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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I think it is a good term to use. I was interested to see a poll where about 70% of young people thought QQ was good and about 70% of old people thought it is bad.

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.

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I'm almost in my 30's and my opinion looking back on what work used to be like (from what I can get from books) is that pensions had a huge impact.

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.

I would actually argue that, although it is unfortunate for long term retirement security, eliminating pensions and allowing workers to switch jobs is a good thing. Otherwise, you might get folks who stay in a job where they are miserable just to get a pension.

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.

I can't find a flawless argument in either direction, personally. You're right that it lets people escape bad work situations.

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.

I’m not so sure about company winning though - isn’t there a significant period of training that is involved in turnover?

I'd be curious about the math. It's really weighing the period of training and how often that training period is inflicted (turnover) against the productivity gains of overworking people.

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.

It's only visible to upper management if people in the field aren't overworking themselves to meet deadlines impacted by someone leaving. Most problems are masked because people can't just "let it fail" and force mgmt to deal with it.

It's possible that the costs of high turnover might motivate a company to make work conditions better, but it's also possible that the company just finds ways to adapt to high turnover.

I’d like to validate your hunch as an individual barely over 40. US born and raised and started hourly jobs at 16 (grocery store, retail, movie theater) and post university landed in corporate America.

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.

> 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.

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!

I discussed this with a very bright CFA Level 3 asset manager with $3B active and another $6B he advises on:

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.

>I think it is a good term to use. I was interested to see a poll where about 70% of young people thought QQ was good and about 70% of old people thought it is bad.

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?

Was the poll about the term itself or about the practice that the term describes?

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