The term ‘quiet quitting’ is worse than nonsense
ft.com
ft.com
Many, many years, I came on as an SDE 1 at Amazon.
Consider the unrealistic timelines. What should be a multi year project needs requirements, design, reviews, implementation, delivery, and operational readiness, but it all had to be done in 6-8 months.
In 2 months, we burned out at least a dozen SDEs who voluntarily resigned or moved to another org.
Let me describe morale. While I’d continue working every night and weekend, my manager would be out of the office. My skip level would be on vacation, traveling to Europe. Meanwhile, the product team would be coming up with additional scope and trying to get me to commit on behalf of my manager.
Best case, I get one or two devs added to my team. They’d be brand new to the company, and now I’m being asked to ramp them up, while also doing my own work, while also responding to emails from partner teams, driving integration work, leading design meetings, and providing feedback on my peers’ performance.
It was miserable hell. I never saw my family. I got out of shape and got diagnosed with diabetes. One morning I woke up and my entire left shoulder was numb. I couldn’t make a fist with my left hand.
When we launched, I remember my skip level becoming a director. One engineer I worked with on another team was promoted. The 5 devs on my team got no promotions, in fact, in compensation review time, we got measly 1% pay bumps and no new equity because the stock had appreciated and the company was factoring in previous equity grants and their present value.
I remember that year I put off getting pregnant so I could focus on work. During the next performance reviews, I received positive but backhanded feedback. On one hand, I was a rockstar for doing so many things well. But man, I should have also done a, b, and c.
It was a never ending rat race.
That was about 8 years ago. In hindsight, quiet quitting should be the least of any company’s worries. Companies that put their profit and their management egos (AMAZON) above people have no reason to exist. Times are changing. These will companies change how they behave, or they will die a slow, agonizing death. Amazon in particular is a place that brainwashes and gaslights their employees.
Replace that last word with any other group and you can get why the whole room of sales folks gasped.
We have a lot of founders that will work 16 hours a day on HN, but I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people (in the US at least) prefer having a work-life balance.
The average employee? Not so much. Stock might be somewhat of an incentive but it's really a dice roll.
I’ve been lucky to meet people throughout my life who were motivated by that, not by money. Some where in creative professions, some not, some had big salaries, some not.
I guess automation and UBI could solve that replacing the proverbial janitors with robots. But then it may just incentivize more people to lay in bed and stare at the ceiling all day. Is it a bad thing? Is it a good thing? I do tend to believe most people will eventually fall into doing some kind of rewarding work-like activity if left to themselves completely and money was taken out of the equation. On the other hand relationships/ families may be a time-suck and many peopl etc would just “spend time with the kids” all days.
Amazon’s market cap is ~$1.25T. Under the conservative (false) assumption that a union bidding for half the shares would not move the price at all, that union would have to spend ~$625B on those purchases, meaning total employee dues would be that much, implying a wage base (at 1% dues) of $62.5T, or more than 3 years of the entire US GDP.
Said differently: if employees could buy half their company for 1% (or even 10%) of their wages, there’d be no need for them to have a union negotiate their wages.
There's a common trap I've run into in my hobby of game development, that probably has a name that I don't know: trying to solve every problem with a single solution (and also its close cousin, rejecting a proposed improvement because it doesn't solve every problem). This is clearly also applicable to real life, with things like people complaining solar isn't viable at all because it can't provide for every bit of our energy needs on its own.
The idea datavirtue suggests is a good one. It just needs other things to be happening at the same time to support it—like strong antitrust action against the tech giants.
In abstract I like unions and unions have helped me out, if I had become a cop obviously I'd be part of the Union, and I suspect union negotiators were persecuted in Chile for very very good reason in the elite's view. Like those guys would actually negotiate hardcore, knew all the tricks, well-read, not intimidated by glances or ugly looks, knew what to charge...basically a union negotiator. Negreated the negreators, well and that's why they were persecuted. Strictly money in that case.
It's never spoken openly, nobody ever brings up union negotiators. Think hostage negotiator. And working in the interest of the company, don't want it going underwater so it can keep paying wages. And also making sure the business stays competitive, but actually. In one case in Uruguay there was a strike, sort of the workers took over the factory and started working again right away, cut the management out completely, kept it going fine, hostile takeover so to speak.
The hikkikomori phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori) is still growing so there's little reason to believe that.
I'd support universal basic employment, even if it's for make-work tasks like keeping the street clean, but not UBI. There needs to be a tie between what one gives to society and what gets from society or inevitably there will be a breakdown of some sort.
If it were purely lack of work -> become recluse, we'd see this with 100% of retirees everywhere, but we don't. I'm not saying it's 0%, but I've known plenty of retirees with hobbies and socialization.
I'm not saying this lifestyle is healthy, but I can see why some people want to opt out of a system that doesn't consider their desires or wellbeing.
Also, not everyone can be a software developer. Why do you consider being a game dev to be noble and productive, but playing games to be a drain on society?
It's a sad reality for some people, I do know some people that are living this way.
For some reason I had thought it meant actually not working when you otherwise would / can.
I think that’s the problem, everyone has these implied scenarios they don’t mention.
Not that I don’t put in extra work, but I don’t think of just 8 being quiet quitting.
If you want to show up and “just do your job”, that’s not my jam but more power to you. However, “quiet quitting” as I’ve seen it is people being “anti-work” and actively doing as little as humanly possible to collect a pay check. Borderline not doing their job.
It takes so much extra effort from the people who are trying to do their job, that the people I have heard about are an active detriment to teams - not a net positive or net neutral.
Form what I have seen, these are not people “trying to have a good work life balance”.
If quiet quitting means not actually working while still collecting a salary, then who else deserves the blame?
I recognize that as a manager at the a rising startup. Even if the pressure is high, saying no to this weeks deadline but hitting it 100% next week, and not have it come back 2 months later as an issue ultimately gets you further.
I think measuring a person's output rather than the input, the blockers, the whole process holistically is a method doomed to fail, and repeating the same problems you're trying to solve.
In order to be accurate, measurements must be completely neutral, and their only purpose should be to signal to a human, perhaps a senior, that something is wrong. Then the human can intervene, check the whole process and make decisions on how to remove the issue.
I am in my 70s, so I could be wrong about this: young people never experienced the level of workers’ rights, pensions, etc. that were common 20 or 30 years ago. In general I think young people have a better balance between material desires and spending time enjoying their lives. They have made an adaptation that other demographics could benefit from.
First-hand I’ve watched the changes and stagnant wages. The lack of loyalty or even fiscal responsibility (Enron as big one but smaller happen a lot going bust) or stability via buyouts or whatever - it’s become a mercenary market in 2022 and without cover anymore.
There was enough bad behavior by Boomers to perk my ears up. Then I realized they have to work until death because they didn’t save and somehow expect social security they gutted for wars will be there. Sorry, I’m not paying for luxury sunset years - especially with this healthcare “system” and costs involved. This is the unfortunate future to confront. I’m ticked and ready.
Once a person frees their healthcare from a job, it’s a lot easier to move with stability on a big expense / risk. The younger generations want work life balance, meaningful work, and know employee wages have been suppressed for DECADES and are moving the needle and I’m with them.
Now good FTE remote jobs don’t even ask for references or waste my time with peeing in a cup anymore - which was standard practice 5-7 years ago. Times change and I can tell which way the wind is blowing. There’s a bit of unspoken reckoning going on that is trying to re-build a middle class at the current mark to market stats (eg average working couple income not over $100k but more than $200k or more).
Or, in short, this is Adam Smith’s invisible hand taking supply and demand and slapping career managers and executives in the US so hard teeth break.
I just quoted that for emphasis.
This is a huge problem. All those profits are going to upper management with wages barely keeping up with inflation is not a healthy habit for an economy!
Rich people disproportionately hoard money and lock it up or invest it to make more - poor people spend what they make which is why they stay poor - but they need enough income to keep the consumer machine running.
When the rich don’t give the poor enough to spend, the system does not work and societal unrest is sure to follow.
Story as old as the guillotine.
Pensions formed a compelling reason not to quit or get fired. Having to switch jobs came with substantial risk/drawbacks. That's not true today. Most people don't have any drawbacks to switching jobs other than the job itself. From a pure optimization perspective, quiet quitting offers workers a "reset period" where they can mentally reset before they quit/get fired and start a new job.
It's an extension of an environment that rewards switching jobs more than keeping jobs.
I think the proclivity towards trying to punish QQs rather than preventing people wanting to quit is only going to make it worse.
If people do quiet quit… doesn’t it make sense? They can continue receiving a salary and fulfilling their job responsibilities during a transition period in their lives. Their employer gets their job responsibilities performed, perhaps to the letter, but it reduces churn / time-between-hires.
The one group of people that quiet quitting might not work for are executives, whose salary is justified by them being able to deliver outsized value, which it is hard to show up to work and do on autopilot.
On the other hand, it discourages any attempts to fix miserable jobs. Workers won't bother to try unionizing or petitioning management because they can just quit and management can hire people who quit other jobs. If I'm measuring who "wins" there, I think the company does on the net. They get to keep their crappy, overworked jobs and workers take on the risk of finding new employment. Until very recently, finding replacement workers wasn't really a struggle for management.
I don't think quiet quitting is bad in and of itself, but I think it's symptomatic of underlying flaws in the current work atmosphere. Workers should be adequately incentivized to either do well in their jobs or find a new job, but we seem to be in a period where neither doing your best nor switching jobs has enough incentives to be worth it. That failing is indicative of some systematic failures.
E.g. if a business can force everyone to work through their half-hour lunch without pay, they're getting an extra 130 hours per employee per year for free. If it takes them a week (40 hours) to train a new employee, they can have 300% turnover for that role (replacing the worker in that role 3 times) and still net 10 free hours per year.
At 2 weeks of training, they net 50 free hours at 100% turnover and break even at 150% turnover.
At 3 week of training, they net 10 hours on 100% turnover, and would be better off letting people have lunch if turnover is higher than 100%.
Skipping lunch is a weird way to measure it, but it's hard to generalize "how much more productivity do companies get if they micromanage employees like Amazon does" or something like that.
Well, here is how we test that: what does quiet quitting mean? Showing up and collecting a paycheck while not performing your job? Something else?
The acceptance of the term "Quiet Quitting" tells us a lot about how we currently view the relationship between labor and management.
Somehow we have accepted that showing up when you are supposed to and doing the tasks you are required to is not "doing your job" but rather "quiet quitting".
It does not seem that these people are goldbricking or maliciously complying or really doing anything wrong at all. They are just doing their jobs. Not going above and beyond may be a bad career move, but it's not "quitting" or somehow stealing from your employer.
It's plausible, but before we state something that looks like an opinion, as fact, it would be nice to have something concrete behind it.
get an additional remote job for a full additional salary and compensation package
dont worry about performance bonuses, since they are either random in a few thousand dollar range, or formalized at 7-40% of your base salary with the lower bound being organization wide, and the upper bound being bearable by normal or even subpar performance at a second parallel job that also requires <8 hours daily max in parallel
Also, for the most part, it does not really apply to highly-paid workers. Is a worker at Google getting paid $350,000 per year, a brain surgeon paid $1,000,000 per year going to "quiet quit?" No. Not only that but these workers get insane benefits - platinum level health insurance, ping ping tables at work, free lunches and dinners, etc.
"Quiet quitting" is what low paid workers are doing. Inflation going up 20% - why aren't businesses paying workers 30% more (have to take out taxes). Business owner/manager - can't afford it? How is that my problem? You are the owner or manager, figure it out. That's YOUR job, that is what YOU are getting paid to do. Raise prices to your customers to give me a 30% raise. You can't, you say? All of your vendors are raising their prices, and you pay them higher rates - why not your employees? If you don't pay, workers should work 30% less. It is capitalism, after all. You pay for what you get. An employee has a 30% pay decrease because of inflation? Guess what, you get a 30% work decrease. It's only cold business logic.
On top of that, these lower paid workers in lower paid industries get shit benefits. The lowest level where they have to pay $12,000 deductibles for health care, for example. And even then, some scumball business owners will only schedule workers 30 hours per week (or whatever it is) for part time work so they don't have to pay benefits at all to those. And the employee is required to get a second job to get 40 hours per week, resulting in more travel time, no health care, etc.
Most workers never "quiet quit", it's always the management's fault. Either for being dicks, or for being incompetent. Management and owners are the "quiet quitters", quitting on their workforce.
And I have always been a proponent of "minimum wage, minimum effort" like for fast food workers, for example. As a counter example, if you go to a high-end fine dining restuarant where the servers are making $110,000 per year with tips, you will get "maximum wage, maximum effort." Again, this is just business logic. Workers are their own business, why should they maximize their income and minimize work to fit what they are paid? They are correct in their actions.
Now, whenever I write something like this, some ignorant person will write, "Yeah, but if you work hard, you will rise in the organization, I'm glad people don't work hard, less competition for me" and sentiments along those lines. There are two wrong assumptions with this, and if you haven't figured them out, then maybe you don't have very business acumen and should not be in management or ownership. They are:
1) you probably have an excellent intelligence, maybe you are going to Stanford or Harvard or MIT - yes, the world is TRULY your oyster, you can effectively do anything with your life. For sure. But you just take this for granted. There are people who didn't graduate from high school, those who were not blessed with the same DNA as you. Twin studies have shown that 50-80% of intelligence is inherited. So don't flaunt your accident of birth that gave you a high IQ. But there's no way someone with lower intelligence, like 90 to your 135, can do what you do. Not possible. Two of my relatives are great teachers, and can't teach some students at all what you can learn in 5 minutes. For example, they told me that some of their students just cannot learn how to add two 2 digit numbers together, no matter how much time they spend with them.
2) It is impossible for every worker that works hard to advance, even if they were all 100% equal. If every single person in a Walmart store, for example worked equally hard in order to become a store manager making $175,000 per year (https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/09/business/walmart-store-manage...), how would all 200 or 300 become the store manager for that store??? You say there are other stores they can be promoted to, well, what if every single store had every single worker working equally hard??? It's just impossible. Walmart has 10,500 stores worldwide, and 2.3 million workers worldwide (https://corporate.walmart.com/askwalmart/how-many-people-wor...) if only 25% of employees worked super hard, that means that there are 575,000 employees worthy of being a store manager. That is a .018 chance of getting to be a store manager, even only taking the most hardest workers. If you look at ALL Walmart workers, that is a .00000043 chance of being a store manager.
Sure, maybe YOU can, because you go to Stanford or Harvard and get a degree in business or operations management or supply chain management. But only because you are privileged to be born with the right genetic code, into the right family.
As an example, here's the executive management team for Walmart (keep in mind Walmart is based in Arkansas). You will see there are not too many high school dropouts:
.
Doug McMillon
President and CEO
BA - business administration - University of Arkansas
MA - business administration - University of Tulsa.
.
Rachel Brand
EVP Global Governance, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary
BA - University of Minnesota
J.D. - Harvard Law School.
.
John Furner
President and CEO, Walmart U.S
BS marketing management - University of Arkansas.
.
Kelvin L. Buncum
Executive Vice President, Neighborhood Markets, Walmart U.S.
North Carolina - B.S. Electrical Engineering
MBA - Harvard Business School.
.
William White
SVP Chief Marketing Officer
BA Business - Duke University
.
Emma Waddell
SVP Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer
BA Rutgers, MBA - University of South Carolina
.
JP Suarez
EVP, Chief Administration Officer
BA Tufts, JD University of Pennsylvania
.
And so on.
It's a cynical and quite moronic idea that someone flipping burgers or carrying inventory would make it their fulfilling life purpose instead of just offering honorable pay and letting them stay a separate entity from your soulless corporation. Pay minimum wage, expect minimum engagement.