The "Quiet Quitting" Myth Is Toxic for Tech
blackentropy.com
blackentropy.com
It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. It's a problem of motivation. If I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime. So what am I working for? My only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired. -- Office Space
So why don't I use them to do the absolute best I can as a software engineer because doing great work will improve my skills in the future. I'm losing nothing because 8 hours are 8 hours and doing nothing instead does not gain me anything either.
But by god this behavior is not rewarded by higher-ups. They just tended to see me as an loyal useful idiot even when that's not the case.
This has taken me a long time to internalize, but it's finally managed to work it's way through a thick skull. When you're spending your time constantly bailing poor planners who reap the fruits of your heroics out while burning your own candle at both ends, you harm yourself, and anyone working for you, and anyone who works for the higher ups in question.
And the only ones who can recalibrate, are you, and the higher ups. Who won't, unless you force it.
This blog post really made this type of error clear to me: https://acoup.blog/2024/08/16/fireside-friday-august-16-2024... (read the whole thing):
> [weakness with George R. R. Martin’s worldbuilding of the Night’s Watch]
> And sure, from the elite perspective, this all makes sense. Someone needs to stand on the wall, so we’ll send someone (over time, increasingly low-status, disposable someones) to do it, provide them very minimal comforts necessary for minimum survival and decree harsh punishments should they ever leave their military-penal colony. For a Warden of the North in Winterfell or a King in King’s Landing, that all makes sense.
> But consider it for a moment from the perspective of the brothers of the Night’s Watch. Sure, someone needs to stand on this wall, but it doesn’t need to be them. Fear of the Others or Wildlings is useless here: that answers why someone needs to be here, but not why I need to be here. Some people will self-sacrifice for the community with no thought to other rewards (money, prestige, status), but they are very, very few.
The first thing I notice is that it replaces a description of behavior with an external assessment of a motivation. I already begin to suspect this is one of those slippery words that will be abused for their vagueness by people pretending not to. But for now we'll go get a description from googling. Pretty wide definition, but seems to encompass:
1. Minmaxing. Doing as little work as possible for as much money as possible.
2. Burnout.
3. Employee lets their responsibilities slip because they're busy applying and interviewing elsewhere.
4. Social behavior that is actively against office collaboration and comradery.
Those more specific issues translate to:
1. This is just wage negotiation. At the end of the day, someone performs to the standard of their role and remuneration, or they don't. If someone meets expectations without going above and beyond, calling it a "quiet-quit" is a management whinge.
2. Management is failing an employee.
3. Management has failed an employee.
4. Management has failed a workplace.
QED: This is an HR word for management types to talk about low morale without admitting to their fuckup.
With that definition, there's nothing unsavory about it.
therefore...
It's turtles all the way down...
I’m sure that level of pay doesn’t have many coasters.
At $150k, I was coasting at a large company for a few years, but it wasn’t like I did _nothing_. I did my sprint work as assigned within the sprint.
Tech jobs on the whole are broadly easier than other industries like medical or legal. Even accounting for familiarity bias, I'm confident that my job is significantly easier than my doctor's or my vet's despite us being in similar income brackets. That doesn't make it easy, just closer to a sane workload.
If you work at ticket clinic, your job as a lawyer is probably pretty easy.
If you work in algorithmic trading at Jane street, your job is probably pretty challenging.
It's weird to count literally doing your job as requested as "coasting."
If you’re not pushing the envelope to be noticed more and build your promotion packet, you’re coasting.
No, I'd say that's just not being ambitious, which is different from coasting.
My managers and principal engineers on my team made it clear that NOT actively working to build promotion packet materials and engaging in self-marketing within the company placed me at a lower rank over time.
It was explicitly not good enough to do my job as described. They used a system called stack ranking and (unofficially) they would put people lower on the ranks on PIPs and prepare to let them go even if they were fulfilling their responsibilities to the letter (but not above)
Maybe this wasn’t the case for staff level engineers, but it was for mid levels (which I was at the time)
Nothing new about doing the bare minimum to get paid at a job while quietly searching for a new job.
They want you to make your job your entire identity to imprison you further and have even more mental leverage to treat you like trash. We are a family, of course, but only when it suits them, otherwise you are a quiet quitter, and despite record profits, we simply don't have the budget for a raise Janet!
Actually when I think of that, it would be the only good use of LinkedIn.