-15 layers from me to the CEO. This created a hypothetical ladder of responsibilities and titles I felt I could climb, with rungs 3-5 years apart, getting wider the higher you go.
In more recent roles, I have been in 3000 person organizations where even as an IC, I am known to, and speak with, people in the C-suite short of the CEO. I work for someone with 50 people in org, who works for someone with 1500 in their org, who works for the CEO.
A lot of these radically flat orgs expect ICs as "senior engineers" or "staff engineers" or some other made up title to do some ad-hoc mix of IC, people management, project management, etc.
In effect a lot of us get asked to do a job we don't have, and in fact, will never have, given the 50:1, 1500:1, and 3000:1 ratios from IC to each of the 3 levels on the ladder.
The second dimension is that software project lifecycles have always been shorter than traditional engineering, and have become shorter. This leads to a lot of hopping between firms as your project hits peak and is on the disinvest cycle.
> A lot of these radically flat orgs expect ICs as "senior engineers" or "staff engineers" or some other made up title to do some ad-hoc mix of IC, people management, project management, etc.
Then they fire someone randomly and wonder why the company fell apart because that random was doing the bulk of the unappreciated 'glue' work but because their manager never recognized them for that work or bothered to promote them, no one knew besides their co-workers
This was a more balanced post than I expected. I'm probably older than the median here on HN and I think it's a generational thing. My parents were of the generation when folks tended to work for a company for a majority of their career and work hard to try to stay. But they grew up influenced by their parent who lived through great depression (technically mine did too but they were young) - jobs were a lifeline. So I'm a couple of generations removed from that and, even though I'm still biased towards 'work hard, job is important' my attitudes have been shifting as well (even though I'm in tech, my wife is a schoolteacher and also works incredibly hard).
I did not enter the workforce at an age where I was constantly deluged with 24 hour news and media feeds that the world is a terrible place. I've talked to multiple folks in the past 5 years or so who were just entering the workforce and they were even wondering what the point in getting married, having kids, etc. was. I have to believe that's a factor as well.
This article is another one in a long line that continues to “not get get it.”
First off, just stop saying “quiet quitting” this way. Doing your job isn’t quiet quitting. We should be suspicious of any term like this that suddenly spreads across mass media.
This is the monopoly guys of the world trying to label and shame people for having boundaries and realizing that their hamster wheel leads nowhere. Working hard for someone else’s gain just wastes the one life we were given to us.
If there is a legitimate use for a term called “quiet quitting,” that would be more like pretending to work and legitimately slacking. Completing the required job generally on time isn’t quiet quitting.
The article treats this introduction of healthy boundaries by the youngest generation as if it’s a problem for companies to solve, and suggests that employers start to recognize employees’ accomplishments more.
If what companies want is extremely dedicated employees, I say, that recognition isn’t nearly enough.
Here’s the thing: younger employees are simply following the incentives that corporations are giving them.
Corporations don’t even incentivize extra hard work despite asking for it! They don’t offer commissions or profit sharing unless you’re in sales. They don’t give out bonuses for putting in extra hours or delivering work early. The equity they offer is worthless bullshit that’s filled with caveats.
Corporations rarely promote from within, they hire outside managers and friends of current management, double the word “rarely” if you’re a woman or minority.
Corporations don’t incentivize long tenures, they’d rather you leave or be laid off so that they can run the company like a pro sports team and optimize their labor force. If a team is misallocated, they’d rather lay off the team and hire a whole set of new employees where they’re needed. Retraining and cross-training don’t fit on their balance sheets.
Finally, corporations don’t keep salary increases paced with inflation or career growth so they incentivize job changes.
If you want me to dedicate my life to your company, you better be doing a whole hell of a lot better. Just because I like the work I do doesn’t mean I have better things I can do with my time that I enjoy more.
I’m out of here by 4. If you don’t like it, find someone else.
I'm not particularly happy with the term "Quiet Quitting." I think that, if someone does the job they are expected to do, at the quality level that is expected of them, for a fair compensation, then that does not count as "quitting."
I think the blame for the current mess the American (and this seems to be mostly an American issue) labor force is in, rests squarely on the managers and executives of corporations.
I don't know if I'm just privileged, but I've never worked with anyone that "just wants to get the day over with." I've always worked with people who are passionate about the work they do, and use that passion to "power through" the parts that don't kindle that passion.
But it's pretty important to help folks to feel good about the work they do, and for the place where they spend 1/3 of their life. You want them to give more than 1/3? Make it worth it to them; and it's not just money (but money is important. It is a visceral signal that you are valued).
I was a first-line manager, for a large portion of my career. I seem to have done a fairly good job of keeping my employees motivated, passionate, and engaged. It took a lot of work and humility, on my part. I was not really supported by my superiors, or the HR department. I spent a great deal of time, shielding my employees from the rapacious nature of HR.
I did work for a company that was run by older, more business-oriented folks. There wasn't a ton of money to be made (we were basically specialized, and Quality-oriented), so our top-level leadership was fairly pragmatic. I am so glad that we weren't run by one of these twenty-something billionaires that can't even understand people that aren't rich, or trying to be rich. That sounds like a nightmare.
As far as "work-life balance," I don't see why young people seem to think older folks value this less.
You want to learn about "balance"? Get married and have kids.
"Quiet quitting", because "healthy boundaries and balance" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as smoothly.
Hustle culture is great for those with significant equity, but ultimately happiness comes from within, and work is usually just a stepping stone to finding a sense of purpose beyond making a handful of individuals rich.
Here's to hoping that quiet quitting is merely the beginning.
Can someone please explain to me how you work 200%?
Does this mean that a person claiming this worked 16 hours days, and then in order to eat, skipped two hours of sleep time, so typically would only get 6 hours of sleep, and no other time off during the week?
Or, that they decided not to see children (who need 10-12 hours of sleep a day, so that would clearly make it impossible to see them if you are not occupied by work except for 8 hours a day, presumably at night), except on the weekends?
And, that they didn't write blogs back then? It takes me two or three hours of total time, and I've never had a job that paid me to write in my personal spaces, so I cannot figure out how I would have done that kind of work. Maybe the kids are optimizing by using Snapchat which takes much less time?
> Can someone please explain to me how you work 200%?
Come in early, skip lunch, dinner at your desk, take your computer home, work while watching Netflix, take your computer to bed, sleep with it next to you.
Some people definitely do work 200% longer and harder than a regular employee who is conscientious about their work. Working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and not letting off the gas, really putting your energy into it. The author works at CERN, so maybe they are that passionate and feel fulfilled by the work. Most people who do that are being exploited.
> This concept is illustrated by a video that has gone viral on social media. “You are still performing your duties but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life,” the young man in the video says.
They really needed a word to describe having a rational (as in rational self-interest) attitude towards work.
> From the Ombud’s watch post, I confirm that giving fair recognition and appreciation
Interesting that compensation is not included in this list.
I imagine cern pays pretty well, however I’ve seen HR at many companies try stuff that either literally or figuratively amounts to a pizza party, while trying to not give raises.
I handed in my notice today I have been with the company for 7 years and am nearly doubling my pay by going else where. Last time I got a significant promotion or raise was because I got another job, stuck with the company put in the work got nothing else. Now im quitting again suddenly im the most valued member of the team and they are going to move heaven and earth to make it work.
I don't like having to threaten my boss with quitting in order to get anywhere.
My friend starts looking after 2 years and makes a boat load more than me. Loyalty and hard work just don't get you paid, knowing your market value does.
The Cousin to "quiet quitting" is a culture of "immediate gratification".
The number of quick-fix, no-code, RAD tools that are delivered via SaaS are experiencing amazing growth.
Front line Information Workers are increasingly conditioned to use the cloud for solutions. Managers are quick to approve budget for these tools. Is this working smarter? More resourceful? Or just lazy?
Whatever the conclusion, the Hacker community can turn this into a thousand opportunities.
Not to be rude but a 50+ years old who works at CERN for 20 years and probably is paid X times the min wage _will_ not understand the mindset of quiet quitters
These people haven't "worked" a day in their lives, either because they pursue their dreams or because they have extremely comfortable working situations. Same people who ask construction workers to work until 65/67 years old. "if I can do it everybody can", yeah no sorry we're not all pursuing our dreams and getting paid $$$ for it
I am seeing this happening on multiple occasions in my career. One: there was this engineer I in my sister team. They put in just enough effort to get by and not to get pipped. They were not incompetent, I would argue the opposite. I thought they were lazy for doing minimal amount of work to get by while I was putting in 200% for the customers. Fast forward a couple of years, I couldn’t get to the promotion I needed the most. They retired and then retreated to a LCL area. Looking back, I would admire them for being conscious about work.
Second: current team, there is this employee who has been with the firm for over 18 years. They are in product management, not an engineer. Recently performance review questioned why they stay at that role for so long: was that because of complacency or just incompetence? Their manager answers that they are good of what they’ve been doing for over 15 years, but have no motivation for moving up because they care more about work life balance and family relationships. They were put to pip next quarter.
Those two experiences have shaped my perception of work very much. Especially the 2nd one, where I was involved in the performance review. I see all the nasty side of management and stack ranking system designed to screwed employees, albeit they are doing a decent jobs. I’m still pushing for my promotion everyday. But, I no longer am invested emotionally heavily in that rat race. If I am to be promoted next time, it is great. If not, it’s not because I’m incompetent, just quiet quitting.
Why are some people working more than they can? For their own startup or doing a PhD they are passionate about I understand it, but for a random company?
I find myself saddened by the 'quiet quitting' meme.
If people were simply promoting trying to find a new employer if your current employer doesn't value your hard work properly, that would be great. That would benefit workers.
If people were simply promoting a balanced life in which it is okay to take leisure time and not make your whole life about your career, that would be great. That would benefit workers.
But 'quiet quitting' isn't just those things. It actively encourages people to stay where they at but to perform the minimum required to maintain employment. In many cases, it promotes a sense that you are sticking to the man; you're finally causing your your employer to get what they deserve.
But adopting apathy towards your career hurts you proportionally far more than it hurts your employer. 'Quiet quitting' is a meme that can easily harm the people who are most enthusiastic to put its tenants into practice.
Years ago I read an autobiography of a Black gentleman who came from very poor beginnings in the US South but ended up having an accomplished career laid on the foundation of the hard work he had put into being successful in his academic pursuits when he was young. He discussed some of the challenges that other young Black boys and men faced. In some parts of the Black community, young Black boys would insult their peers who were interested in academics by saying they were 'acting white'. Although it is virtually certain that these young boys had legitimate grievances about the 'white' society in which they were growing up (which was early to mid 20th century America), this had developed into a meme in which trying to be successful at learning was derided as pointless or as selling out. This was a tragedy since becoming successful at learning was in fact one of the best things that young Black men could do to raise their standards of living.
The similarities with the 'quiet quitting' meme seem sadly clear to me. Hopefully it will pass before too many young people's future growth is inadvertently self-sabotaged.
To be clear, I don't mean to deny that there are problems with the typical 21st century "employee-employer bargain". Let's just try to find a way to fix those problems without spreading a self-harming meme.
A phenomenal amount of words are being written about this topic but it seems far simpler to me than most are suggesting. People are sick of those who are already extremely wealthy capturing so much value from economic activity, without truly earning their wealth (by any reasonable definition of "earning"). Since people still need to eat, we are entering into a spite-centric model where I earn as much as I can, but in competition with my employer rather than collaboration. The easiest way for me to do that is to minimize the benefit they can get from my employment, while not offering any excuse to get rid of me specifically.
The best way I can see to recover from this trend is for employee ownership models to gain traction.
Exactly. Even for people in those high prestige, high income fields the link between hard work and success is often negligible. Rent-seekers have taken too much, and we need fundamental structural change.
> Loss of purpose, lack of fair recognition and the need to preserve work–life balance seem to be the main motives of the younger generations for quiet quitting.
The fact that the author is not even recognizing "how much less money earned is worth" summarizes the entire problem. I wish you could pluck these people from the castle they have built for themselves and throw them back into the real world as a fresh 20 year old and tell them to do everything they did the same, and see how it turns out for them.
I worked a lot on my first job. I thought this company was my company, and I tried to help a lot, failing in every attempt. Boy... it was very painful.
After 6 years without a raise, I went to another company.
After my departure, 4 people are hired to do my work.
And six years later I went back to the first one, with a 700% increase in salary.
What I've learned over the years is that with an external proposal, you get a raise 99% of the time.
And that your effort is basically irrelevant. Politics and social capital are much, much more relevant. If your competitor is the owner's son, friend of the boss, you will lose.
In the end, with some social capital you can't work in practice and you'll never get fired. Quiet quiting is for people without social capital.
If, like me, you have zero social capital, my recomendation is to be very professional: I work 8 hours and if the company has an emergency, like a DDOS, I help, but I ask for a day off in the same week. If there's an opportunity for a raise, I'll try. If I see an opportunity to help the employer, I try, but without suffering. If employer try to umilate me or do not accept the days off from a emergency, like DDOS, etc I will find another job. Your employer will likely never be truly professional, but you can be.
This will not abate at all given an economic downturn.
The old school keeps waiting for these deeply rooted changes to blow over like a reddit fad. During a downturn I expect the "mellenials" (and all the gen x and others who have joined them) to double down.
I currently jump at any chance to take less pay for less work. The opposite direction holds no appeal to me unless it is my own gig.
Something this pervasive and organic does not blow over.
Looking at one very narrow slice of the UK labour market, it seems to me that what's changed is this: in the old days, contracts said that employees would do "reasonable" unpaid overtime, and on a 100% job you ended up doing perhaps effectively 120% or something like that. You knew periods in the year that would always be busy, and periods in the year where no-one cared if you went home a bit earlier except if there was an unplanned crisis (which happened, but was rare). Everyone knew the actual deal, and it mostly worked.
Now, it seems like there's always a crisis, the definition of "reasonable" somehow went above 150%, and you're constantly being pushed to get more done with less. Also pay rises have been below inflation since around the early 2000s, and are definitely not keeping up with the current cost of living crisis.
I don't blame employees for going, if the employer's definition of "reasonable" overtime is anything but, what about if I work the number of hours I'm contracted for and no more? Because the unofficial actual deal worked as long as both sides were ok with it.
The tenured boomer view of indifferent younger colleagues is just survivorship bias (or ageist hiring practices or both). Because the company is only hiring younger people each of the boomers that still work at the company remember the good old days. What appears to be a generational shift in work ethic in reality is just people that survived at the company for multiple decades telling tales about their work experience (and it's easy to say, or think, that you worked long hours when there is no one around to correct you.)
Point being, if the company hires boomers as new employees they will likely find that the indifference spans generations, and what does that tell you about the management and long term viability of the organization?
Fundamentally, the price you pay from working a job in terms of time and energy lost will very rarely be worth it to the individual. There is a disconnect between the human mind, which has complex desires, and the place of any individual human in the world, where getting anything done requires either sacrifice or prior luck and your role is very small for the most part. For a job to be satisfying, it will either have to be something you'd do anyway (which is rare) or something where your contributions live up to the demands of your mind (which is even rarer)
This article is very ironic: it is written by the CERN's Ombud, who has a lifetime employment contract like all of CERN's management, and probably obtained it at a time when CERN was printing them like hot cakes. Today's reality is much different: the chances of obtaining this contract are very low and mostly depend on older colleagues retiring, otherwise you are limited to a 5 year staff contract. The disconnect between the Ombud and the people she talks about is striking, for example when she describes them as "obviously disoriented" for refusing to get into the career grind.
A new generation figured out how to balance work and life... and boomers call it 'quitting'? While those same boomers gain more wealth each year than gen X and Z are able to save, because they cling to real estate that they got on the cheap? OK Boomer...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowdown
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