> to me quiet quitting is fulfilling your job responsibilities and contract hours without going above and beyond for a workplace that just won't love you back.
Someone needs to come up with a better name for this. “Quiet quitting” absolutely does not imply the above meaning… that’s simply work and nothing else.
From the POV of a software developer I’d consider quiet quitting as doing the bare minimum work to not be fired outright and instead placed on a PIP with no intention of surviving it.
You play your cards right and you would basically be paid 6 months for minimal effort, between when performance degradation is first noticed, PIP deployed, and your company Slack access is finally disabled.
> Someone needs to come up with a better name for this. “Quiet quitting” absolutely does not imply the above meaning… that’s simply work and nothing else.
From what I understand, it's the corporate class that invented the term "quiet quitting" as way to shame people that don't go above and beyond.
Of course, nobody wants to go above and beyond anymore because it's not rewarded. Why work extra hours and offer to take on additional responsibilities when it won't lead to promotion or even a raise that keeps up with rent and inflation?
> Of course, nobody wants to go above and beyond anymore because it's not rewarded. Why work extra hours and offer to take on additional responsibilities when it won't lead to promotion or even a raise that keeps up with rent and inflation?
please review the latest guide on performance reviews. “above and beyond” was found to be too broad of a band, so the majority of it is going to constitute the new “underperforming.” so if you want to be seen as “top talent,” which is short-hand for “expert at doing the most with the least,” well, now you know the expectations.
we all have to tighten your belt, so make sure to suck it in while sucking it up. until the last of your effort has been sucked out.
>Someone needs to come up with a better name for this. “Quiet quitting” absolutely does not imply the above meaning… that’s simply work and nothing else.
> Work-to-rule is a job action in which employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of their contract or job, and strictly follow time-consuming rules normally not enforced.
From Gene Sharp's "The Methods of Nonviolent Action":
> 110. Slowdown Strike
> In the slowdown strike (also known as the go-slow and in Britain and elsewhere by the Welsh word ca'canny78 instead of leaving their jobs or stopping work entirely, the workers deliberately slow down the pace of their work until the efficiency is drastically reduced.79 In an industrial plant this slowdown has its effects on profits; in governmental offices it would, if continued, reduce the regime's capacity to rule.
> Slowdowns in work by African slaves in the United States are reported in statements by ex-slaves and others. Raymond and Alice Bauer summarize these:
> The amount of slowing up of labor by the slaves must, in the aggregate, have caused a tremendous financial loss to plantation owners. The only way we have of estimating it quantitatively is through comparison of the work done on different plantations and under different systems of labor. The statement is frequently made that production on a plantation varied more than 100 percent from time to time. Comparison in the output of slaves in different parts of the South also showed variations of over 100 percent.80
Russian serfs in 1859 showed their opposition to their serfdom by doing less work,81 and two years later in the early weeks of 1861, following an explicit promise of emancipation, the peasants conducted go-slows on the corvees.
> The peasants carried out these duties, from which they thought they would soon be exempted, more and more slowly and more and more reluctantly. A sort of spontaneous strike, aimed at loosening the bonds of serfdom, and making submission to the local administrative authorities less specific, accompanied, and often partly replaced an open but sporadic refusal to yield to the landlord's will. 82
> Franz Neumann describes the ca'canny or the slowdown as "one of the decisive methods of syndicalist warfare" and claims that its first large-scale use—he presumably means in industrial conflicts—was by Italian railway workers in 1895.83 It had, however, previously been used by Glasgow dockers after an unsuccessful strike in 1889.84
> During the Nazi occupation, "Dutch factory workers went slow, particularly when they were forced to work in Germany . . ,"85 In 1942 Sir Stafford Cripps broadcast an appeal to workers in Nazi-occupied Europe to "go slow" in their work. Goebbels thought silence the best means of fighting the appeal, since he wrote, "the slogan of 'go slow' is always much more effective than that of 'work fast.'"86 German workers themselves appear to have used slowdown strikes very effectively in 1938 and 1939. Go-slows by the coal miners during that period led to a significant drop in production, which in turn prodded the government to launch efforts to raise production and to grant significant wage increases.87 The wage freeze of September 1939, other worsening labor conditions, and the "clear . . . intention of the regime at the outbreak of the war ... to abolish all social gains made in decades of social struggle" led to similar more widespread action by German workers. Neumann writes:
> > ... it is at this point that passive resistance 88 seems to have begun on a large scale. The regime had to give way and to capitulate on almost every front. On 16 November 1939, it reintroduced the additional payments for holiday, Sunday, night, and overtime work. On 17 November 1939, it reintroduced paid holidays and even compensation to the workers for previous losses. On 12 December 1939, the regime had finally to enact new labor-time legislation, and strengthen the protection of women, juveniles, and workers as a whole. 89
> In Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, "there was of course also i...
> I showed up to my job and did what I was required to do, but I didn't show initiative to push myself beyond that
That’s just becoming an office drone. A few people go above and beyond and most people don’t. Welcome to the rest of your life I guess? You’ll probably lose your job a couple times due to economic factors out of your control but huge corps like when people just show up to work and do what they are required.
The ones who got paid most, probably. I.E. their best workers. I’ve seen it before. That’s what they typically do when they want to cut costs and make the balance sheet look really good.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, try to see it from upper management’s point of view. They don’t see products, or customer attitudes, or people. None of that is legible to them. They can’t measure that stuff. What they can measure, is numbers. Numbers in, numbers out. Making the numbers-in bigger takes time. Making the numbers-out smaller is much quicker. Just let go a bunch of the biggest numbers on your outgoing money sheet. Presto!
There are various reasons someone can be chosen to be laid off and salary can be a factor. But it's silly to deny that performance isn't an extremely common factor. Even if you don't intrinsically take pride in your performance, it's still strategically valuable over the long run to perform well. Some layoffs will hit you no matter what, and other times you'll control your destiny.
If you need to have income, face the reality that you're hurting yourself by not taking the endeavor seriously.
It's profoundly misguided and corrosive to go through life pretending you have no agency just because it seems like it doesn't always pay off in the short term.
I do my job very well, mostly because there is satisfaction in doing something competently. I don’t imagine that corporate wouldn’t fire me if it made them 50 cents though.
That's a ridiculous thing to say. They'll either let you go or give you a raise and promotion to retain you according to whichever serves their interests at a given time. It cost them time and money to hire you so it's not efficient for them to let you go casually. Layoffs happen in bulk because the steady state tendency is to keep people around longer than needed, until the company reaches a certain threshold of oversized relative to need or viability.
It's just business on both sides. You'd also leave if it served your interests. Nor were they your family, committing to keep you forever. There's no reason to frame the relationship as adversarial or inherently toxic, even if it is impersonal and transactional. A transaction can benefit both parties.
> There's no reason to frame the relationship as adversarial
It is, by definition, adversarial because their interests and mine are in direct conflict - I want the largest salary I can get; they want to pay me the lowest salary they can. There are more ways that their interests and my interests are in conflict - this is just the most obvious.
That said, just because something is adversarial that doesn't mean it needs to be acrimonious.
A sometimes random collection of people made up by a collection of burnt out middle and senior managers that are required to make lists to let go of a certain arbitrary body count or percentage of their departments typically.
You think layoffs actually target the weak employees? Maybe. Sometimes.
Too often it’s the perceived value of the employee to the business, or the idea of keeping key roles and not the talent or dedication of the employee that forms the foundation of decisions.
I’ve seen so much too talent get shown the door because companies don’t know the value of key employees like their peers know their value.
I’ll say this, after layoffs the top people typically start to split, especially in SME and smaller businesses. They start looking as soon as they get wind. So the company ends up with a lot of middling folks, as their best talent splits or burns out trying to catch up the workload and the employees that are the lower productivity but solid daily work grinders already pink slipped. The damage done by this whole culture of layoffs is astonishing.
The math is different for large Enterprises and very prestigious companies. We used to joke about the revolving door at Apple.
I’m a millennial, and I too just turn up and do only what I’m paid for in fact, my employer will use money to bribe me into staying an extra hour or too some times.
My fave was when I was having a day off, and they rang me and asked me if I could come in for the day, and I said no, they called me back an hour later, and asked me if I’d come in for 1.5hrs later in the day, for 8 hours pay, a free day of annual leave, travel costs and a free meal. Then I said yes.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 63.6 ms ] threadSomeone needs to come up with a better name for this. “Quiet quitting” absolutely does not imply the above meaning… that’s simply work and nothing else.
From the POV of a software developer I’d consider quiet quitting as doing the bare minimum work to not be fired outright and instead placed on a PIP with no intention of surviving it.
You play your cards right and you would basically be paid 6 months for minimal effort, between when performance degradation is first noticed, PIP deployed, and your company Slack access is finally disabled.
From what I understand, it's the corporate class that invented the term "quiet quitting" as way to shame people that don't go above and beyond.
Of course, nobody wants to go above and beyond anymore because it's not rewarded. Why work extra hours and offer to take on additional responsibilities when it won't lead to promotion or even a raise that keeps up with rent and inflation?
please review the latest guide on performance reviews. “above and beyond” was found to be too broad of a band, so the majority of it is going to constitute the new “underperforming.” so if you want to be seen as “top talent,” which is short-hand for “expert at doing the most with the least,” well, now you know the expectations.
we all have to tighten your belt, so make sure to suck it in while sucking it up. until the last of your effort has been sucked out.
Yeah, that's called "work to rule".
> Work-to-rule is a job action in which employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of their contract or job, and strictly follow time-consuming rules normally not enforced.
From Gene Sharp's "The Methods of Nonviolent Action":
> 110. Slowdown Strike
> In the slowdown strike (also known as the go-slow and in Britain and elsewhere by the Welsh word ca'canny78 instead of leaving their jobs or stopping work entirely, the workers deliberately slow down the pace of their work until the efficiency is drastically reduced.79 In an industrial plant this slowdown has its effects on profits; in governmental offices it would, if continued, reduce the regime's capacity to rule.
> Slowdowns in work by African slaves in the United States are reported in statements by ex-slaves and others. Raymond and Alice Bauer summarize these:
> The amount of slowing up of labor by the slaves must, in the aggregate, have caused a tremendous financial loss to plantation owners. The only way we have of estimating it quantitatively is through comparison of the work done on different plantations and under different systems of labor. The statement is frequently made that production on a plantation varied more than 100 percent from time to time. Comparison in the output of slaves in different parts of the South also showed variations of over 100 percent.80 Russian serfs in 1859 showed their opposition to their serfdom by doing less work,81 and two years later in the early weeks of 1861, following an explicit promise of emancipation, the peasants conducted go-slows on the corvees.
> The peasants carried out these duties, from which they thought they would soon be exempted, more and more slowly and more and more reluctantly. A sort of spontaneous strike, aimed at loosening the bonds of serfdom, and making submission to the local administrative authorities less specific, accompanied, and often partly replaced an open but sporadic refusal to yield to the landlord's will. 82
> Franz Neumann describes the ca'canny or the slowdown as "one of the decisive methods of syndicalist warfare" and claims that its first large-scale use—he presumably means in industrial conflicts—was by Italian railway workers in 1895.83 It had, however, previously been used by Glasgow dockers after an unsuccessful strike in 1889.84
> During the Nazi occupation, "Dutch factory workers went slow, particularly when they were forced to work in Germany . . ,"85 In 1942 Sir Stafford Cripps broadcast an appeal to workers in Nazi-occupied Europe to "go slow" in their work. Goebbels thought silence the best means of fighting the appeal, since he wrote, "the slogan of 'go slow' is always much more effective than that of 'work fast.'"86 German workers themselves appear to have used slowdown strikes very effectively in 1938 and 1939. Go-slows by the coal miners during that period led to a significant drop in production, which in turn prodded the government to launch efforts to raise production and to grant significant wage increases.87 The wage freeze of September 1939, other worsening labor conditions, and the "clear . . . intention of the regime at the outbreak of the war ... to abolish all social gains made in decades of social struggle" led to similar more widespread action by German workers. Neumann writes:
> > ... it is at this point that passive resistance 88 seems to have begun on a large scale. The regime had to give way and to capitulate on almost every front. On 16 November 1939, it reintroduced the additional payments for holiday, Sunday, night, and overtime work. On 17 November 1939, it reintroduced paid holidays and even compensation to the workers for previous losses. On 12 December 1939, the regime had finally to enact new labor-time legislation, and strengthen the protection of women, juveniles, and workers as a whole. 89
> In Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, "there was of course also i...
That’s just becoming an office drone. A few people go above and beyond and most people don’t. Welcome to the rest of your life I guess? You’ll probably lose your job a couple times due to economic factors out of your control but huge corps like when people just show up to work and do what they are required.
I mean if they don’t care about us.. why would they expect us to care about the business? Seems like an absurd expectation.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, try to see it from upper management’s point of view. They don’t see products, or customer attitudes, or people. None of that is legible to them. They can’t measure that stuff. What they can measure, is numbers. Numbers in, numbers out. Making the numbers-in bigger takes time. Making the numbers-out smaller is much quicker. Just let go a bunch of the biggest numbers on your outgoing money sheet. Presto!
If you need to have income, face the reality that you're hurting yourself by not taking the endeavor seriously.
It's profoundly misguided and corrosive to go through life pretending you have no agency just because it seems like it doesn't always pay off in the short term.
It's just business on both sides. You'd also leave if it served your interests. Nor were they your family, committing to keep you forever. There's no reason to frame the relationship as adversarial or inherently toxic, even if it is impersonal and transactional. A transaction can benefit both parties.
It is, by definition, adversarial because their interests and mine are in direct conflict - I want the largest salary I can get; they want to pay me the lowest salary they can. There are more ways that their interests and my interests are in conflict - this is just the most obvious.
That said, just because something is adversarial that doesn't mean it needs to be acrimonious.
You think layoffs actually target the weak employees? Maybe. Sometimes.
Too often it’s the perceived value of the employee to the business, or the idea of keeping key roles and not the talent or dedication of the employee that forms the foundation of decisions.
I’ve seen so much too talent get shown the door because companies don’t know the value of key employees like their peers know their value.
I’ll say this, after layoffs the top people typically start to split, especially in SME and smaller businesses. They start looking as soon as they get wind. So the company ends up with a lot of middling folks, as their best talent splits or burns out trying to catch up the workload and the employees that are the lower productivity but solid daily work grinders already pink slipped. The damage done by this whole culture of layoffs is astonishing.
The math is different for large Enterprises and very prestigious companies. We used to joke about the revolving door at Apple.