I would imagine it to mean "doing the absolute smallest amount you can get away with without getting noticed and subsequently fired."
Fulfilling my duties but not doing overtime seems like "doing your job" rather than "quiet quitting."
I think it's an indication of a totally dysfunctional work culture that "not doing extra" can be synonymous with "not working at all"
The fact that the author claims to have given "200% of [their] energy" to their job "throughout their career" is, to me, depressing rather than admirable
But putting in 80 hours a week, going to work even when sick, neglecting rest and family, all these things reduce overall work output, often sharply. Especially when it's just performative, but even when it's honest.
I am somehow a millennial despite being born in the early 80s and so I straddle the divide here somewhat. I share their cynicism and distrust of corporations and capitalism. Your employer is trying to minimize the amount they are paying you and maximize the amount of work you produce, so it only seems fair for a worker to have the inverse incentive.
At the same time, I can't really bring myself to do bad work or generally shirk my responsibilities. Part of this is due to the relationships with my bosses and coworkers, knowing that they are largely trapped in the same circumstances and that they will likely have to pick up the slack, and part of it is just a personal value on doing a thing as well as I can.
Sort of in the same position as you im terms of late millenial. I have always gotten kicked in the ass for doing this. I put a high personal value on the work that I do and go (what I consider) above and beyond. But at all my employments there was a time when I needed help (medical emergency, life emergency, burn-out, family issues etc.) and have always found that I didn't get the support I expected and needed; even from the bosses that I appreciated.
Ultimately, that always drives me to keep a more open eye on new offers.
"Quiet quitting" strikes me as being more like what was traditionally called "Work To Rule" in union circles.
I can't imaging how that'd work for a developer. There can be an innumerable number of tasks different developers do and as they grow in a position, it can change enormously. I guess it would force contract and pay renegotiations every year? Otherwise your new team lead could just.. stop.. in the case where they were hired as just a senior developer.
I left in June and took a new job at a small tech consultancy here in Minneapolis. Teaching is a special job in many ways, but the material benefits of exiting education are stark (at least for me).
Edit: I’m also sympathetic to the argument that students shouldn’t be required to do school work outside school hours; however, that is a much more involved conversation than we are going to have here.
I'm assuming of course that you mean what I ususally have seen which is "i arbitrarily decide how much work to do". If you mean this is just "not go above and beyond", then sure.
Imagine if you were a contractor tasked with painting a room. Mid painting the expectation changes to "you're also expected to reinstall window and door trim, and paint it" (at no extra cost and by staying at jobsite longer), but with a remote probability of increased pay later. Or... The customer fires one of your colleagues and tells you that you and one more person must now deliver the job at the same pace.... but with only two thirds of the pay.
Uh,no. It's usually getting more and more work coz someone left/got fired and employer goes "well, productivity looks the same" (coz everyone is working that bit more) "why hire more?".
Or frankly you just learned more and are more productive than you were year ago... for same wage.
This is like an employer failing to gauge the number of people needed to do a job, just tell you to do a little extra...
Never ever will you get the benefit of a cut from the cost of the missing people, but your employer WILL get the benefit of delivering something more valuable to the market.
That is an interesting phrase. Isn't this what is required of you to do? If you are failing at the job, you will at least get noticed.
So, what is quiet quitting? In my mind, it seems like not having ambition to grow in the corporate world is (negatively) called out as quiet quitting.
If it's a 3-tier scale, the middle "doing your job" means you use your 8 hours / day to get work done (mostly). You don't push off as many duties as possible while "waiting" for more information. You don't go fishing while logging hours. You continue to see what you can get done throughout the day, and you do it, even if you're not being watched and monitored.
On that bottom tier, unless something is specifically measurable, unless there's a solid grasp of accountability that management can use to ensure the work you're doing is meaningfully productive from their point of view, you don't have to do much of anything. You could be in sales but not selling anything. You could show up for required meetings, but make up reasons why you didn't get anything done. You could spend 7 of your 8 hours watching Netflix. Basically, you quietly (as in, without being noticed) quit (as in, stopped doing your job.)
So many people do this already while spending all their time disrupting others and working long hours.
Culture probably plays a role here. Like that joke about an American making calls / texting for work while in the hospital, and a European taking 4 weeks vacation for the summer, just dropping everything work related.
With such a range of skills and loose definitions, it it is almost impossible to tell who is doing their job and who isn't.
I think the most important question to ask is "If the company dies, why don't the employees care?" And unpacking that box can answer all sorts of unasked questions about power imbalance in the modern (mostly service, non-union) economy.
No. If your company has to rely on people working extra hours and doing extra work, to actually function... then screw that company.
Imagine if you demanded your carpenter do your plumbing as well, because "as house can't operate without proper plumbing".
That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.
Hence why you get "quitely quitting" as just doing the job you were hired to do.
Among the reasons this can happen is a variant of race-to-the-bottom cost / value creep due to competition. If some other carpenter is offering complementary deep-clean, then everyone else in the space has to offer it too (or risk losing work).
Now, they should of course ideally pay their staff to do the thing that has become the new norm. But it's easy for a frog-boil to cause something to creep into the new norm without corresponding compensation increasing (especially if the guy offering the deep-cleans originally has some kind of economic advantage the competition doesn't that allows him to offer it for free... Maybe his partner is co-owner and does the deep cleans, or they have kids who work for them for free).
There's a lot of power imbalances that I think become obvious if one asks the question "Why would the employees not care if this company went belly-up tomorrow?" The kids / partner circumstance, for example, involves employees working for below-market rate but they do care if the company goes belly-up tomorrow.
Yeah, but the employers see 'just doing your job' as you not working enough. They want you to go 'above and beyond' and 'dedicate yourself to the mission' with 'passion'. Hence, quiet quitting.
The delta between that and "normal work as required" depends hugely on the job type and company culture. If you're flipping burgers, that difference may well be zero - if you're working as a programmer, it may be huge.
Personally I suspect Quiet Quitting is a quasi-immune response to an employer's expectation that your job should be your life's main activity. Again, how well justified that expectation is comes in a huge spectrum.
In a recession, this response is (reasonably) heightened by an inability to enjoy the economic or personal benefits that an employee expects to come with "giving 110%" for the company.
In my experience, young people saying "quiet quitting" are referring explicitly to the judgmental attitude around work-life balance that's held by some older members of the workforce.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might even suspect that the term "quiet quitting" was actually coined by people who were cynically looking for a way to goad people to work more unpaid overtime.
Which results in people saying that "quietly quitting" is "doing the smallest", when it's actually just sticking strictly to your contract obligations.