Are you a "quiet quitter" in your job

[bill5]

For those not familiar: quiet quitting is where you’re not outright quitting your job, but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond, doing the minimum to keep yourself out of trouble and keep your job. This is apparently a growing trend, the reasons which can be debated... 

 

 

[Notes_Norton]

Self-employed here, so I try to be an over-achiever.

 

I want my duo to be better than the competition for the person who contracts our services. I try to make our music better, too.

 

If gigging at a commercial venue, every decision we make is intended to help the entertainment purchaser make money. We want the guests to have fun, stay longer, and come back more often.

 

If it's a non-commercial party, we want the guests to tell the host that they had a wonderful time.

 

Notes ♫

[RABid]

Wasn't that a big issue with communism? No real incentive to excel or go beyond minimum. 

[KenElevenShadows]

I can't do quiet quitting. I'm not wired that way, and that's doubly so because I was a teacher. There's no quiet quitting when teaching kids in my book. I also want to be the best I can be at something.

 

However, I get why some do quiet quitting. If you are continually treated with disrespect, never get a raise while management keeps increasing their pay, and so forth, I get it and don't pass judgment. If, however, you are quiet quitting because that's your "go to" move, then I have little respect for that.

 

This might seem like I'm at odds, saying on the one hand that I am not wired for it, but on the other, saying that I totally get why some people do it. But I really don't think it is because you cannot apply one thing to all scenarios.

[Anderton]

A gig is a transaction. You're compensated a certain amount for your time and skills. I don't think it's fair for a company to say "we want more of your time and skills, and we won't compensate you for it." Nor do I think it's fair not to give your very best effort for the compensation you receive.

 

Like some of the others here, I give more than expected. It makes clients happy, and perhaps more importantly, I find it satisfying.

[David Emm]

I'm with Ken; not wired that way. I prefer to follow through.

However, I've put myself out to excess a few times and been found comatose in the janitor's closet. 🙄

[Nowarezman]

In a good number of professions, it's rather normal to overwork and, to my mind, abuse the newer and younger workers.  The older managers think, "Well I paid my dues so it's time they pay theirs."  So the cycle is baked in.  But of course, only a few of the newer and younger workers will survive the culling process of promotion.  And it's been my observation that, once you get up into the upper levels of management, the promotional process becomes more irrational.  There are plenty of people who, on rational grounds, can fill those upper level jobs.  So rationality leaves too many to choose from and irrationality (or nepotism or the rich boy's club, etc., etc.) invades the selection process for those last few rungs of the corporate ladder.

 

This whole scenario is discouraging and depressing for millions of corporate workers.  Many companies like to ask for 110% all the time, but how many companies have any loyalty to workers?  The whole power thing is often seriously out of whack.  Yeah, I can see someone deciding to drop back to 95% from 110% and coast.  It may not be the best decision - depends on circumstances - but I wouldn't judge someone too readily who takes that route.

 

nat

 

 

[jazzpiano88]

19 hours ago, bill5 said:

For those not familiar: quiet quitting is where you’re not outright quitting your job, but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond, doing the minimum to keep yourself out of trouble and keep your job. This is apparently a growing trend, the reasons which can be debated...

 

I've seen it.  A dog catcher..

 

 

[Stokely]

Frankly, yes.

I turned down a manager position years ago, because while I like my job I think the upper execs and my depts managers are unethical douchebags.  I stay as far from them as I can, working from home for 3 years honestly stopped me from job hunting.  Out of sight out of mind.

I don't have to swim in their cesspit and I do what I'm asked.  I still get raises and am more than willing to help out junior people if asked.

A couple years ago a new manager came in and pretty obviously tried to get the old timers to quit.  Several did, I remained but she went after me, writing me up to HR for bullshit.   I knew from past experience through a good friend that our HR are nothing but management tools, they are NOT your friend, so no point going to them.   She moved on (she is a slimy climber who has never stayed at a job very long) but that left a mark on me.  Since then, I've distanced myself as much as possible from the "family".   It's a paycheck, nothing more.   They have no special loyalty to employees, and I have none toward them.  They can ask for 50%, I'll give 100%.  They can ask for 110%, I'll give them 100%.   If that's an issue, I'll find another job.   But I'll never go back into an office again unless I have no other choice  

 

[bill5]

On 9/2/2023 at 7:32 PM, Nowarezman said:

In a good number of professions, it's rather normal to overwork and, to my mind, abuse the newer and younger workers.  The older managers think, "Well I paid my dues so it's time they pay theirs."  So the cycle is baked in.  But of course, only a few of the newer and younger workers will survive the culling process of promotion.  And it's been my observation that, once you get up into the upper levels of management, the promotional process becomes more irrational. 

omg yes. I have learned that succeeding in getting into upper (or even mid) level management, at least in the corporate America I've seen in the last few decades, has little to do with being good at anything other than being a master BS artist. The more you can talk without really saying anything, the farther you will go. Our CEO for ex. has these "Town Hall" meetings every so often and the guy can talkandtalkandtalkandtalkandtalkANDtalk, for hours if need be, and not say a single thing. In a sick way it's kind of impressive actually; I couldn't do that if I tried. The meetings are on Zoom now and he talks at the beginning and end of the overall meeting, so I just hit mute and wait till I see someone else pop on in the beginning and log out when he pops back on at the end (these meetings are attended by hundreds so I'm not worried about being noticed).

 

Quote

This whole scenario is discouraging and depressing for millions of corporate workers.  Many companies like to ask for 110% all the time, but how many companies have any loyalty to workers?  

Exactly. I have found when I go above and beyond, I got little if any recognition for it, and my current boss is a dick who for reasons I may never know always had something against me (when they decided to make him my boss I started looking elsewhere) and puts outright lies on my annual evals to justify a lesser grade. I didn't bother to contest them because I know how that game is played; the little guy almost never wins that battle. So yeah, I'm a quiet quitter and not the least bit ashamed of it. I'm trying to coast to retirement, at which time I will quit and not care the slighest if the company goes under the next day. 

 

[Stokely]

Being in corporate management does require some skill besides talking (that is a central one of course).  There's also:

* bus-throwing under - always be on the ball with an underling to blame for your lack of planning
* hemming-and-hawing - (might fall under "talking") - when you don't have a good answer, perfect the art of stringing it along for as long as possible.  Like when you can't give a good reason why someone's annual review is two years late.  My favorite reason for that was "we are getting a new tool that should help me remember to get this done."  What, like a calendar schedule?
* ass-kissing - because until you are the top dog, you have to grovel shamelessly to your so-called superior(s) (thanks Sting for that lyric)
* fake hugging - because you spend all day in meetings, doing no actual work nor much actual planning, you need to work on your fake hug that all these managers give each other when they get together.  Reminds me of the manly hugs in the Sopranos.
* already mentioned, but your best best to avoid actual work is to attend every meeting you can.  Makes you look important, and most importantly, busy.
* magic tech - This is IT-specific, but there's always a "magic tech" that will solve all the problems.  Never mind that the problems are actually lack of good planning/requirements, lack of implementation, and no honest post mortem on what was done right and wrong.  "The Cloud!"  "Data Lakes!" etc etc

I've worked with various execs on reporting and other projects, and quite simply my cynical view is that the higher up the food chain you get, the more of an asshole the person is.   My only regret for not joining the crew is that even as a senior analyst I have no say in the "planning", so the same dumbass mistakes keep getting made out of ignorance.   Last year they hired a vendor for somewhere close to $160K to build this rube goldberg solution, took them months and we had to go back for help on it later (which I reckon is one reason its so complex).... when I saw what it did I told my supervisor our team could have built something simpler in two weeks and saved the company a ton of money.  Nobody asked us up front, and nobody cares now.   End of the day, it's their money and if they want to throw it away, there's nothing I can do in my position.

[Greg Mein]

I helped an engineering manager get logged into a computer I'd previously used over the phone and through text messages a year after I'd retired. I'd call that going above and beyond!

[Joe Muscara]

While "quiet quitting" is a new term, it's really nothing new… [second clip ironically NSFW]

 

 

[Notes_Norton]

I've had a couple of 'day jobs' in my life, and I've seen some slackers. And I've also seen some slacker musicians.

 

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

[Anderton]

What "frosts my ass" (as Hartley Peavey would say) is when I propose something that gets shot down, only to surface later to great acclaim when someone else proposes the exact same thing.

 

This has happened often with me. My theory is that the first time people hear something different from the norm, they recoil. The second time, it seems more familiar and therefore, less threatening.

 

Here's a different example or corporatocracy in action. One time a company paid me beaucoup bucks to give my opinion on a new reverb design from one of their engineers. He was intensely proud of it. Frankly, it sucked, which I tried to communicate as politely and with as much empathy as possible to the designer.

 

Only later did I find out that everyone at the company other than the designer thought it sucked, but they wanted him to get mad at someone from outside the company   So they blamed me as to why they wouldn't turn it into a product. ("Well, that guy writes a lot of reviews...if he pans it, and it sounds like he will, that would seriously impact sales.") Luckily this was in the days before the internet, so I didn't end up getting tracked down by some guy with an AR-15.

[bill5]

It's all games played by soul-less POFSs who care only about themselves and pretend otherwise to the nausea of many. Not not all mgt is like that, but it is clearly the norm, not the exception. I can't wait to retire and it's a coin flip as to whether I'll give 2 weeks notice or just send an email titled "I quit and oh btw f you" or something similar. 

[ProfD]

Office Space is a great movie to watch especially if you're for familiar with working in such an environment. 

 

I hate meetings as most of then are nothing more than a time sink. Folks with little or no real to work to do like to organize and/or attend meetings. 

 

A review of meeting minutes will show that it's the same BS discussion every [insert meeting frequency here]. Meetings justify unnecessary management positions. 

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) wont have meetings when it replaces human beings in the workplace.

 

When AI has no work to do....it won't do anything especially upper level management.

 

AI won't have to take online courses which is another time sink. There will be no performance evaluations either.

 

The pandemic changed some of the brick and mortar mentality associated with the workplace. It will continue to change as folks aren't tied to office spaces.😎

[jazzpiano88]

I just woke up from a bad dream.  I was a program manager for a couple of products in real life taking them from R&D to release.  In my dream I was giving upper management an update and said everything is on track for making the release date except for a minor hiccup with a camera that should be fixed quickly.  I then asked the hardware manager when we expected to get a quality image from the camera instead of crap.  He said that they were struggling and dead in the water as the dsp programmer from a sw vendor had quit a month ago and no one in house knew how the code worked or how to even write new code to resolve anything and that the whole program was at risk.   Rat hole, chaos, and recriminations ensued and, oh by the way, I had forgotten to wear pants to work that day.  This is where I woke up.  
 

Never quiet quit, but being a program manager was one of my most difficult experiences in management, having to keep people satisfied both up the chain and below at the functional groups.   

[Notes_Norton]

10 hours ago, Anderton said:

This has happened often with me. My theory is that the first time people hear something different from the norm, they recoil. The second time, it seems more familiar and therefore, less threatening.

 

When I started selling my Band-in-a-Box aftermarket styles, I had zero experience in business. I was a career musician, who wrote the styles for myself, gave them to my friends, and they told me they liked them better than the built-in styles.

 

So I took out a classified ad in Electronics Musician magazine. The third month it ran, with no sales. The ad rep called, I told her I was not going to renew. About an hour later, I got my first sale, called the magazine and renewed. I suspect the magazine might have had something to do with that <wink/grin>. Anyway, the sales started coming in, and now I've been in business over 30 years selling BiaB aftermarket products.

 

I then bought a book on mail-order sales. In that book, it stated that it usually takes 3 times for most people to respond to something, including advertisements.

 

So I'll add to what Craig said: the first time people hear something different from the norm, they recoil. The second time, it seems more familiar—therefore, less threatening and the third time they are comfortable with it.

 

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

 

[bill5]

15 hours ago, JazzPiano88 said:

I just woke up from a bad dream.  I was a program manager for a couple of products in real life taking them from R&D to release.  In my dream I was giving upper management an update and said everything is on track for making the release date except for a minor hiccup with a camera that should be fixed quickly.  I then asked the hardware manager when we expected to get a quality image from the camera instead of crap.  He said that they were struggling and dead in the water as the dsp programmer from a sw vendor had quit a month ago and no one in house knew how the code worked or how to even write new code to resolve anything and that the whole program was at risk.   Rat hole, chaos, and recriminations ensued and, oh by the way, I had forgotten to wear pants to work that day.  This is where I woke up.  
 

Never quiet quit, but being a program manager was one of my most difficult experiences in management, having to keep people satisfied both up the chain and below at the functional groups.   

I was a program manager a time or two. Worst job I ever had and the other so-called managers were nothing but self-licking ice cream cone douchebags far more concerned with spewing drivel so confounding that it looked like they were doing a lot and no one dared call them on it for fear of looking stupid because they didn't understand it. Powerpoint presentations (OOPS I mean "decks"...got to use the cool trendy corporatespeak) were all the rage. Nothing less than purgatory.