New Work Trend - Quiet Quitting

[StarBright]

The generation raised by the people who were part of the old system were conditioned by their upbringing to behave like the employees in the old system: respect your employer, be loyal, trust your management knows best, etc.

The next generation raised their kids with the knowledge that the company can and *will* fuck you up, down, and sideways at every chance they get. We were raised with stories of secretaries who worked for 40 years for a company being fired when they were diagnosed with cancer. I saw my mom's company try to get rid of her when she was diagnosed with MS.

That generation has now raised the new batch of incoming staff.

I feel like this right here explains a big difference between the youngest GenX/Geriatric Millennials vs Younger Millennials/Gen Z.

[Metalcat]

Thanks @Malcat for that great post. It rings true of you ask me.

It also goes the same way: Youth can only look with a big ??? on their face if those managers complain about them being entitled. It's a business transaction, either you agree to the terms or not, but don't go around spouting nonsense!

This is similar to what I have seen here about the Friday school protests for climate.

"What? Those youngsters are skipping school? First they should earn some money and feed a family before they dare to want something from us!"

It's a totally different worldview, formed by the experience of a greatly different world.

Lol, my number one question I get is "how do I get them to stop taking so many sick days? Do they not understand how negatively it affects the business whenever they take a day off?"

I'm like "why would they give a fuck about the impact on the business? Are you giving them shares? Profit sharing? If they don't feel well, they have zero motivation to come to work. They're not going to lose their job, they're still going to get paid, and you're the one who is inconvenienced. What have you done to make them invested in your well being?"

The ones that listen do so well because these young people are ironically quite willing and prepared to work themselves to death. They're ultra capable and insanely driven, but only if it serves their self-interest.

And they not only shut down in the face of unfairness and bullying, they shut down if they see *any* of their peers being taken advantage of, because they're shockingly protective of each other.

I read recently about how reality tv show producers are having to reformulate their formats because the younger participants are too nice to each other, bond as a group too easily, and are too mutually supportive. The old tools for drama just aren't working with this new generation.

Give them a sense of autonomy and collective value though? They'll bend over backwards *for each other* to get the work done.

When asked how I am consistently able to get young people to work so hard and with so little complaint, I always emphasize that they are not doing it for me.

During interviews I ask them what job they want after this and what skills they would like to develop during this job to be able to get there. I set the expectation of personal gain *for them* from the get go.

I engineer all of my messaging and management approach to foster their very, very powerful internal meritocratic drives to achieve personal excellence, and never invoke the well being of the company, because they don't give a fuck.

I put huge emphasis on how I can help develop their talent to superstar level so that they can move on to bigger and better things. It's never about the benefit to me or the company.

However, this motivates them to work their asses off, support one another in excellence, and makes them freakishly loyal to me because I'm one of the only employers who knows that this is what they want.

I get huge benefit to the company from them by never, ever, ever invoking their obligation to the company's performance, only their own team's performance and what that means to them.

They don't give a fuck what the business billed this quarter or that they contributed to it, but they care deeply that they are known for being the best in the industry and that other businesses constantly try to poach them.

But it also means being patient with their needs. Not cracking down when they perform poorly because of a personal life issue. Giving them the day off because their pet salamander died. Not invalidating their priorities.

But if the rest of the team are the same, they happily step up and fill the gap where they're colleague is struggling.

I once had an entire group of staff volunteer to cover the hours of a junior staff person at that person's reduced pay rate so that she could take some personal time.

I learned to let them be who they were designed to be: ultra performing meritocratic machines who have learned to count on each other and fundamentally mistrust corporate motivations.

It's also why most businesses don't actually follow my advice, because their management system just can't work that way.

One company brought me in to handle their turnover nightmare. I told them exactly what to do, got fired quickly, and they lost 90% of their staff over the next year. And this was previously known as one of the best companies to work for, but their entire management team was built of Gen X folks who were indoctrinated with loyalty to the firm as the only corporate virtue.

They just kept bullying harder and harder and micromanaging more and more until they lost everyone except for their most toxic/incompetent staff that no one else wanted. Head hunters just gutted them.

And they had zero training programs in place because they had always had experienced staff to train newcomers. So without a single training manual or onboarding program, it was the blind leading the blind, and management shitting on staff for making mistakes. And so on and so forth until total, catastrophic staffing failure.

[Metalcat]

The generation raised by the people who were part of the old system were conditioned by their upbringing to behave like the employees in the old system: respect your employer, be loyal, trust your management knows best, etc.

The next generation raised their kids with the knowledge that the company can and *will* fuck you up, down, and sideways at every chance they get. We were raised with stories of secretaries who worked for 40 years for a company being fired when they were diagnosed with cancer. I saw my mom's company try to get rid of her when she was diagnosed with MS.

That generation has now raised the new batch of incoming staff.

I feel like this right here explains a big difference between the youngest GenX/Geriatric Millennials vs Younger Millennials/Gen Z.

Indeed. I saw a radical change happen in real time early in my career where I went from being the youngest member of a team to being one of the oldest.

I was unbelievably fortunate to start my career as the head of a clinic, but all of the staff had WAY more experience than I did. So I was trained by staff, not by superiors.

My entire management style was forged by depending on subordinates to care about my well being, so I had to care about theirs. We all worked for the equivalent of a faceless corporation that mostly abandoned us and left us alone because we were internally motivated to do incredibly work. We generated great profits because we worked well together, so they left us alone.

Then they moved our location and started imposing corporate management systems in us, and the team fell apart and everyone left very quickly, including me. 

This focus on the staff needs and their outcomes above the outcomes of the business conditioned me to be the perfect Gen Z manager.

Peers in my industry look at me like some kind of wizard because I consistently create ultra productive teams that work their asses off and don't leave. My name on a staff member's resume is worth a 20% pay premium, at least. One former staff member jokes that her resume is just my business card.

When I am called for references, I warn employers that my former team members are, in fact, the best, but they will leave if they aren't happy, and I will proactively help them leave if I get a whiff of them feeling the least bit under valued.

It's not fucking hard, it just requires throwing out anything we've ever known about how to manage and motivate staff and to *actually* pay attention to them.

ETA: to clarify, my industry is one where staff are EXTREMELY expensive and difficult to replace and a single staff turnover can represent hundreds of thousands of annual loss if not handled properly. I'm sharing a personal anecdote of an approach I developed for this industry specifically.

But am giving general insight into what I have found has worked for Gen Z staff. I am not saying my approach is best for all industries as I'm not a subject matter expert on other industries.

[GuitarStv]

This goes hand in hand with the steady evisceration of on-the-job training and professional middle management that has happened in corporations over the past few decades.

This is a great macro-level observation that explains the lack of upward mobility within companies. As you say, everyone wants to buy skilled employees instead of making them in-house. In a "flat" organization, there is no way for a technician to be promoted to a middle management role.

I wonder, however, about another macro-level observation. If so many people are leaving their jobs after 2-4 years, then what percentage of the employer's employees are actually good at their jobs at any given time? If a company's workforce is xx% noobs, at what point is that a productivity problem that costs more than old-school tall org structures and career development investments would have cost?

Sure, most businesses use the same software, HR policies, communication norms, etc. as other businesses, but what makes a person good at their job is the stuff that takes years to learn: an awareness of the company's contracts and functions, their ability to tap a social network of coworkers with specific skills / permissions to resolve problems, knowledge of historical decisions or mistakes at the company and why they were made, industry trends, configuration details, how to submit accurate expense reports, business rules, who to talk to about what, yada yada.

If flat organizations consist of a bunch of noobs who have zero loyalty to their executive leaders and who will all be gone in 2 years, that sorta makes a joke out of the idea that talent is a commodity that can be bought in the marketplace.

I'm not sure the lack of middle management is always a negative.

My previous work was at a very large place with many levels of management (me -> my team manager -> his manager -> regional manager -> country manager -> north american manager -> world operations manager -> executive liaison -> jr executive -> senior executive -> CEO).  Middle management seemed to be mostly interested with political infighting.  No attempt at development of employees was made.  The squabbles about responsibility and resourcing tended to negatively impact my ability to actually do the work that I was trying to do.  (I once spend three weeks contacting different IT managers in various countries in order to get administrative access to the new laptop that I was given.  Without administrative access I couldn't actually do my job.  They wouldn't hand me the new laptop until I had given them the old laptop, and they wouldn't hand me back the old laptop after I received the new one.  :P )   Actual engineers doing work were treated as interchangeable resources by the many levels of management who never really seemed to understand any of their individual strengths/weaknesses or how to create positive team dynamics.  This led to a lot of undesirable situations, and people doing weird shit that they knew was stupid and counterproductive but 'orders from up top'.

I'm currently working for a smaller company with a very flat management structure (me -> my manager -> CEO), and it's pretty awesome.  If I need something to get project work done there are few levels of management to go to, so it's very easy to escalate it to the person who needs to approve it.  We do more development of employees here than we did in the 'thick with middle management' approach of the previous company, and the few managers that we do have all know their teams very well.  If something seems dumb, I can tell people and they will listen.  I feel much more loyalty to the flat organization.

[Metalcat]

This goes hand in hand with the steady evisceration of on-the-job training and professional middle management that has happened in corporations over the past few decades.

This is a great macro-level observation that explains the lack of upward mobility within companies. As you say, everyone wants to buy skilled employees instead of making them in-house. In a "flat" organization, there is no way for a technician to be promoted to a middle management role.

I wonder, however, about another macro-level observation. If so many people are leaving their jobs after 2-4 years, then what percentage of the employer's employees are actually good at their jobs at any given time? If a company's workforce is xx% noobs, at what point is that a productivity problem that costs more than old-school tall org structures and career development investments would have cost?

Sure, most businesses use the same software, HR policies, communication norms, etc. as other businesses, but what makes a person good at their job is the stuff that takes years to learn: an awareness of the company's contracts and functions, their ability to tap a social network of coworkers with specific skills / permissions to resolve problems, knowledge of historical decisions or mistakes at the company and why they were made, industry trends, configuration details, how to submit accurate expense reports, business rules, who to talk to about what, yada yada.

If flat organizations consist of a bunch of noobs who have zero loyalty to their executive leaders and who will all be gone in 2 years, that sorta makes a joke out of the idea that talent is a commodity that can be bought in the marketplace.

I'm not sure the lack of middle management is always a negative.

My previous work was at a very large place with many levels of management (me -> my team manager -> his manager -> regional manager -> country manager -> north american manager -> world operations manager -> executive liaison -> jr executive -> senior executive -> CEO).  Middle management seemed to be mostly interested with political infighting.  No attempt at development of employees was made.  The squabbles about responsibility and resourcing tended to negatively impact my ability to actually do the work that I was trying to do.  (I once spend three weeks contacting different IT managers in various countries in order to get administrative access to the new laptop that I was given.  Without administrative access I couldn't actually do my job.  They wouldn't hand me the new laptop until I had given them the old laptop, and they wouldn't hand me back the old laptop after I received the new one.  :P )   Actual engineers doing work were treated as interchangeable resources by the many levels of management who never really seemed to understand any of their individual strengths/weaknesses or how to create positive team dynamics.  This led to a lot of undesirable situations, and people doing weird shit that they knew was stupid and counterproductive but 'orders from up top'.

I'm currently working for a smaller company with a very flat management structure (me -> my manager -> CEO), and it's pretty awesome.  If I need something to get project work done there are few levels of management to go to, so it's very easy to escalate it to the person who needs to approve it.  We do more development of employees here than we did in the 'thick with middle management' approach of the previous company, and the few managers that we do have all know their teams very well.  If something seems dumb, I can tell people and they will listen.  I feel much more loyalty to the flat organization.

I never said it was a negative, I said it was a major change that hasn't been totally adapted to yet.

Never did I say that going backwards was better. I said that the model is still very new and corporations haven't yet adapted to it fully because there are still vestiges of the old structure left within it, such as old management expectations based off of the old system.

The old way was not superior. It's just that the new way hasn't been duly developed yet and it's experiencing vicious growing pains at this moment in time.

My management style that I describe above is a flat management style. There was me, my fellow executive level, and then staff. We had absolutely no middle management, which is why it was so easy to adapt.

The bigger the machine, the less nimble.

[ChpBstrd]

I'm not sure the lack of middle management is always a negative.

My previous work was at a very large place with many levels of management (me -> my team manager -> his manager -> regional manager -> country manager -> north american manager -> world operations manager -> executive liaison -> jr executive -> senior executive -> CEO).  Middle management seemed to be mostly interested with political infighting.  No attempt at development of employees was made.  The squabbles about responsibility and resourcing tended to negatively impact my ability to actually do the work that I was trying to do.  (I once spend three weeks contacting different IT managers in various countries in order to get administrative access to the new laptop that I was given.  Without administrative access I couldn't actually do my job.  They wouldn't hand me the new laptop until I had given them the old laptop, and they wouldn't hand me back the old laptop after I received the new one.  :P )   Actual engineers doing work were treated as interchangeable resources by the many levels of management who never really seemed to understand any of their individual strengths/weaknesses or how to create positive team dynamics.  This led to a lot of undesirable situations, and people doing weird shit that they knew was stupid and counterproductive but 'orders from up top'.

I'm currently working for a smaller company with a very flat management structure (me -> my manager -> CEO), and it's pretty awesome.  If I need something to get project work done there are few levels of management to go to, so it's very easy to escalate it to the person who needs to approve it.  We do more development of employees here than we did in the 'thick with middle management' approach of the previous company, and the few managers that we do have all know their teams very well.  If something seems dumb, I can tell people and they will listen.  I feel much more loyalty to the flat organization.

Depending on how many people are at your current smaller company, the management structure might be flat or it might be tall. E.g. in a 30-person company, your manager would probably count as middle management. If 7-10 people report to your manager, that's fairly flat. If 20, that's fairly tall. At your old megacorp, I would say the people with positions from regional manager and up are executives. Maybe that company had a very flat lower management structure and a very bloated executive structure.

[FrugalToque]

Thanks @Malcat for that great post. It rings true of you ask me.

It also goes the same way: Youth can only look with a big ??? on their face if those managers complain about them being entitled. It's a business transaction, either you agree to the terms or not, but don't go around spouting nonsense!

I think this is a big one.  In order to get around the "discomfort" most of us experience, you have to view negotiating as an emotionless business deal.  It seems to me all of the friends I've had who successfully negotiated, or just had the balls to stand up for themselves, are the ones with the least emotional, most capitalist way of looking at work:
I own a machine that produces output for you.You own a second machine that integrates my output with others to make profit for this company.I have determined that my output has more value than you are paying me.I want to realize that value or, obviously, I will take my machine elsewhere.
I feel like the most aggressive people I know had this practical outlook.  They didn't demand "respect" from their corporation or manager, or work on their self-respect or anything like that.
One guy told me, when his landlord didn't want to fix something, he demanded the fix.The landlord said, "Hey, c'mon.  Let's be fair.  Gimme a break.  I'm kind enough I let you use the main floor kitchen!""No.  The use of the kitchen is in the lease.  My basement apartment doesn't have a kitchen.  That's a business agreement.  We have that agreement.  You can't use that like some kind of token.  Now fix the [broken thing]."He just refused to let the discussion sway into emotion.I don't know what this done to your brain, mind you, but it certainly makes negotiation less tense.
Toque.

[FrugalToque]

I wonder about this.  Is the outcome "changing employers gets the best raise" due to the fact that most people don't have the confrontation and negotiation skills to ask their current employer for a raise?

As someone who has had over a dozen different employers, here's my alternate take on this.

I've asked for raises, knowing I was producing much more than co-workers who made much more than me. They assumed I would not do anything but suck it up and get paid what they gave me. I interviewed elsewhere and got offered much more money. If I came back to them - at best they offered the same amount. At worst they said "bye!" (One place offered me less and then a day later whipped out a non-compete and tried to threaten me with it, but I ignored it. They did later attempt to sue me, unsuccessfully...) But at that point, they know I've got one foot out the door - do I really want to stay there knowing it took an actual job offer elsewhere (which is not trivial to obtain) before I went through on my intentions to leave the company if I didn't get the raise I felt I deserved?

In general, employers believe things based on what most employees will do, and convincing them otherwise is not trivial. Generally it takes an offer in hand for them to get serious, and by then, you've already changed the nature of your relationship. At that point, I've always found it worthwhile to just make the change (with a disclaimer that, as a technical worker, I enjoy the change, the new skills I'll learn, the pay raise without being promoted into management...)

Yeah, "taking the new job anyway" is a real thing.
Generally, once I've gone to the trouble of finding a new job to compare salaries, I've wanted to leave, so it never makes a good negotiating tool.
But, maybe, if we used that sort of thing before we got completely disappointed in our present jobs, we wouldn't feel the same way.  On the other hand, it's very difficult to get a salary estimation (never mind an actual offer) without a string of interviews and a lot of work, so it's not like those numbers are just floating around out there for the taking.

[mm1970]

One company brought me in to handle their turnover nightmare. I told them exactly what to do, got fired quickly, and they lost 90% of their staff over the next year. And this was previously known as one of the best companies to work for, but their entire management team was built of Gen X folks who were indoctrinated with loyalty to the firm as the only corporate virtue.

I resemble that remark.  Being Gen X that is.

My first job after the Navy was in manufacturing.  Soon after I started (6-7 months), we started having layoffs - 3 rounds, at least.  (We couldn't make the shift to the next technology.)  Over these rounds there was much done to look at who the essential employees were. I was pretty pissed to learn that I was making $50k and the men I was working with were making $80k to $100k, and I was expected to be appreciative of the 8% raise I got.  Um, okay.  I guess that it was good that I kept my job while DH was in grad school?  In any event, I started job hunting, and had an interview.  I opted to stay "loyal" to the company, but two months later they sent us home at Christmas for 3 weeks "we'll be back in January!"  (Spoiler alert: we weren't back in January.)

Of course everyone who got laid off in rounds 1-3 got severance, while the rest of us got jack.  And they reorganized, so 24 people kept their jobs.  I wasn't one of them.  Luckily, in December, after being sent home, I immediately called the company that I'd interviewed with - and their job still wasn't filled.  So they gave me an offer, with a pay bump (it wasn't filled because they'd been lowballing).  I started right after losing my job. 

This job taught me that: companies are not loyal to you, and some bosses are great, but you need to look after yourself.  In this company, I was forcibly put on 12 hour night shifts for 3 weeks.  I was BURNT by the end, because I was also sometimes working 6-7 days a week. When my parents came to visit, I told my boss "I'm taking the week off, and I'm not taking vacation, this is comp time."  He said OK.

However, I have never ever been able to negotiate a raise, despite trying, and part of that is simply the fact that women are treated differently, whether intentionally or not.  At my next two jobs, I was THAT GUY (uh, gal), who counseled the newer younger engineers to:

1.  DO NOT TAKE PTO if you leave early on a Friday, are you kidding me?  You are working 50+ hour weeks.  DO NOT ASK YOUR BOSS IF IT'S OK.  The timecard system does not care what days your hours are on.  It knows how to count to 80.  (And in fact, if you are exempt, they pay you for 80 even if you work 79 because you had to bail early to pick up a kid when the daycare shut down.)

2.  Discuss raises and promotions with your boss, by calming showing what the various titles and requirements are - and note that your work lines up with the promotion.  (Like I said, this never worked for me, but it did work for a couple of the younger men I counseled.)

3.  Look for other jobs.  When one of my employees went and got a job offer, it was $13k more than we paid him.  He turned them down.  I did not know this. They offered him more.  He told me about it then.  I simply said "take it, you will NEVER get that here, and it doesn't matter how hard I try."

---
On middle management, I think I probably am middle management, but nobody works for me, technically.  However, in our flat organization - we really need some middle management, or at least more people.  We are staunchly mostly GenX and boomer now, and we really need to train more than the few older Millennials that we currently have.   However, most people really do not take an interest in training new people and helping them reach their potential in the company.  So, we've lost many.  I spend as much time as I can with our newest employees, but honestly, I'm expected to manage STUFF and also DO STUFF (like, actual data analysis, paperwork type things) because there's literally nobody beneath me to train to do these things.
---
When that company shut down, all the engineers scattered. Many of them went to a local company and they are STILL THERE.  These guys are my age or older, approaching 60 if not older.  I've always wondered if that company is SO GREAT to work for or:
- They are complacent - they own homes, so it's "good enough"
- They are loyal?  Mostly early GenX /late boomer

I think it's probably a combo.  There's room for growth there if you want it.

[Metalcat]

Thanks @Malcat for that great post. It rings true of you ask me.

It also goes the same way: Youth can only look with a big ??? on their face if those managers complain about them being entitled. It's a business transaction, either you agree to the terms or not, but don't go around spouting nonsense!

I think this is a big one.  In order to get around the "discomfort" most of us experience, you have to view negotiating as an emotionless business deal.  It seems to me all of the friends I've had who successfully negotiated, or just had the balls to stand up for themselves, are the ones with the least emotional, most capitalist way of looking at work:
I own a machine that produces output for you.You own a second machine that integrates my output with others to make profit for this company.I have determined that my output has more value than you are paying me.I want to realize that value or, obviously, I will take my machine elsewhere.
I feel like the most aggressive people I know had this practical outlook.  They didn't demand "respect" from their corporation or manager, or work on their self-respect or anything like that.
One guy told me, when his landlord didn't want to fix something, he demanded the fix.The landlord said, "Hey, c'mon.  Let's be fair.  Gimme a break.  I'm kind enough I let you use the main floor kitchen!""No.  The use of the kitchen is in the lease.  My basement apartment doesn't have a kitchen.  That's a business agreement.  We have that agreement.  You can't use that like some kind of token.  Now fix the [broken thing]."He just refused to let the discussion sway into emotion.I don't know what this done to your brain, mind you, but it certainly makes negotiation less tense.
Toque.

Curious...are you implying that that kind of pragmatic business exchange is somehow an unhealthy way to operate?

It just sounds like boundaries and expectation setting to me.

[FrugalToque]

Thanks @Malcat for that great post. It rings true of you ask me.

It also goes the same way: Youth can only look with a big ??? on their face if those managers complain about them being entitled. It's a business transaction, either you agree to the terms or not, but don't go around spouting nonsense!

I think this is a big one.  In order to get around the "discomfort" most of us experience, you have to view negotiating as an emotionless business deal.  It seems to me all of the friends I've had who successfully negotiated, or just had the balls to stand up for themselves, are the ones with the least emotional, most capitalist way of looking at work:

• I own a machine that produces output for you.
• You own a second machine that integrates my output with others to make profit for this company.
• I have determined that my output has more value than you are paying me.
• I want to realize that value or, obviously, I will take my machine elsewhere....

... just refused to let the discussion sway into emotion.I don't know what this done to your brain, mind you, but it certainly makes negotiation less tense.Toque.

Curious...are you implying that that kind of pragmatic business exchange is somehow an unhealthy way to operate?

It just sounds like boundaries and expectation setting to me.

I don't think it's unhealthy to conduct business this way, but I'm not sure about the effect it might have on my personality.20+ years taught me it's better to be less emotionally invested in work, when that work could just vanish one afternoon because of a stock market fluctuation, so that part is good.

In order to negotiate better, I have to stop thinking of myself as a person, with issues, and more of a machine, and extract value from that machine.  This seems coldly analytical and I don't want to turn into a cold person.  (Although maybe your way of thinking about it: "establishing boundaries and expectations" is better.)

I guess I was trying to say that if you negotiate mechanically like this often enough (with the car dealer, with your manager, with the PTA, with the school principal, with the landlord) could it actually, in real life, make you think about yourself this way?  Could it alter your personality in some negative way?

I'd way rather work with people who consider each other valid human beings, but when it comes to money, you gotta act like a machine and be honest about how we're operating under capitalism and you're going capitalize your very best.

[GuitarStv]

Too much and you go full blown CEO.  Too little and you're going to have everyone take advantage of you.  You need to just the right amount of sociopathy to be good at this without losing your humanity.  :P

[Dave1442397]

Some great posts there --> @Malcat , can you come manage us?  :)

One of the funniest things our last CEO kept saying was "Treat your job like a business owner", to which I would reply "Wait, do business owners do their best to piss their employees off, treat them like crap, and fire them when they need to make quarterly numbers look better? Sorry, that's not me."

I'd prefer that my company treated my like a hired gun. Pay me to do the job I'm here for, which does not involve mindless bs training in things I don't do, like dealing with money laundering, how to evacuate the building if there's a shooter (I work from home), etc.

[RetiredAt63]

Too much and you go full blown CEO.  Too little and you're going to have everyone take advantage of you.  You need to just the right amount of sociopathy to be good at this without losing your humanity.  :P

Boundaries.  Agreements.  If the deal is X, don't make it a favour to do part of X.  It is in the deal.

So the sociopathy comes when someone tries to make you think they are doing you a favour when it is part of the agreement,  You holding them to the agreement is dealing with their sociopathy, not yours.

Women need to learn this more than men do, because we are socialized (still!) to be nice and accommodating and think of others needs before ours.  Others including but not limited to our bosses, our colleagues our husbands, our children/grandchildren/inlaws/FOO, neighbours, club members, church members  . . . . . .

[Metalcat]

Thanks @Malcat for that great post. It rings true of you ask me.

It also goes the same way: Youth can only look with a big ??? on their face if those managers complain about them being entitled. It's a business transaction, either you agree to the terms or not, but don't go around spouting nonsense!

I think this is a big one.  In order to get around the "discomfort" most of us experience, you have to view negotiating as an emotionless business deal.  It seems to me all of the friends I've had who successfully negotiated, or just had the balls to stand up for themselves, are the ones with the least emotional, most capitalist way of looking at work:

• I own a machine that produces output for you.
• You own a second machine that integrates my output with others to make profit for this company.
• I have determined that my output has more value than you are paying me.
• I want to realize that value or, obviously, I will take my machine elsewhere....

... just refused to let the discussion sway into emotion.I don't know what this done to your brain, mind you, but it certainly makes negotiation less tense.Toque.

Curious...are you implying that that kind of pragmatic business exchange is somehow an unhealthy way to operate?

It just sounds like boundaries and expectation setting to me.

I don't think it's unhealthy to conduct business this way, but I'm not sure about the effect it might have on my personality.20+ years taught me it's better to be less emotionally invested in work, when that work could just vanish one afternoon because of a stock market fluctuation, so that part is good.

In order to negotiate better, I have to stop thinking of myself as a person, with issues, and more of a machine, and extract value from that machine.  This seems coldly analytical and I don't want to turn into a cold person.  (Although maybe your way of thinking about it: "establishing boundaries and expectations" is better.)

I guess I was trying to say that if you negotiate mechanically like this often enough (with the car dealer, with your manager, with the PTA, with the school principal, with the landlord) could it actually, in real life, make you think about yourself this way?  Could it alter your personality in some negative way?

I'd way rather work with people who consider each other valid human beings, but when it comes to money, you gotta act like a machine and be honest about how we're operating under capitalism and you're going capitalize your very best.

To push back a bit. Perhaps the person you are thinking of doesn't see themselves as a human being, but that isn't a prerequisite of operating this way.

I very, very much saw my staff and myself as human. It's a big part of my management approach, but I also very pragmatically assign value to everything and negotiate accordingly.

You don't have to "take emotion out of it" to be an excellent and.aggressive negotiator and staunchly quantify the value of the human capital you bring to a business.

I have been incredibly emotionally invested in my work, but also able to recognize when the value isn't there to justify pushing any further.

If a workplace isn't compensating me appropriately for what I bring to the table, then I'm not going to just hand over free labour to them. I'm not their volunteer.

For me it's not about being detached or not invested. I take not being compensated fairly as a vicious gesture of disrespect. I take it very, very personally and I refuse to accept it.

I was in a negotiation a few years ago where I had made it clear to the partners that I wasn't motivated by income. I didn't need the money and was actually struggling to figure out what I would do with it.

Then at one point I pushed HARD on a certain part of the comp model and one dude was like "why are you fighting so hard if you don't care about compensation."

I said "I don't care about compensation I care about being compensated. I demand to have my work valued and anything less is disrespectful because it means that value *I* earn with my work is being diverted to someone else. If you don't value me with appropriate compensation, you are stealing from me because it ends up in YOUR pockets."

It's not about keeping emotions out. It's about not allowing businesses to dictate what emotions you should feel about your own value and your negotiating position.

Companies systematically try to convince staff to feel grateful for their jobs, grateful for their paychecks, needy for asking for any sort of accommodations or special dispensations, and greedy/entitled for asking for more money.

It's not about feeling *less* emotional about your career, it's about feeling *healthier* emotions about it.

*Edited for clarity and typos

[Metalcat]

Too much and you go full blown CEO.  Too little and you're going to have everyone take advantage of you.  You need to just the right amount of sociopathy to be good at this without losing your humanity.  :P

I've managed to be an absolutely ruthless negotiator in business while injecting massive amounts of humanity back into it.

People have this strange dichotomy that being an aggressive professional with strict boundaries means losing your soul. But it doesn't, it can actually be critical to preserving your humanity.

[Metalcat]

Some great posts there --> @Malcat , can you come manage us?  :)

One of the funniest things our last CEO kept saying was "Treat your job like a business owner", to which I would reply "Wait, do business owners do their best to piss their employees off, treat them like crap, and fire them when they need to make quarterly numbers look better? Sorry, that's not me."

I'd prefer that my company treated my like a hired gun. Pay me to do the job I'm here for, which does not involve mindless bs training in things I don't do, like dealing with money laundering, how to evacuate the building if there's a shooter (I work from home), etc.

You probably can't afford me ;)

When bosses say to think like an owner, they're usually trying to get staff to care about the well being of the company. It's such a dumb thing to say.

They're basically saying: "you should care about things that no one is compensating you to care about"

I remember a dentist crying to me in her office saying "my bills aren't getting paid and none of them seem to give a shit!"

I was shocked that she thought her $22/hr, 11hrs/day, 6 days/week  staff who got no benefits, whom she did not allow to take vacation except when she was on vacation, wouldn't be emotionally invested in her failures as a business person who over expanded and spent too much on fancy finishes for her new office.

She told them they should "think like owners."

I think I told her that she should "think like a human being with a working brain" or something equally mean.

[Villanelle]

I don't want to discourage people from going the extra mile, doing their job to the best of their ability so they can accumulate respect, get a raise and move forward with their careers.  But I also don't want anyone to do any of that in a way that isn't appreciated.

This is where the quiet quitting trend intersects with the observation that most people have to change employers to get any significant raise.

I wonder about this.  Is the outcome "changing employers gets the best raise" due to the fact that most people don't have the confrontation and negotiation skills to ask their current employer for a raise?

I haven't asked for raises very often in my career.  Being somewhat introverted, it just doesn't come naturally.  But the times that I can remember doing so, I got the money.

Instance #1.
I am a "junior" designer/engineer ("D/E 1").
I have 2.5 yrs experience but my previous manager was a douche and didn't give the standard 2 year promotion to intermediate ("D/E 2").

"Hey Dave, I wanted to talk to you about my promotion to D/E 2"
"Hm, we usually discuss that in May with the performance reviews"
"Oh" <pause> "That'll be too late."

What I had meant by this was "that's six months from now, which means my career will be a whole year behind. Oh, no!"
What he heard was "Several of my coworkers have left for higher paying jobs in the states, so I guess I'll be going too."

The next day I had my promotion and commensurate raise, just over 10% IIRC, with an apology because they thought I was only at 1.5 yrs experience instead of 2.5

But that's not the sort of aggressive insistence I would normally engage in, not naturally.  I think if most people knew how to constructively engage with management, keep their eye on their value (perhaps by actually applying for work elsewhere just to check out salary offers) and ask for their raises, we wouldn't see this "you need to change jobs to get raises", but I don't have any hard data on that, just anecdotes.

Toque.

Yea, it takes a certain personality type to negotiate aggressively and cultivate side offers. That means people with those personality types / capabilities are the ones getting the raises and promotions, whether they stay or go. Skill, then, is less important than negotiating ability. The people who make it to management are less likely to be skilled than they are to be good negotiators / politicians. So what we're describing is an anti-meritocracy that selects for people who are not afraid of confrontation.

This goes hand in hand with the steady evisceration of on-the-job training and professional middle management that has happened in corporations over the past few decades.

This is a great macro-level observation that explains the lack of upward mobility within companies. As you say, everyone wants to buy skilled employees instead of making them in-house. In a "flat" organization, there is no way for a technician to be promoted to a middle management role.

I wonder, however, about another macro-level observation. If so many people are leaving their jobs after 2-4 years, then what percentage of the employer's employees are actually good at their jobs at any given time? If a company's workforce is xx% noobs, at what point is that a productivity problem that costs more than old-school tall org structures and career development investments would have cost?

Sure, most businesses use the same software, HR policies, communication norms, etc. as other businesses, but what makes a person good at their job is the stuff that takes years to learn: an awareness of the company's contracts and functions, their ability to tap a social network of coworkers with specific skills / permissions to resolve problems, knowledge of historical decisions or mistakes at the company and why they were made, industry trends, configuration details, how to submit accurate expense reports, business rules, who to talk to about what, yada yada.

If flat organizations consist of a bunch of noobs who have zero loyalty to their executive leaders and who will all be gone in 2 years, that sorta makes a joke out of the idea that talent is a commodity that can be bought in the marketplace.

Personality type, and just willingness to speak up, certainly account for some of it.  But I think in general, HR assumes that most people are unwilling to leave their job unless it is really awful.  Once they have someone hooked, odds are they are going to stick around.  People are hesitant to leave jobs.  Even if they make waves about wanting more pay, most people just succumb to the inertia of their current employment.  So even someone willing to speak up, make a compelling case for higher pay/promotion, or even threaten to leave, IME, most HR departments (or whoever is making the final calls) will call the bluff--or what they assume is a bluff (and they are usually right).

I think that's why switching jobs is the best way to get the most significant increases over time.  A new employer needs to lure someone in.  A current employer feels they have the upper hand. 

[Metalcat]

I don't want to discourage people from going the extra mile, doing their job to the best of their ability so they can accumulate respect, get a raise and move forward with their careers.  But I also don't want anyone to do any of that in a way that isn't appreciated.

This is where the quiet quitting trend intersects with the observation that most people have to change employers to get any significant raise.

I wonder about this.  Is the outcome "changing employers gets the best raise" due to the fact that most people don't have the confrontation and negotiation skills to ask their current employer for a raise?

I haven't asked for raises very often in my career.  Being somewhat introverted, it just doesn't come naturally.  But the times that I can remember doing so, I got the money.

Instance #1.
I am a "junior" designer/engineer ("D/E 1").
I have 2.5 yrs experience but my previous manager was a douche and didn't give the standard 2 year promotion to intermediate ("D/E 2").

"Hey Dave, I wanted to talk to you about my promotion to D/E 2"
"Hm, we usually discuss that in May with the performance reviews"
"Oh" <pause> "That'll be too late."

What I had meant by this was "that's six months from now, which means my career will be a whole year behind. Oh, no!"
What he heard was "Several of my coworkers have left for higher paying jobs in the states, so I guess I'll be going too."

The next day I had my promotion and commensurate raise, just over 10% IIRC, with an apology because they thought I was only at 1.5 yrs experience instead of 2.5

But that's not the sort of aggressive insistence I would normally engage in, not naturally.  I think if most people knew how to constructively engage with management, keep their eye on their value (perhaps by actually applying for work elsewhere just to check out salary offers) and ask for their raises, we wouldn't see this "you need to change jobs to get raises", but I don't have any hard data on that, just anecdotes.

Toque.

Yea, it takes a certain personality type to negotiate aggressively and cultivate side offers. That means people with those personality types / capabilities are the ones getting the raises and promotions, whether they stay or go. Skill, then, is less important than negotiating ability. The people who make it to management are less likely to be skilled than they are to be good negotiators / politicians. So what we're describing is an anti-meritocracy that selects for people who are not afraid of confrontation.

This goes hand in hand with the steady evisceration of on-the-job training and professional middle management that has happened in corporations over the past few decades.

This is a great macro-level observation that explains the lack of upward mobility within companies. As you say, everyone wants to buy skilled employees instead of making them in-house. In a "flat" organization, there is no way for a technician to be promoted to a middle management role.

I wonder, however, about another macro-level observation. If so many people are leaving their jobs after 2-4 years, then what percentage of the employer's employees are actually good at their jobs at any given time? If a company's workforce is xx% noobs, at what point is that a productivity problem that costs more than old-school tall org structures and career development investments would have cost?

Sure, most businesses use the same software, HR policies, communication norms, etc. as other businesses, but what makes a person good at their job is the stuff that takes years to learn: an awareness of the company's contracts and functions, their ability to tap a social network of coworkers with specific skills / permissions to resolve problems, knowledge of historical decisions or mistakes at the company and why they were made, industry trends, configuration details, how to submit accurate expense reports, business rules, who to talk to about what, yada yada.

If flat organizations consist of a bunch of noobs who have zero loyalty to their executive leaders and who will all be gone in 2 years, that sorta makes a joke out of the idea that talent is a commodity that can be bought in the marketplace.

To clarify, organizations still have middle managers, they've just systematically neutered them in terms of autonomy, decision making, and most importantly, respect.

Middle managers now operate as accountability agents for staff performance, not stewards of their subordinates, they're less like mentors and more like those prisoners who are promoted to terrorize other prisoners and keep them in line. They're the person executives squeeze so that they will squeeze the staff/budget/whatever they can to produce better bottom line numbers.

So that means they don't have the authority to give raises, and are disincentivized to ever advocate for them.

As for the army of noobs issue, yes, as time goes on and the lifers die-off/retire and are steadily displaced by a generation that doesn't perform on command and jobs have even less perks and security, companies are coming up against the army of noobs issue with no systems to even onboard them.

I'm seeing this play out in bigger and bigger organizations. I was seeing it in small businesses and wrote it off as just poor planning by naive business owners, but then I started seeing it spread to medium sized businesses.

I'm now seeing it in DH's work, which is for the federal government. There was literally NO system in place for his onboarding to a new department. None whatsoever. A senior executive eventually dedicated a few hours to showing him where the files are kept and how to access them.

DH then realized that the 3 people reporting to him were also new and had no knowledge of how anything worked. People are moving jobs so quickly even within the government that instead of there being one new person to an established team, the entire team is new, with no corporate memory at all, and no training systems in place. And they gutted the administrative staff a decade ago, and they were usually the ones who knew how everything worked.

If the largest employer in the country is starting to suffer for lack of experienced, qualified staff, then yeah, there's a systematic failure happening in real time.

You can see it reflected in both Telsa and Facebook's current epic meltdowns about how they are coming down hard on their staff to step up performance. Like, seriously?

That's a telltale sign of a management system that has gone off the rails. When Musk starts lamenting that Americans aren't as hard working as the Chinese, you know something is going very very sideways on the management front.

The moment I hear an employer talk about their entire staff being lazy, I know that company is in serious trouble with HR problems that are snowballing.

As someone above said, HR departments have generally just expected people to stay put, but you can't forget that the new generation of workers weren't told by their parents to find a good job, work hard, and do their time. They were TOLD by their parents that the way to get raises and promotions is to switch jobs.

The incoming batch of staff are already planning to leave the day they sign their employment offers. They'll even be shameless honest about it if you ask them because it's been THAT normalized for them. It's why I always just flat out ask them in interviews what job they want after this one. They'll usually even volunteer a timeline.

It's a different reality managing a population of staff who just have no concept of the old school loyalty to the employer. There's no one in their life who has ever normalized that. Their Gen Z parents have felt trapped by it, but do not subscribe to the ideology that their parents instilled in them.

Think about that. The incoming workforce was raised by Gen X.
You think an entire generation raised by Gen Xers, the most cynical generation ever, that they were going to produce a population of good little workers who don't question authority and politely take being used?

Juuuuust let that sink in. A workforce raised by Gen X folks being managed by a generation raised by boomers.

Yeahhhh good fucking luck with that.

[mspym]

I've told this story in other threads but what broke the last vestige of company loyalty (14 years!) was sitting in a workplace training seminar [that I was sent on in lieu of the raise I was promised if I hit *this mark* and obtained *this qualification*] and being told that internal promotions were great for The Company because
a) it took an external hire 2 years to get to the level of institutional knowledge that an internal hire had AND
b) it took an internal hire 7 years to get to the pay that an external hire had. 

I was gobsmacked and said "that sounds like we should start looking elsewhere for a new job" and they really didn't have a reply.

So I did, 25% raise for the next role, and a lot of Hurt Feelings from the people that had gone back on explicit promises to me, who couldn't believe that I would actually walk after that. I did eventually end up working back at that company again for a couple of years as a contractor for twice the pay and never having to complete a bullshit performance review again.

Malcat is right about the next generation of workers being raised by people like me. And also they will go above and beyond if the work is fair, interesting and ties back to where they see themselves. I have loved working with every single grad-recruit or new starter that I have come across- ferociously capable and intrinsically driven, grateful for anyone who takes the time to explain the big picture and makes it relate to them.

[Gremlin]

Thanks @Malcat for that great post. It rings true of you ask me.

It also goes the same way: Youth can only look with a big ??? on their face if those managers complain about them being entitled. It's a business transaction, either you agree to the terms or not, but don't go around spouting nonsense!

I think this is a big one.  In order to get around the "discomfort" most of us experience, you have to view negotiating as an emotionless business deal.  It seems to me all of the friends I've had who successfully negotiated, or just had the balls to stand up for themselves, are the ones with the least emotional, most capitalist way of looking at work:

• I own a machine that produces output for you.
• You own a second machine that integrates my output with others to make profit for this company.
• I have determined that my output has more value than you are paying me.
• I want to realize that value or, obviously, I will take my machine elsewhere....

... just refused to let the discussion sway into emotion.I don't know what this done to your brain, mind you, but it certainly makes negotiation less tense.Toque.

Curious...are you implying that that kind of pragmatic business exchange is somehow an unhealthy way to operate?

It just sounds like boundaries and expectation setting to me.

I don't think it's unhealthy to conduct business this way, but I'm not sure about the effect it might have on my personality.20+ years taught me it's better to be less emotionally invested in work, when that work could just vanish one afternoon because of a stock market fluctuation, so that part is good.

In order to negotiate better, I have to stop thinking of myself as a person, with issues, and more of a machine, and extract value from that machine.  This seems coldly analytical and I don't want to turn into a cold person.  (Although maybe your way of thinking about it: "establishing boundaries and expectations" is better.)

I guess I was trying to say that if you negotiate mechanically like this often enough (with the car dealer, with your manager, with the PTA, with the school principal, with the landlord) could it actually, in real life, make you think about yourself this way?  Could it alter your personality in some negative way?

I'd way rather work with people who consider each other valid human beings, but when it comes to money, you gotta act like a machine and be honest about how we're operating under capitalism and you're going capitalize your very best.

@FrugalToque , I don't think I can be as eloquent as @Malcat, but I don't think of this as being 'machine-like'.  I do think it comes down to asking myself whether this is a good and fair deal for me - and being commercial, rather than emotional, about that. 

There were times in my work career where I was fed a shit sandwich from up high, but with an expectation that it would be appropriately recognised and compensated for (not necessarily in strict financial terms always, but always on terms that worked for me).  There were also times when the shit sandwich was being passed my way and I pushed back, for lack of appropriate recompense.  Setting your own boundaries is perfectly acceptable.

I think it's also important to recognise situations where you struggle to set boundaries and seek out appropriate support.  For example, I've bought a couple of investment properties.  I can be 100% coldly analytical in dealing with real estate agents in this context.  Buying a house to live in?  Not a chance I can be anything other than emotional when we've found one that is 'the one'.  As a result, Mrs G has led the negotiations when buying places to live in, whereas I've done it for the investment properties we've bought.

Similarly, I had one particular manager that I struggled to set appropriate boundaries with.  I made a conscious choice to pay a mentor to support me with strategies.  Best money I ever spent.  Funnily enough, I now mentor others (including a couple of individuals who have themselves have to deal with that sociopath).

[Malossi792]

Ptf and to thank @Malcat for understanding us youngsters so profoundly.

[FIPurpose]

Can I confess my recent work story here?

I've been working for a federal contractor for about 4 years now. There's always been slow periods and a few times where there was a good amount of work to do. But I've never done overtime, and the job is completely remote 100%. I've also always received significant raises every year I've been here. Since starting, my pay is now ~80% higher.

I was recently promoted to a new position after someone left, I was tapped to take up the mantle. In my last position, I was working on coding up a pretty cool full-stack app that was highly praised by the Feds making the decisions. But now I've been promoted to this more nebulous "Lead" Engineering position where I'm not directly responsible for any code or application. I'm more like a consultant or a floating resource.

So over the past, I don't know, 3 - 4 weeks I can say that I've worked maybe 6-8 hours total on work related items? That might be a stretch, but at least at the moment, it feels like I really only work about 10% of my actual hours.

So how did I go to making more money to a position to do less work? I really don't get it. I've been working on side projects either home upgrades or a private app I'm working on. I count it as "education" hours in my mind.

Part of of me is also a little nervous. Like the consultants from Office Space will one day figure it out and come to me and ask "So what is it that you do here?". "Heck man, I don't know. I'm pretty sure my position is pointless and I think I know a couple other people here that don't have much of a point." My one saving grace is that when a problem comes up and I'm tapped to help solve it, I've rarely if ever needed more than an hour to solve it.

It's cool that I'm being paid to basically do nothing but give opinions and help a couple times a week. I even started claiming a 9-day work schedule to take every other Friday off. If I'm doing nothing, might as well take off every other Friday when I'm rarely needed anyways, and it's never urgent.

I recently bought a house. I've just been doing things here and there to it while waiting for work to come through. Thinking of maybe working on finishing my basement while doing it.

It's an extremely weird combination of feelings honestly, this probably falls more under "Wally work" than "Quiet Quitting", but it makes me feel like I'm cheating the system, or that one day someone is going to find out and fire me. I kind of wish I had a little more to do just to justify my paycheck or at least fill out a resume to say what I did here.

Anyways, thanks for listening everyone.

[Metalcat]

Ptf and to thank @Malcat for understanding us youngsters so profoundly.

Understanding people is my jam.

[erp]

Can I confess my recent work story here?

I've been working for a federal contractor for about 4 years now. There's always been slow periods and a few times where there was a good amount of work to do. But I've never done overtime, and the job is completely remote 100%. I've also always received significant raises every year I've been here. Since starting, my pay is now ~80% higher.

I was recently promoted to a new position after someone left, I was tapped to take up the mantle. In my last position, I was working on coding up a pretty cool full-stack app that was highly praised by the Feds making the decisions. But now I've been promoted to this more nebulous "Lead" Engineering position where I'm not directly responsible for any code or application. I'm more like a consultant or a floating resource.

So over the past, I don't know, 3 - 4 weeks I can say that I've worked maybe 6-8 hours total on work related items? That might be a stretch, but at least at the moment, it feels like I really only work about 10% of my actual hours.

So how did I go to making more money to a position to do less work? I really don't get it. I've been working on side projects either home upgrades or a private app I'm working on. I count it as "education" hours in my mind.

Part of of me is also a little nervous. Like the consultants from Office Space will one day figure it out and come to me and ask "So what is it that you do here?". "Heck man, I don't know. I'm pretty sure my position is pointless and I think I know a couple other people here that don't have much of a point." My one saving grace is that when a problem comes up and I'm tapped to help solve it, I've rarely if ever needed more than an hour to solve it.

It's cool that I'm being paid to basically do nothing but give opinions and help a couple times a week. I even started claiming a 9-day work schedule to take every other Friday off. If I'm doing nothing, might as well take off every other Friday when I'm rarely needed anyways, and it's never urgent.

I recently bought a house. I've just been doing things here and there to it while waiting for work to come through. Thinking of maybe working on finishing my basement while doing it.

It's an extremely weird combination of feelings honestly, this probably falls more under "Wally work" than "Quiet Quitting", but it makes me feel like I'm cheating the system, or that one day someone is going to find out and fire me. I kind of wish I had a little more to do just to justify my paycheck or at least fill out a resume to say what I did here.

Anyways, thanks for listening everyone.

I think this actually ties into the discussion beautifully, and I have some similar experiences (although much less extreme).

Part of the story is that there is real value to a company for people who are capable, understand systems, and have enough time that they can drop in and solve problems. In a theoretically perfect system you might not need that, but in every real company I've seen it's useful for some people to be less busy so that they can understand big picture items and put out fires.

When I was a baby engineer, someone would come to me with a discrete problem and I would solve it. I was always busy and I could demonstrate it easily ("I have completed xxx project and yyy analysis"). As I've matured in roles though, a lot of my time is devoted to asking questions like "how should we do this", "what's more important", "how do I make sure this is safe 20 years from now" - these questions still involve the analysis or math or whatever, but they also involve a ton of thinking and consensus building. To me, at least, they don't feel like "work" in the same way. I still make spreadsheets and programs, but while my salary has doubled since I started working, I don't make 2x as many spreadsheets and programs. I probably make fewer - but they solve less routine things and they do so in ways that build them into process or culture so that they'll exist when I'm gone.

Not everyone needs to work this way in a company. Some people are happy to keep being brought problems, and to keep solving them. That's good - we need people like that. Some other people do need to think about big picture connections and networks - I think this is the 'middle manager of old' role which malcat is referencing. Companies who are really metric focused sometimes squeeze out this sort of employee because it's harder to quantify what they do. But (we are seeing) that if you squeeze all of them out, then it gets really hard to actually get anything done.

tl;dr - work hard, make sure you feel good about what you're contributing. But maybe consider whether a lot of what you're doing is actually work that benefits the company, it just doesn't feel like work in the same way that a concrete task does.

[GuitarStv]

There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later his company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine fixed, but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past.

The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day he marked a small “x” in chalk on a particular component of the machine and proudly stated, “This is where your problem is.” The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again.

The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges. The engineer responded briefly:

One chalk mark………………….$1

Knowing where to put it……..$49,999

[Captain FIRE]

I've heard that same story about tapping a part of a big airplane that made it work perfectly and charging $1 for the tape and the rest for knowing where to hit.  Which makes me worry it's legend and not truth, which would be sad.

[LennStar]

I've heard that same story about tapping a part of a big airplane that made it work perfectly and charging $1 for the tape and the rest for knowing where to hit.  Which makes me worry it's legend and not truth, which would be sad.

Sometimes a story is more true than reality. - Sounds like something Terry Pratchett could have said.

[GuitarStv]

I've heard that same story about tapping a part of a big airplane that made it work perfectly and charging $1 for the tape and the rest for knowing where to hit.  Which makes me worry it's legend and not truth, which would be sad.

Sometimes a story is more true than reality. - Sounds like something Terry Pratchett could have said.

Yep.  It's a good encapsulation of what most higher level engineering actually is.  You're being paid to know stuff and use that knowledge to make the right decision.  The amount of visible work you do is largely inconsequential.

[Sibley]

The company I currently work for is interesting. The owner is a Boomer. He's a nice guy, but if I had to actually work directly for him, I wouldn't be here. I'm not a workaholic. The partner that I do work directly for is pretty decent. She's Gen X. I can work with her. There's some stuff going on regarding scheduling, etc right now that is annoying, but I know it's growing pains so I'm willing to tolerate it for now. If it doesn't get worked out in a way I'm ok with, then I'll end up looking around. But for now, I'm good.

I definitely see what Malcat is talking about re Gen Z. I'm not to that extent, but I'm on that end of the spectrum. I don't have personal loyalty to the company. They treat me well, I'll treat them well in return. The company is struggling to hire new staff. It's not just us, its an industry wide problem. I'm not sure how it's going to work out, but it is very clearly EVERYONE, not just this small company. The Big 4 audit firms are going to have to reinvent how they function I think, and a lot of other accounting firms will have to make significant changes as well. Lot of pain in that process. I'm glad that I have learned how to set boundaries at work, it helps.

[mm1970]

They're basically saying: "you should care about things that no one is compensating you to care about"

So, let me tell you about the time when I was not happy at ALL because I got a new super shitty boss.  Things were bad.  A coworker wondered how I was possibly still employed with my grumpy bad attitude and complainy mouth.  "Well, I still do good work and I know too much about this place."  This was around some of our layoffs.

But at some point, the company president (who I'd known for 12 years by then) "MM, you are the HEART of this company.  Everyone on the floor looks to YOU to see  how things are going.  You need to be positive!  You need to be happy - to make sure everyone feels good."  FUCK THAT you don't pay me to be the heart of the company or a pollyanna, you pay me because I'm a fucking good engineer.

Think about that. The incoming workforce was raised by Gen X.
You think an entire generation raised by Gen Xers, the most cynical generation ever, that they were going to produce a population of good little workers who don't question authority and politely take being used?

Juuuuust let that sink in. A workforce raised by Gen X folks being managed by a generation raised by boomers.

Yeahhhh good fucking luck with that.

Ah ha ha ha ha...yep.  My kids are too young to work, but my nieces and nephews are not and I counsel them to jump around.  My sister has had the same job since age 20, and she's 58.  Her son?  Not so much thanks to his auntie.

[neo von retorch]

I think the fables about "knowing what/where/how" being the value of a service have evolved as "labor" has shifted further from "showing up and doing the work for 8 hours" to knowledge work, service work/expertise, etc.

At a small company where I worked as lead web developer (before we all became software engineers 😊), my boss would ask me how long it would take me to do something... so he could provide an estimate for a client. I said honestly, it'll take me 30 minutes, but we're going to assign it to junior web developer, and it's going to take them 4 hours. And guess what, it won't be done quite as well. So do you want to bill the client for 4 hours or for 30 minutes? Or do you need to step back and think about what value the client will get from this, plus what the client is willing to pay for that value? I mean, sure, I get it... it's easy to take an estimate of hours and use it to estimate what to charge for projects. But it's far from comprehensive! And how long it takes to do is not an accurate reflection of the value it creates - it can often provide more value but take less time, particularly depending on who does it. (I've often used it as a freelancer; I'd break all tasks down to small-ish chunks 1-4 hours usually, and use that to get a ballpark estimate to provide to clients. As I got more knowledgeable, I tried to get better at understanding what I could charge, as additional information that would make me more profitable.)

(Of course, these days I'm bitter because people coming to my house to do work are loathe to provide labor and material breakdowns, because it would show that they plan to make about $500/hour off you...)

[seattlecyclone]

I was recently promoted to a new position after someone left, I was tapped to take up the mantle. In my last position, I was working on coding up a pretty cool full-stack app that was highly praised by the Feds making the decisions. But now I've been promoted to this more nebulous "Lead" Engineering position where I'm not directly responsible for any code or application. I'm more like a consultant or a floating resource.

So over the past, I don't know, 3 - 4 weeks I can say that I've worked maybe 6-8 hours total on work related items? That might be a stretch, but at least at the moment, it feels like I really only work about 10% of my actual hours.

So how did I go to making more money to a position to do less work? I really don't get it. I've been working on side projects either home upgrades or a private app I'm working on. I count it as "education" hours in my mind.

Part of of me is also a little nervous. Like the consultants from Office Space will one day figure it out and come to me and ask "So what is it that you do here?". "Heck man, I don't know. I'm pretty sure my position is pointless and I think I know a couple other people here that don't have much of a point." My one saving grace is that when a problem comes up and I'm tapped to help solve it, I've rarely if ever needed more than an hour to solve it.

A good senior developer can be like a force multiplier. If you know the system and the languages and design patterns like the back of your hand (or know who to talk to for the parts you don't know), and you're available to the junior developers as needed to help them get unstuck, half an hour of your time can double the amount of code they write that day. Spend two hours on that and you likely contribute more to the team than if you spent eight hours writing code yourself.

[Dave1442397]

I was recently promoted to a new position after someone left, I was tapped to take up the mantle. In my last position, I was working on coding up a pretty cool full-stack app that was highly praised by the Feds making the decisions. But now I've been promoted to this more nebulous "Lead" Engineering position where I'm not directly responsible for any code or application. I'm more like a consultant or a floating resource.

So over the past, I don't know, 3 - 4 weeks I can say that I've worked maybe 6-8 hours total on work related items? That might be a stretch, but at least at the moment, it feels like I really only work about 10% of my actual hours.

So how did I go to making more money to a position to do less work? I really don't get it. I've been working on side projects either home upgrades or a private app I'm working on. I count it as "education" hours in my mind.

Part of of me is also a little nervous. Like the consultants from Office Space will one day figure it out and come to me and ask "So what is it that you do here?". "Heck man, I don't know. I'm pretty sure my position is pointless and I think I know a couple other people here that don't have much of a point." My one saving grace is that when a problem comes up and I'm tapped to help solve it, I've rarely if ever needed more than an hour to solve it.

A good senior developer can be like a force multiplier. If you know the system and the languages and design patterns like the back of your hand (or know who to talk to for the parts you don't know), and you're available to the junior developers as needed to help them get unstuck, half an hour of your time can double the amount of code they write that day. Spend two hours on that and you likely contribute more to the team than if you spent eight hours writing code yourself.

Yes, exactly. At this point you're being paid for your knowledge and expertise, not just for churning out code.

I thought I was going to have a quiet week this week. I have things coded that are waiting for QA to finish testing them, and until they do, I can't do much else. We had a major project get postponed, so our Analysts are busy writing specs for other projects we need to do. There's not a whole lot in the pipeline.

However, it's been one of those weeks where our Senior Architect is away on vacation (and not allowed check in for two weeks), and all sorts of things hit the fan. I've been putting out fires all week. I learned more about producing client software releases in gitlab today than I did in the past two years. If tomorrow is quiet, I'll take it.

[okits]

The last few days' worth of posts have been great.

eventually we all just felt ripped off and used. 
<snip>
I don't want to discourage people from going the extra mile, doing their job to the best of their ability so they can accumulate respect, get a raise and move forward with their careers.  But I also don't want anyone to do any of that in a way that isn't appreciated. 

Toque, you perfectly distilled the motivation behind employee pushback and the crux of the Quiet Quitting conundrum.  Some people are in the right situation to go above and beyond, but should make sure their efforts have a fair chance of being reasonably rewarded.  Too often that extra effort is demanded in exchange for nothing.

@Malcat 's description of middle managers now being the slave drivers holding whips, squeezing the workers for numbers... yeah.  Absolutely that.

Skill, then, is less important than negotiating ability. The people who make it to management are less likely to be skilled than they are to be good negotiators / politicians. So what we're describing is an anti-meritocracy that selects for people who are not afraid of confrontation.

Yes.  The reward is not for the value of your work but for your self-promotion.

Sure, most businesses use the same software, HR policies, communication norms, etc. as other businesses, but what makes a person good at their job is the stuff that takes years to learn: an awareness of the company's contracts and functions, their ability to tap a social network of coworkers with specific skills / permissions to resolve problems, knowledge of historical decisions or mistakes at the company and why they were made, industry trends, configuration details, how to submit accurate expense reports, business rules, who to talk to about what, yada yada.

I really appreciated this point.  After a bunch of years in my company and industry I've built up a cache of knowledge, skills, and relationships... just as I'm reaching my limit for overwork and burnout.  And of course there are no manuals or other employees with my experience to train a new hire.  I may be embarking on an exciting discovery of whether my company thinks super-specific talent and experience can just be hired in the open market...

[Metalcat]

The last few days' worth of posts have been great.

eventually we all just felt ripped off and used. 
<snip>
I don't want to discourage people from going the extra mile, doing their job to the best of their ability so they can accumulate respect, get a raise and move forward with their careers.  But I also don't want anyone to do any of that in a way that isn't appreciated. 

Toque, you perfectly distilled the motivation behind employee pushback and the crux of the Quiet Quitting conundrum.  Some people are in the right situation to go above and beyond, but should make sure their efforts have a fair chance of being reasonably rewarded.  Too often that extra effort is demanded in exchange for nothing.

@Malcat 's description of middle managers now being the slave drivers holding whips, squeezing the workers for numbers... yeah.  Absolutely that.

Skill, then, is less important than negotiating ability. The people who make it to management are less likely to be skilled than they are to be good negotiators / politicians. So what we're describing is an anti-meritocracy that selects for people who are not afraid of confrontation.

Yes.  The reward is not for the value of your work but for your self-promotion.

Sure, most businesses use the same software, HR policies, communication norms, etc. as other businesses, but what makes a person good at their job is the stuff that takes years to learn: an awareness of the company's contracts and functions, their ability to tap a social network of coworkers with specific skills / permissions to resolve problems, knowledge of historical decisions or mistakes at the company and why they were made, industry trends, configuration details, how to submit accurate expense reports, business rules, who to talk to about what, yada yada.

I really appreciated this point.  After a bunch of years in my company and industry I've built up a cache of knowledge, skills, and relationships... just as I'm reaching my limit for overwork and burnout.  And of course there are no manuals or other employees with my experience to train a new hire.  I may be embarking on an exciting discovery of whether my company thinks super-specific talent and experience can just be hired in the open market...

They can't replace you.

When your skills are lost, your middle manager above you will just nee squeezed hard and whomever is left/hired at your level will be under astronomical pressure to work extra hours to figure out the knowledge you left with.

Because more man hours don't cost the company more money, because no one asks for compensation for them, this is a much more cost-effective way to handle loss of corporate memory.

It costs way more to have you train someone or even take the time to make a corporate manual. Why bother when people can just be bullied into figuring shit out on their own?

DH just stepped into a senior knowledge-based role with literally no onboarding or guidance and basically spent 5 months working evenings and weekends just to get up to speed on the very basics of how to do the job and the expert knowledge to move forward.

This is what happens every time he moves jobs. I just brace myself that he's going to disappear for a few months into the insanity of teaching himself the expertise needed for the job that no one is available/able to teach him.

What's worse, he wasn't even hired for this job. They lost someone they needed for the role and he was pulled over from another brand new job to cover both roles because he was the most qualified for both.

So he's been doing two jobs for 5 months, working non-stop to catch up on both, for no extra pay.

Now, in case, it's a bit exceptional, and this was a strategic move to secure a dream job, and his management and executive team are wonderful, everyone is valuing his amazing work, and he *does* plan to hunker down and stay in this final role until retirement.
But this is government, not corporate.

But still, it's an example of how the strategy to deal with the loss of corporate memory is just to pressure everyone else to pick it up, no matter what it takes.

This is the kind of pressure and unreasonableness that the younger workers won't respond to. DH is turning 50, it's in his DNA to just put his head down and pull as hard as he needs to to get the job done, especially when there's something he wants from his employer (see my journal for details).

But he had 3 newbies reporting to him and they were just phoning it in because no one taught them what to do and they weren't about to go above and beyond for a team they didn't know, had no loyalty to, and for no extra money.

So DH took even more time and trained them so that he would finally have some help on his two jobs.

But again, as his generation dies off/retired, there won't be any DH's left to work 80+hr weeks for the same base pay for several months, willing to bend over backwards to train themselves and their subordinates every time they start a new job.

[brunetteUK]

This discussion is excellent and I think this article from The Economist complements some points that have been made.

https://www.economist.com/business/2022/04/09/how-mba-wielding-bosses-boost-profits

"The authors look at newly appointed CEOs in America and Denmark. They find those with MBAs increase returns on assets in the five years after their appointment—by a total of three percentage points on average in America and 1.5 points in Denmark. But that is not because they boost sales, ratchet up investments or raise productivity. Rather, the higher returns are the result of suppressing workers’ wages, which fall by 6% in America and 3% in Denmark over the five years after an MBA takes charge. In short, ushering MBAs into corner offices seems to boost shareholder value by slicing the pie in certain ways, not by making the pie bigger."

"The researchers put this phenomenon down to change in business-school syllabuses. MBA programmes, says Mr He, have over the years grown less focused on technical aspects of finance and management, and more obsessed with maximising shareholder value and corporate leanness. The result, he and his colleagues contend, is that workers have increasingly been seen as “costs to be reduced” rather than an investment in human capital."

---

I remember my mother's total frustration went she was laid off after 12 years at the age of 45. She said she would never let anyone make her cry like that again. My generation (mid 30s) cannot imagine crying over a job! Every company I worked for had a restructuring every two years - the possibility of being made redundant wouldn't surprise anyone into crying of frustration.

[Metalcat]

This discussion is excellent and I think this article from The Economist complements some points that have been made.

https://www.economist.com/business/2022/04/09/how-mba-wielding-bosses-boost-profits

"The authors look at newly appointed CEOs in America and Denmark. They find those with MBAs increase returns on assets in the five years after their appointment—by a total of three percentage points on average in America and 1.5 points in Denmark. But that is not because they boost sales, ratchet up investments or raise productivity. Rather, the higher returns are the result of suppressing workers’ wages, which fall by 6% in America and 3% in Denmark over the five years after an MBA takes charge. In short, ushering MBAs into corner offices seems to boost shareholder value by slicing the pie in certain ways, not by making the pie bigger."

"The researchers put this phenomenon down to change in business-school syllabuses. MBA programmes, says Mr He, have over the years grown less focused on technical aspects of finance and management, and more obsessed with maximising shareholder value and corporate leanness. The result, he and his colleagues contend, is that workers have increasingly been seen as “costs to be reduced” rather than an investment in human capital."

---

I remember my mother's total frustration went she was laid off after 12 years at the age of 45. She said she would never let anyone make her cry like that again. My generation (mid 30s) cannot imagine crying over a job! Every company I worked for had a restructuring every two years - the possibility of being made redundant wouldn't surprise anyone into crying of frustration.

Yep, the general disdain for workers and middle manager is palpable at the executive level for the most part. This is represented in wage slicing and massive executive bonuses.

Those measures work, and spectacularly well...for awhile.

A clinic I was at brought on a manager from a big corporate chain. This is who was brought in to replace all of the management that I was no longer doing. The owner LOVED her at the beginning because she cut costs like crazy and saved the owner boat loads of money. The owner raved about how incredible she was and how she should have done this years sooner.

I kept my mouth shut because I was already one foot out the door. But what I saw was a systematic nickle-and-diming that would steadily poison the well of the business, and toxify the staff.

A year later the owner was crying, hadn't slept in days, and begging me for advice on how to repair the damage after firing the manager.

As I said before, whenever I start hearing owners/executives/managers start talking about staff as if they're lazy and need to be squeezed harder, I know the business is in trouble.

Most people are naturally highly motivated to work very, very hard. If staff are in fact being lazy in general, which does happen, it's usually the product of the management culture.

I once walked into a massive practice and energized a flagging staff within a few days by just telling them I respected what they thought and that I believed them that they were being treated poorly.

That's it. That's all it took to rev their engines. Of course they would go right back to despondent lethargy if the management culture stayed the same, but it proved that the staff weren't the problem.

The executive team there were prone to ranting that "every fucking staff member we have is only working at 50% capacity MAX!"

They too had implemented a classic megacorp management style and it had saved enormous piles of money until it eviscerated their performance and overhead sky rocketed to 95%.

[mm1970]

DH just stepped into a senior knowledge-based role with literally no onboarding or guidance and basically spent 5 months working evenings and weekends just to get up to speed on the very basics of how to do the job and the expert knowledge to move forward.

This is what happens every time he moves jobs. I just brace myself that he's going to disappear for a few months into the insanity of teaching himself the expertise needed for the job that no one is available/able to teach him.

What's worse, he wasn't even hired for this job. They lost someone they needed for the role and he was pulled over from another brand new job to cover both roles because he was the most qualified for both.

So he's been doing two jobs for 5 months, working non-stop to catch up on both, for no extra pay.

Now, in case, it's a bit exceptional, and this was a strategic move to secure a dream job, and his management and executive team are wonderful, everyone is valuing his amazing work, and he *does* plan to hunker down and stay in this final role until retirement.
But this is government, not corporate.

But still, it's an example of how the strategy to deal with the loss of corporate memory is just to pressure everyone else to pick it up, no matter what it takes.

This is the kind of pressure and unreasonableness that the younger workers won't respond to. DH is turning 50, it's in his DNA to just put his head down and pull as hard as he needs to to get the job done, especially when there's something he wants from his employer (see my journal for details).

WHoa.  You just described me I think.  3 times in the last 5 years, I've had major work upheavals where I've been handed more work for no more pay, to the point where I'm now doing 3.5 jobs (and badly, because...I am not 3.5 people).  Every time I end up working weekends to keep up/learn new things/ get ahead and I'm BEAT. But I'm also in my early 50s, so the age lines up.

We are trying to hire a millennial for a different job, and he's playing hardball, and I KNOW this guy is just trying to get into a position where he gets paid full time to work a few hours a day.  He basically said as much during my interview with him.

[Sibley]

DH just stepped into a senior knowledge-based role with literally no onboarding or guidance and basically spent 5 months working evenings and weekends just to get up to speed on the very basics of how to do the job and the expert knowledge to move forward.

This is what happens every time he moves jobs. I just brace myself that he's going to disappear for a few months into the insanity of teaching himself the expertise needed for the job that no one is available/able to teach him.

What's worse, he wasn't even hired for this job. They lost someone they needed for the role and he was pulled over from another brand new job to cover both roles because he was the most qualified for both.

So he's been doing two jobs for 5 months, working non-stop to catch up on both, for no extra pay.

Now, in case, it's a bit exceptional, and this was a strategic move to secure a dream job, and his management and executive team are wonderful, everyone is valuing his amazing work, and he *does* plan to hunker down and stay in this final role until retirement.
But this is government, not corporate.

But still, it's an example of how the strategy to deal with the loss of corporate memory is just to pressure everyone else to pick it up, no matter what it takes.

This is the kind of pressure and unreasonableness that the younger workers won't respond to. DH is turning 50, it's in his DNA to just put his head down and pull as hard as he needs to to get the job done, especially when there's something he wants from his employer (see my journal for details).

WHoa.  You just described me I think.  3 times in the last 5 years, I've had major work upheavals where I've been handed more work for no more pay, to the point where I'm now doing 3.5 jobs (and badly, because...I am not 3.5 people).  Every time I end up working weekends to keep up/learn new things/ get ahead and I'm BEAT. But I'm also in my early 50s, so the age lines up.

We are trying to hire a millennial for a different job, and he's playing hardball, and I KNOW this guy is just trying to get into a position where he gets paid full time to work a few hours a day.  He basically said as much during my interview with him.

Well first, not all Millennials. Because I'm one and I don't think like that. Every generation has their shirkers and scammers.

But why would I do the job of 3 and half people? I'm one person. So, why are you doing the job of 3 and half people? Stop.

[HawkeyeNFO]

Skill, then, is less important than negotiating ability. The people who make it to management are less likely to be skilled than they are to be good negotiators / politicians. So what we're describing is an anti-meritocracy that selects for people who are not afraid of confrontation.

  Yup, especially when it comes to salary or other compensation.  And I would argue that most Americans, regardless of their age or generation, are poor negotiators or truly fear confrontation.

[HawkeyeNFO]

https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-3-managers-respond-to-quiet-quitting-with-quiet-firing/

Interesting (but not fascinating) article.  I don't think anyone here will be surprised.....

Key findings include:

98% of managers of ‘quiet quitters’ say it’s important their reports do more than the bare minimum
91% of managers have taken some action against ‘quiet quitters,’ including taking steps to terminate them and denying promotions/raises
1 in 3 managers admit to ‘quiet firing’ reports
64% of managers say ‘quiet quitters’ are unlikely to have a successful career
75% of managers say it’s justifiable to fire someone only doing the bare minimum

[LennStar]

They too had implemented a classic megacorp management style and it had saved enormous piles of money until it eviscerated their performance and overhead sky rocketed to 95%.

Do you happen to know anything about railroads?
Because those seem to have taken a whole special brew of this. People are leaving in droves, and now strike seems to be on the door, if congress does not deem it illegal. 

If you do not know and you are interested, here is a podcast from yesterday, so reasonably recent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69A_UCdikE8

Well first, not all Millennials. Because I'm one and I don't think like that. Every generation has their shirkers and scammers.

But why would I do the job of 3 and half people? I'm one person. So, why are you doing the job of 3 and half people? Stop.

Maybe this is connected?
They are used to the fact that a 1-person job has work for 2 or 3 people, so for them a 2 or 3-hour day means a workload a single person can reasonably do in a relaxed/non-stressed workday.

https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-3-managers-respond-to-quiet-quitting-with-quiet-firing/

Interesting (but not fascinating) article.  I don't think anyone here will be surprised.....

Key findings include:

98% of managers of ‘quiet quitters’ say it’s important their reports do more than the bare minimum
91% of managers have taken some action against ‘quiet quitters,’ including taking steps to terminate them and denying promotions/raises
1 in 3 managers admit to ‘quiet firing’ reports
64% of managers say ‘quiet quitters’ are unlikely to have a successful career
75% of managers say it’s justifiable to fire someone only doing the bare minimum

Just look at the article:
"If the employee is doing what the job description says, is termination legal?"
If that crops up as a question at all, it shows that something is borked completely. You ask if it legal to fire someone for doing his job?

[Metalcat]

They too had implemented a classic megacorp management style and it had saved enormous piles of money until it eviscerated their performance and overhead sky rocketed to 95%.

Do you happen to know anything about railroads?
Because those seem to have taken a whole special brew of this. People are leaving in droves, and now strike seems to be on the door, if congress does not deem it illegal. 

If you do not know and you are interested, here is a podcast from yesterday, so reasonably recent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69A_UCdikE8

I know the medical world, which is a particular creature. But what I've learned has turned out to be shockingly generalizable to almost all industries and all sizes of business.

It helps that I work with/for the smallest employers of hands on workers in the country and DH works for the largest employer of paper workers in the country.

Seeing how the sausage is made between those two worlds has given me A LOT of insight. Plus I've worked in a few other industries and worked in staffing.

Basically, I have a pretty decent sense of business and management structures in general. Each business has its special version of bullshit, but it's all just flavours of the same bullshit.

[JLee]

https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-3-managers-respond-to-quiet-quitting-with-quiet-firing/

Interesting (but not fascinating) article.  I don't think anyone here will be surprised.....

Key findings include:

98% of managers of ‘quiet quitters’ say it’s important their reports do more than the bare minimum
91% of managers have taken some action against ‘quiet quitters,’ including taking steps to terminate them and denying promotions/raises
1 in 3 managers admit to ‘quiet firing’ reports
64% of managers say ‘quiet quitters’ are unlikely to have a successful career
75% of managers say it’s justifiable to fire someone only doing the bare minimum

lol it would seem the minimum is in fact not the minimum, then!

[HawkeyeNFO]

Do you happen to know anything about railroads?
Because those seem to have taken a whole special brew of this. People are leaving in droves, and now strike seems to be on the door, if congress does not deem it illegal.

BIL has worked for a railroad for decades, as an engineer driving locomotives.  A union steward too.  His schedule for the first 15 years or so was ridiculous, with unpredictable hours and he always seemed to be on call.  I think the reason the railroads were able to treat employees this way was that the compensation levels were quite high.  With mergers and new management styles and techniques introdued in the past 10 years, things changed, for the worse.  If they've not raised pay while asking the employees to do more, well........

[ChpBstrd]

The root cause is that we investors expect static industries like railroads, banks, hospitals, real estate, etc. to produce a stream of earnings that grows faster than inflation, even though such organizations cannot raise their prices or control their costs at a better rate than inflation.

If an organization cannot grow (e.g. railroads cannot build more tracks, hospitals have a fixed number of beds, vacancies will go up if you raise rents) then the only way such companies can deliver rising real earnings is to either "cut the fat" or raise leverage sky-high. Cutting of the fat must occur each and every year forever, or else the company's real earnings shrink and management gets fired. When leverage is maxed out, cutting expenses is such an organization's only option for earnings growth.

Yet, when companies cut back year after year after year, eventually something breaks.

Under-investment in training means new people stay in a less effective mode for longer. Under-investment in IT leads to security breaches, lagging productivity, and falling behind competitors. Under-investment in management leads to a negative corporate culture, under-supervised employees, morale problems, poorer top-down decision making, and challenges making changes. Under-investment in equipment leads to downtime and customer dissatisfaction. Under-investment in marketing eventually costs sales. Under-investment in R&D leads to technological obsolescence. People asked to do more in less time with less resources tend to cut quality. These negative results don't show up until several quarters or years down the road.

It goes on and on until a company like GE becomes what it is today, or an automaker has to spend billions on a recall, or a company like Sears is looted by its own executives. Now we're hearing about cost-cutting at tech companies like Apple, Tesla, and Google, just because their rate of growth is naturally slowing.

But what if investors and boards of directors were OK with mature corporations having zero or slightly negative earnings growth? Such companies could still be cash cows, paying massive dividends and stock buybacks. They'd still be worth the present value of their future income streams, even if those streams decline.

The reasons we investors can't accept these outcomes is because we have a cultural belief that management of any company should be compensated with options based on quarterly growth numbers, because boards are not necessarily elected by shareholders who are in the stocks for multiple years, and because we are more skeptical than we should be of companies' plans to reinvest in themselves.

[Metalcat]

https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-3-managers-respond-to-quiet-quitting-with-quiet-firing/

Interesting (but not fascinating) article.  I don't think anyone here will be surprised.....

Key findings include:

98% of managers of ‘quiet quitters’ say it’s important their reports do more than the bare minimum
91% of managers have taken some action against ‘quiet quitters,’ including taking steps to terminate them and denying promotions/raises
1 in 3 managers admit to ‘quiet firing’ reports
64% of managers say ‘quiet quitters’ are unlikely to have a successful career
75% of managers say it’s justifiable to fire someone only doing the bare minimum

lol it would seem the minimum is in fact not the minimum, then!

I mean...Office Space came out a long time ago...this isn't new information to anyone.

[GuitarStv]

https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-3-managers-respond-to-quiet-quitting-with-quiet-firing/

Interesting (but not fascinating) article.  I don't think anyone here will be surprised.....

Key findings include:

98% of managers of ‘quiet quitters’ say it’s important their reports do more than the bare minimum
91% of managers have taken some action against ‘quiet quitters,’ including taking steps to terminate them and denying promotions/raises
1 in 3 managers admit to ‘quiet firing’ reports
64% of managers say ‘quiet quitters’ are unlikely to have a successful career
75% of managers say it’s justifiable to fire someone only doing the bare minimum

I just fired a guy who was not working last week.  Not sure if it qualifies as quiet quitting, but I'd call it doing the bare minimum.

He would be assigned a task, then get stuck and email someone for a response . . . and then stop working entirely until he got a response back.  I was on vacation for a week, so he emailed me for a response on the Monday and took the rest of the week off while waiting for me to come back and answer his question.  The question could have been answered by any of a dozen other people he works with.

[mm1970]

Well first, not all Millennials. Because I'm one and I don't think like that. Every generation has their shirkers and scammers.

But why would I do the job of 3 and half people? I'm one person. So, why are you doing the job of 3 and half people? Stop.

I didn't mean to suggest all the millennials.  The ones I work with are great.  Now that our company is growing, and it's harder to hire, we simply cannot have the same standards for new hires that we did for the first many years.

Ugh, I'm trying but I'm this hub of knowledge.  Like, I hired someone to work for me and I need to train him, but literally the week before he started, that changed.  So, I have a different boss and I'm not in charge of that "thing" anymore.  But...it's not like we replaced me in the old thing.  Because we didn't.  In fact, I said so when HR said "yay, you aren't doing 3 jobs anymore."  To which I said "um, doesn't exactly count until you hire someone to do the work, 'cuz it still needs to be done."

So...the new guy (who does not work for me) comes to me for training and we have weekly meetings because his "new boss" (my old boss) is unavailable.  And old boss is not trying to be a jerk, but he also got promoted and suddenly took on more responsibilities too.  We are just short handed, and people are quitting and retiring and ... sigh.  This is where training people is a massive time suck but it's SO WORTH IT in the long run.  I tend to end up doing a lot of this stuff.

There's a lot of room for improvement and efficiency, and this is where I'm getting stuck working extra - helping to get people to use our existing systems in an efficient manner.  Plus train a new boss.