So… Doing your job well is “quiet quitting” now? I don’t want my boss to think I’m quiet quitting, I Guess I’ll have to underperform instead.
Quiet firing on the other hand is giving raises that are under inflation. Companies should stop this quiet firing shit.
Giving raises? My employer quiet quit that more than a decade ago. Meanwhile inflation and price gouging march on.
What proportion of people have jumped ship in the last ~8 years as a result? (Understand you could have good reason for sticking around.)
It’s a very small company. About 1/3 have moved on. The attraction is that it’s relatively accommodating for other things in your life.
Ahh, flexibility definitely compensates for a good bit of opportunity cost. Know people who stay in easier remote jobs to avoid the responsibilities and demands that come with moving to certain higher-paid positions.
There’s also freedom from corporate culture, which I have had enough of in the past. Overall I think I’m happier keeping my perfectly tolerable job in its place and earning less, though I can see how others make a different choice and would negatively judge what I do.
Quiet quitting: doing what you’re paid for
Normal working: doing what you’re paid for but also asking managers for more work when you’re done -> that’s what’s expected from management and also takes some load off their shoulders, they love that
Over achievement: doing what you’re paid for and more without asking management -> management will promise you a seat at the table of you continue doing that long enough!
If there’s advancement opportunities try to do the second one until you reach a point where you’re happy and then do the first one :)
Hahaha someone’s living in fairy land.
If they deep throat the boot hard enough, maybe they’ll get to wear it someday!
I had an employee review with my manager this week, at my request. She told me she wasn’t comfortable uptraining me right now even though they badly need the help in the position I asked to be crosstrained for, because they’d rather hire someone just for the role; but we could talk about it again in two months. After a little digging, I found that (A) they can’t afford to lose me from my lower-paid role and (2) they know I’m looking for another job and don’t want to train me until I demonstrate I’m planning to stay.
My response is that (A) well you’re definitely gonna lose me now and (2) I’m definitely no longer willing to stay.
Similar situation on my end awhile back. Location had begun losing people. I was in a bottom rung management position, more title than authority, and the team knew it. However, I was also the only manager willing to be consistently on later shifts. Due to pretty intense compartmentalization issues were often isolated and fixed by managers within each department. Except later on at night I was alone with a smaller team. This presented a bit of a situation:
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If a problem came up I was expected to text or call a manager. As you can imagine, they did not often reply or pick up.
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Many problems require rather immediate solutions.
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I wasn’t being trained to receive the skills necessary to deal with many situations so I began enabling key members of the evening team and standing in front of them if mistakes were made, acting as a wall.
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Due to all of this, and a lot of work being handled by a smaller team, (and some issues going consistently ignored by senior management) we saw several people leave. In the middle of all this I was isolated and made out to be the reason for some systemic issues, told I could no longer take the initiative to help, and the team caught wind.
Eventually I began looking for other jobs. When I let my bosses know boy were they surprised. By the time I left one manager had claimed to have started having anxiety attacks during their shift, the whole unreachable during situations thing became a problem for upper, and well…long story short shit and fan began to meet.
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If a problem came up I was expected to text or call a manager. As you can imagine, they did not often reply or pick up.
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Many problems require rather immediate solutions.
These are not your problems. If management has enacted a procedure that doesn’t work, don’t change it or you will be blamed for any failure.
Send a few emails to document your opinion that there are problems. Otherwise, do exactly what was recommended. You want the policy to fail. Don’t try to improve it without management support.
I learned this in my previous job. We were a city-owned theater, which came with all of the trappings of government bureaucracy. But we were also open after hours, and did a lot of technical work for our shows. The city’s IT would log off on Friday at 5pm, and not log back in again until 8am on Monday. We were one of the few departments that was open over the weekend and after hours, (often until 1 or 2am when loading shows out.)
So naturally, we butted heads with IT a lot. Because we didn’t have access to change things we often needed to change. Whenever we needed to urgently troubleshoot something before a show started, our hands were almost always tied by IT. And IT’s given solution was always the same. Submit a ticket, and we’ll get to it when we get to it. But when you have 2000 people waiting on a show to start at 7pm on a Saturday, you can’t wait for IT to get back into the office on Monday.
Historically, the solution was to use our own gear. Every technician had their own personal laptop, so they could use that instead of the city laptop. But this caused issues of its own, because we couldn’t connect to any of the city-controlled gear as the city network was MAC filtered, (and IT obviously wasn’t going to allow our personal devices to connect to their network.) We worked with what we had, worked around problems we couldn’t fix, and it was a lot of extra stress for no extra benefit; The higher-ups didn’t see a problem because the shows were never visibly impacted. And IT didn’t see a problem, because the higher-ups weren’t complaining.
Eventually, we just started letting it burn. Shows suddenly started 15 to 30 minutes late, (which was unheard of in a building where even 2 minutes late was considered unacceptable.) Clients didn’t get equipment they had paid for, because it was broken on Friday evening and we couldn’t troubleshoot it over the weekend. Projectors didn’t have video feeds, because techs stopped using their personal laptops for shows. Et cetera, et cetera. Instead, the techs simply started noting every time they wanted to fix something but couldn’t because their hands were tied.
And wouldn’t you know it, the system got fixed. IT was suddenly required to keep someone on call for weekend tickets. Because when people stop propping up the broken system, all of the flaws get discovered and heads roll until shit gets fixed.
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I remember doing self assessments before reviews, I just gave myself 5s because they were going to change everything to 3.5 anyhow unless you invented cold fusion and sucked everyone’s dick
Doing your job at a high standard is a problem? Who makes this garbage up?
Yeah I always thought ‘quiet quitters’ referred to people checking out of their jobs emotionally and doing just barely enough to not get fired, so actually underperforming, not because they couldn’t do better but because they stopped caring at some point. In that sense they have already quit, quietly. But now it seems that anyone who doesn’t go above and beyond can be a ‘quiet quitter’? Doesn’t make much sense to me.
They’re just toeing the line for their corporate masters. Capitalists want 150% effort for 100% pay since the profit margin on that extra 50% alone is huge.
It’s companies gaslighting us that we are either looking for new roles, or we are working hard to make more money/ask for a raise or else we’ll find a new role.
Managers see both these things as “not being part of the fam”, but really they just want to take more and give less while playing the victim.
There’s a great reply to this in the same publication: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2024/04/27/quiet-quitters-or-good-workers/
Sir, – I read with interest Olive Keogh’s article (“Quiet quitting: You always had workers who did 9-5 but it’s a creeping malaise, employers say”, April 25th).
The article defines working one’s contract hours as a form of quitting, a contortion of fact that I have struggled to grasp since laying eyes on it.
It is asserted that employees are obliged to put in extra hours, do additional work and recalibrate their work-life balance for the “benefits” of social capital, “wellbeing” and career success.
I have a novel proposal. Pay employees in actual capital for the additional time they are expected to work.
Dispense with the relaxation classes on their lunch breaks and the sweet treats and the tokenistic attitude of management to the labour that drives their business.
Instead, resource staff sufficiently to complete work within business hours, respect the rights of staff to a fulfilling life not defined by their day jobs, and stop using gaslighting terms like “quiet quitting” for fulfilling the terms of their contract of employment.
This may seem radical to those managers who have been around the block, but KPIs (key performance indicators) don’t spend time with my loved ones nor do they put food on the table. – Yours, etc,
SHANE FITZPATRICK,
Dublin 7.
That letter is way too polite for the “go fuck yourselves” that I had in mind… I honestly think we should start actually spitting in the faces of managers of that kind that we happen to know in private life, be it family or neighbors, just show them disdain and disgust coming from people whom they have no power over.
Unionize people. I joined a union and there’s no “we’re a team” bullshit or the boss going “do me a favor”. 4pm hits, you drop what you’re doing and go home. You get paid for your job, and the union fees are nothing considering the pay is way higher for union workers in my field.
If they are completing their assigned workloads where does the quitting happen?
Quiet quitting has always referred to the extra bullshit that employers pressure employees into doing.
In America we’ve fallen into this work culture that implies you aren’t really part of a team unless you are constantly putting forth more than what the employer is paying you for.
The undertone of this headline is that managers feel uneasy because so-called “quiet quitters” won’t take on extra work or unpaid hours or exhibit overwhelming enthusiasm, but just do literally what they have to at a passable or high quality.
The gaslighting part is that those workers aren’t doing anything wrong, but they aren’t bending over backwards for their employers, so corporate America wants to paint the picture that those workers are awful time thieves instead of just burnt out wage slaves.
I hear some countries in Asia are CRAZY bad for these kind of expectations and have been for a long time.
Oh absolutely. In Japan for example if you are unable to work or you get removed from your career, it is socially understandable for you to consider suicide. Lots of Japanese citizens put their job before even their families or the potential of having a family.
It’s actually pretty fuckin crazy what Japanese work culture does to their citizens.
“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.”
– George Carlin.
Gaslighting isn’t real. You sound crazy.
I see a lot of people complaining about the term “quiet quitting.” In this thread there are people saying that that’s exactly what they want in a job, that that’s what they’ve been doing since before the term existed, etc…
I’m curious what other succinct terms people would use to describe the act of doing the bare minimum and not engaging beyond what is required and asked for.
I’m asking because I also dislike the term “quiet quitting”, and I know such an activity has existed forever. At the same time it does seem useful because I can’t think of a succinct way to describe what it explicitly describes. In the past it seems like such a behavior was implicit, but with modern “engagement” and “hustle” and “110%” work culture, it seems like we need a more explicit term.
So, is there another term we can use that people don’t hate as much?
Being normal.
