We have become seriously screwed up when we call “working the job you are paid to do” “quiet quitting.” This implies all jobs are under specifying their actual requirements and by proxy under paying for expected labor, and that’s the employees fault - otherwise they’re not just underperforming but “quitting” quietly - quietly because it’s actually entirely satisfactory.
I've heard it said that employers brand it "quiet quitting", because if they named it something less disingenuous, it would remind people that the opposite of quiet quitting is called "wage theft".
Dude Corporate America means wage theft. Like there are niches but they're not worth the sacrifice if you actually adjust for risk.
I'm trying to come up with the alternative, because it turns out there must be a leader and he or she must set things up so there can be another way. Just has to be a virtuous leader who is virtuous because he wants to, like the ideal Confucian Korean King.
I'm considering how much to pay people for commuting, I can if I can afford it, just need a lot of profit from a lot of margin from a huge speedup. I know how to do that, that yes. The rest is highly speculative.
Where did the term come from? I can't trace it back further than a WSJ article and a TikTok criticizing it that blew up. Even sourcing the original article is tricky since almost everything is discussing from a post-TikTok perspective.
Corporations are indeed psychopathic monstrosities, but if they were trying to control the conversation with this term then it didn't have any mindshare prior to the backlash.
The idea that quiet quitting is about doing the work you’re paid for is the misnomer.
Quiet quitting is about people who are doing below the bare minimum they’re supposed to do. Either because they knew they wouldn’t get fired during the labor crunch a few months ago, or because they were working multiple jobs and once again through they could get away with it.
The problem is that the “quiet quitters” who were interviewed for these articles didn’t present themselves in that way for obvious reasons. Instead they presented themselves as people who were just doing what they were required and not more.
Which describes 70-80% of the workforce for decades.
Standard of living is great and all, but I'd trade a big chunk of it away for a modicum less alienation. Just a scrap of de-alienation is all. Yes, I'm begging.
Anybody care to say why they censored my parallel comment? It's now completely illegible now.
I like losing karma best comments are gray, but this forum unfortunately lets everybody censor anybody. Points in favor don't make the text any clearer, but points in favor make it illegible. Even under highlighting, you have to copy paste to a different app, you have to leave the web app altogether. And there's troll farms with hackernews.com on their coverage, they make software for instance, which says black is positive points, then for 0 or below you have an automatic color dropper (probably just reads the html) and then you can choose how much you want to censor it yourself sir with our troll farm app. And we can keep it at 0 no matter how many "biological users" upvote it.
Like why are points only visible if they're negative? For integrity you should make positive points huge, 50pt, bold, maybe spice up the font.
Back when it was points, nobody cared. This is about legibility. It is physically painful to try to read comments grayed out and they don't even show them to you if you highlight. You know that is a real form of cowardly censorship with books? Books that hurt to read, bad fonts mistakes on purpose poor contrast, meant punishing reading without permission. In fact does cause eye damage, squinting then eye degeneration, highly desirable because then they will never read anything again.
Relevant today in Chile, the absolute worst-functioning book market and the absolute highest book prices, backed by what is secretly a monopoly, after literally burning books and even torturing people based on their bookshelf. Threatening them openly so they would burn their books out of their own accord.
Like if it were karma, I would say nothing, and I still am saying nothing about karma. But if writing is sneakily censored, that's different. It shows up gray only when you log out. I brought the matter of legibility up formally.
None of this punishes me, like get real I got whacked, I got lynched, I'm a survivor. It punished my readers. It punishes you.
People have to die and keep dying for you to be able to read.
This is factual and I can prove it is that way from the very beginning of the formation of the economy, when compound interest behaves nearly linearly. But not linearly. From the very beginning. There are arrangements and something feels off but it's mostly (it really is mostly) a very good arrangement for all parties.
Then the aptly termed late-stage capitalism, which is not a bullshit thing it's a mathematical concept too. Worked it out in detail, without adjectives, connotations, plain.
So early game, capitalism is better, late game, communism is better. Really the best is nature the entire time.
On one side, you have people doing what they're paid to do. On the other you have people creatively firing them, an illegal practice in some countries.
I really don't get why quiet quitting is even a term. It's just people not exceeding expectations as a default.
> I really don't get why quiet quitting is even a term.
“Quiet quitting” is a labor-hostile way of describing what labor advocates call “work to rule”.
“Quiet quitting” has different connotations than “work to rule” which give the managerial class a handle to oppose the leverage knowledge workers gained during the pandemic vis-a-vis remote work.
Workers should counter the term “quiet quitting” with what it really is, “work to rule”.
Except labor was the group that came up with the term "quiet quitting."
Also, I'd say "work to rule" is also pretty bad from a branding/comprehension perspective, given the multiple meanings of the word rule. I suppose it's meant to mean "do the exact work required by the rules governing your job and no more" but grammatically the sentence reads as though it's referring to the verb form of the word - i.e. "work in order to become a ruler within the organization."
> I suppose it's meant to mean "do the exact work required by the rules governing your job and no more" but grammatically the sentence reads as though it's referring to the verb form of the word - i.e. "work in order to become a ruler within the organization."
“Work to rule” is an elision, short for “work according to rule”.
Right, so sounds like I understood the meaning there. The point still stands, though - it's a grammatically ambiguous phrase, which is a bad quality when you're looking for a shorthand way to communicate an idea.
Yeah, for me it was more like working maybe 2 hours a day and then sneaking out early to catch a movie. Moviepass and "quiet quitting" or whatever you want to call it were a match that made for a beautiful summer in 2018.
> Yeah, for me it was more like working maybe 2 hours a day and then sneaking out early to catch a movie. Moviepass and "quiet quitting" or whatever you want to call it were a match that made for a beautiful summer in 2018.
That’s not “work to rule”. That’s straight up dereliction of duty.
Or perhaps quiet quitting? It was quiet enough that no one noticed - and this was not a WFH position. Eventually I got laid off (loudly) if that helps. Lay off had nothing to do with my personal performance (at that point it was covid lockdown and we were completely WFH so I generally spent more hours online anyway), but the business just wasn't doing good, hence all the downtime in the previous years.
Branding matters, and work to rule and quiet quitting project different brands to my ear.
If you're not paid by the hour and not required to be on call (which seems to be the above case), the it's very hard for an employer to argue that you need to be at home, staring at a monitor just in case.
I have never worked more than the agreed upon contract. This is NOT quiet quitting. I'm not going over and above, why don't YOU go over and above and instead of paying me $125K per year, pay me $500K? Or pay a vendor twice what the contract said that your company owes them?
It's ridiculous.
I always manage up, though. Most managers, not all, are going to take your feedback. I'll tell a manager that under no circumstances would I cancel a vacation or anything else for a job. And, most managers I've ever had would never expect that, nor expect me to work from 6 am to 8 pm every day.
There's no reason to quiet fire, just raise the expectations. If you set clear expectations and your employee isn't meeting them, that's that. It's quite simple idk why any of this is "quiet".
I've seen that employers don't want to have written expectations beyond the bare minimum.
They want to list an 'industry standard' job for $X per hour, but have verbal expectations of far more than that along with verbal and implied failures on the employees part that the employee is not meeting expectations.
If they wrote down the raised expectations in the first place most prospective employees would give them the middle finger and seek more fair compensation. Instead they love to feast on the type of employee that goes above and beyond at a standard level of compensation.
My wife recently left a job like this as a manager. She got a year end review that her performance was 'beyond expectations" and that her output and quality of work was the highest in the company. Not a month later they attempted to write her up on a PIP for not meeting expectations (which was interestingly right before they were assigning bonuses). She fought it, won, got the bonus and immediately left. The company then attempted to put my wife's workload on one of her subordinates with no title change or pay increase. Needless to say that employee quickly left too.
And if you are living in a country with reasonable workers rights like germany then "raising expectations" as a reason to firing employees will only lead to a costly appearens before the Arbeitsgericht for the employer
I would imagine you don't raise expectations with the inten to fire, you raise them because you hadn't set them appropriately before.
If there was some assumption that workers would give 110% for whatever, but now you know they'll give 100%, you're certainly free to raise the expectations next performance cycle.
Are you saying that's a violation of workers rights?
It is a violation of workers rights, and personally, I'm going to expect my salary to go from $100,000 per year to $110,000 per year.
Give me the solution you seek to solve, we agree on a price, I do the solution, I get paid what we agreed. But, I'm not going to start cleaning the toilets every night because the manager wants me to "give 110%."
I mean, if for some reason the manager or owner asked me to fix the toilets because they are backing up, and I have the expertise, and there's a big client coming in tomorrow that will quadruple revenue, yeah, I'd do it. But that is not putting in 110%. That's just...common sense? But if they wanted me to do it every week, for 110%, no. Not hired to do that. I'm not working 110% for anyone. Unless we renegotiate my contract and I get paid more.
Quiet firing is also better know as organizational failure. Your employer has decided to pay below market wage so cannot hire or retain staff. Those willing to stay work at market equilibrium effectiveness
What a hideous dystopia.