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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Don't take it personal. All business want to reduce costs. As long as people cost money, they'll want to reduce people.

Which is why quiet quitting is the logical thing.

Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive.

Hey, it's just business.

And you do this honestly, by negotiating reduced hours for the same pay or by negotiating piecework rather than time-based pay. Right?

Like any shrewd businessman, I negotiate to receive the highest price possible for the minimum cost on my end. This is how business is done.

What does the term mean? I think the answer to your question is obvious.

Unless something has changed, "quiet quitting" means "do only what the job requires". Arrive at 9, leave at 5, no out-of-hours work functions, etc. It's more a return to normalcy, but with a bad name because it comes from a generation who has always been told they have to go above and beyond to succeed alongside a corporate culture that tries to lure people into work by making it more of a social experience.

Which is why I fire the quiet quitters on the spot

I am so appreciative of the employment protection laws we have in Europe so I don't have to deal with managers like you.

Yeah but you are paid less than half for a reason

But they get to live in Europe

And Europe is a sh*thole

Most Europeans wouldn't want to live in the USA even if given twice the salary.

Because they are lazy and full of delusion

And you wonder why you're understaffed.

Actually agents allowed me to save on labor. Thanks

The irony being that software, and developers, have often been the tool for reducing head count.

> Don't take it personal. All business want to reduce costs. As long as people cost money, they'll want to reduce people.

"Don't take it personal" does not feed the starving and does not house the unhoused. An economic system that over-indexes on profit at the expense of the vast majority of its people will eventually fail. If capitalism can't evolve to better provide opportunities for people to live while the capital-owning class continues to capture a disproportionate share of created economic value, the system will eventually break.

While not an incorrect statement, trillions of dollars have been paid to software developers to build software that invariably reduced labor costs.

You're absolutely correct on that. The technology industry, at least the segment driven by VC (which is a huge portion of it), is funded based on ideas that the capital-owning class thinks is a good idea. Reducing labor costs is always an easy sell when you're trying to raise a round.

Even in boring development jobs. For example, one of my first development jobs was for a large hospital, building an intranet app to make nurse rounds more efficient so they didn't have to hire as many.

Some businesses want to reduce costs. Some want to tackle the challenge of using resources available in the most profitable manner, including making their employees grow to better contribute in tackling tomorrow's challenges.

A business leader board that only consider people as costs are looking at the world through sociopath lenses.

This is just a layer of emotion on top of raw capitalism. And it will always prove to be a lie when push comes to shove.

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