Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

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>About two years ago the term “quiet quitting” was added to the workplace vocabulary. It refers to employees who are no longer willing to go the extra mile for an employer

The fact that not doing additional free work is framed as "quitting" is both ridiculous and sad.

>Quiet quitters are hard to handle, both on the job and in performance reviews, because they continue to complete their assigned workload to the same (often high) standard, giving their managers an uneasy feeling but nothing specific to complain about.

Why would there be anything to complain about if the work someone is assigned is completed on time and to a high standard? I don't understand.

>“But it’s hard to deal with while keeping everyone else engaged. In particular it’s a challenge to ensure that the first job employees on the team don’t assume this behaviour is the norm.

God forbid other team members start to respect their own time rather than giving it to their employer for free.

I think it’s more about exploiting the gap between the bar for the role and the bar to get fired. Perhaps “ideally” there’s no gap there to exploit. But practically there will be. Moreover, because the bar to fire is usually driven by completely separate mechanisms in an organization, there’s no clear backpressure to force more alignment between the two. So I think it’s less about the respect of an employee or an employer - it’s not that the employees are doing anything wrong - and more what are the systemic consequences of the size of this gap potentially changing and/or employees biasing more towards the ‘not fired’ bar. What happens if everyone swings left? Whose responsibility should it be to manage that and who is actually empowered/incentivized to do so? Who’s at the wheel here?

There's also a gap regularly exploited by employers, between "worker does extra" and "worker actually gets paid for it."

I feel it would be a mistake to try to analyze just one of those without the other.

The employee is at the wheel here. That’s the realization that’s setting in. Want more engagement? Make the work more engaging. Or just realize that you get what you pay more.

What the “bar for the role” gap is really is the zone you work in when you don’t care about getting ahead. Getting ahead has never been mandatory, at least post the first few years at work (often the first few levels in most corporations have an expiry date you need to matriculate through or be let go). Once you’re in a terminal role it’s supposed to be ok to stay there and not put in that extra to get ahead. It should be ok for people to not always be striving and reaching higher and higher. Often other things in life become more important - children, last years with parents, your maker hobby. That’s ok.

> The fact that not doing additional free work is framed as "quitting" is both ridiculous and sad.

Yeah, that's something I thought was strange in the article. My understanding of quiet quitting was that you did the bare minimum to not get fired, not "not going above and beyond".

You're right:

> “Quiet quitting” first hit the internet in March 2022 when a Gen-X career coach and employment influencer named Brian Creely used the phrase when discussing an Insider article about employees “coasting” at work. After that, the phrase went viral on TikTok, particularly among the app’s younger, Gen-Z-dominated user base.

https://www.thestreet.com/dictionary/quiet-quitting

I think the term shifted because one of the early descriptions was "only doing what you're paid for", which can be interpreted as either "coasting" or "restricting to 9-to-5".

That or they're actively trying to shift it to stop people from realizing coasting is a thing.

That was the original definition as I remember it.

Of course the article’s definition works better if you want to paint all workers as lazy mooches who are lucky for every day they’re not fired.

I think your definition is correct and "the extra mile" simply refers to above the minimum. It wouldn't be a phenomenon if it referred to the normal amount of work that was expected.

Well, more people used to have ambition to "move up", get raises, bonuses, and promotions.

extraordinary amounts of hours buys less and less. it feels like the ambition dissolved when the rewards dwindled -- which is (maybe sadly) a behavior that I find hard to find fault in.

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