Quiet Quitting and the Death of Office Culture

> The office was a powerful tool to keep people in line - you were extremely visible at all times, middle managers kept track of everybody, and you were seen as a “hard worker” based on many conditions that didn’t relate to work at all.

> “Hard workers” were those that got in early and left late, who play-acted how stressed they were, and seemed the most enthusiastic or “engaged” during meetings. Workers were incentivized to resemble a certain aesthetic the boss craved of a “good worker” that regularly did not connect to actual outputs

In the same way that the author accuses others of having weak defenses of office culture, the author has really weak parody arguments of office culture itself.

Somehow when we are in an office, we are simultaneously monitoring by the omnipresent malevolent panopticon, but also managers are so inept and disconnected they can't even evaluate those workers correctly and deduce all the fake work they are performing. But remotely all work is getting done, no deadlines are slipping, communication is smooth, but managers simply fret about missing social control over "people of color and women".

We are witnessing the incoherent attack on the value of locality wrt to collaboration? And the entire argument is, "my boss is a controlling racist"

I am grateful to this article because I was confused about what quiet quitting was supposed to be. The author's thesis is that it's sort of an engineered panic regarding workers who will not do more than 100% of their jobs. That seems correct.

The last three years and the rise of work from home have really been an acid test for "workplace culture." If you have a company like e.g. Bloomberg that just needs to be in-person or the culture implodes, you should realize by now that you have a design flaw rather than an external threat.

"...working hard does not mean you’ll go far, and going above and beyond rarely, if ever nets anything other than free work..."

But working hard and smart does tend to pay off. The 'smart' part is key. Understand the value you're producing, be confident and negotiate.