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Comment by everforward | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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 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.

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