You’re blaming your previous colleagues for management apathy/incompetency and your own choice to not have left sooner. I have sympathy as someone previously in on call rotations, but I’m also sufficiently experienced to know to get out at the first sign of boundaries violations (7 weeks!?).

Take better care of yourself going forward, no one else will. That is what the message is, self care over a nebulous business.

I'm absolutely blaming my previous colleagues for their actions of dodging their responsibility and letting it fall where it may.

I don't want to work any more than you do, but it's not my fault or management's fault that you're not doing your job when nobody's watching.

It's a choice you make to shirk the responsibility you've been paid to assume, and it affects your colleagues much more than the corporation.

its your choice to play mother teresa, however.

edit: honesty is important. call it as you see it. if that doesnt work: join em or walk

I didn't play Mother Teresa. I walked, instead of checking out and letting everyone assume I'm doing my job. I think that's a much stronger signal than warming a chair.

My point is that there's a contradiction in this argument.

A work culture where everyone is held accountable is a culture of authoritarianism, blame and metrics gaming.

A work culture where everyone is expected to act like an adult and do their job even when nobody's watching with the red pen, is a work culture in which the least you can do to not get fired is exactly nothing.

Everyone can't "quiet quit" by any reasonable definition, as that amounts to doing nothing and when nothing is delivered nobody gets paid.

It does not compute.

I imagine that you are discussing two different personal and corporate cultures with very different expectations.

Either the output of what you do has an impact on the bottom line or it doesn't.

Guess which one gets let go first when push comes to shove.

I'm sorry that happened to you, I was stuck in a place with a similarly unstructured on-call schedule and it equally made my life hell. It felt like the sword of Damocles hanging over my head, unfortunately there was no support structure or understanding of the fact that on-call is not a substitute for architecture.

I left. The colleagues I left behind could handle the situation better than me and still work there. And I don't fault them either, the on-call schedule as well as how it was run was defined by management. Down the line that experience made me violently advocate for my current team not to be on-call, and with a bit of luck and support I was able to pull it off. The result was demonstrably more stable services and a team that can spend more time on high value work. Which is to say: change is possible. Sometimes.

Buddy you had every ability to half ass that on-call and no one would have faulted you for it and it would have resulted in the corporation realizing they needed to harden that duty better.

I’m very sympathetic to how you were impacted, and have also suffered fairly severely (multiple years of physically painful burnout symptoms) from prolonged overwork. In my case it was about 6 months.

I can’t say I’m sympathetic to your analysis at all. I don’t blame any of my coworkers who were able to work according to their actual express duties and not beyond, not one bit. I find it appalling that anyone would describe that as “sociopathy”, even in colloquial terms. With few exceptions, people are employed by organizations explicitly designed to extract as much value from every resource—human or otherwise—for as little expense as possible. And they’re employed or managed by people who either benefit from that or reinforce it. Speaking of colloquial (albeit wrong) use of the term “sociopathy”, that sure sounds like a perfect fit to me.

Even if someone extends their effort just a little bit and it’s not traumatic in the way you and I have experienced, they’re generally trading part of the most precious thing they’ll ever have, time, to enrich someone else at their expense.

The point of fulfilling your duties, and doing no more, isn’t to “hurt the corporation”, it’s to protect yourself from being harmed by it as you and I have. This is, curiously, where I find myself more philosophically at odds with the article than I think you are. The article advocates for quietly acquiescing to the fact of exploitative work expectations by quietly sneaking some semblance of not being exploited. You advocate for more people sharing the burden of being exploited, more evenly. Maybe Homer Simpson and America are wrong, and a healthy organized labor movement which prioritizes solidarity between workers, at the expense of employers and management where their priorities are harmful is a better compromise with reality than either “hope I don’t get caught doing my job and only my job” or “I’m destroying my life because my peers aren’t willing to destroy theirs along with me”.

The buck does have to stop somewhere. Why does it have to stop with the people who will likely suffer as we've suffered? Why are they the focus of ire and not the expectation that they sacrifice themselves too?

The least everyone can do to not get fired is, quite often, absolutely nothing.

If nobody does anything, nothing is delivered and nobody gets paid.

If you don't want to work, don't take a job.

You’re responding to a phenomenon which neither the article is advocating for, not what I defended. The article rightly, I think, questions the pervasiveness of such extreme do-nothingness. Most workers engaged in whatever is being observed do what they were hired to do and don’t oblige themselves beyond their stated responsibilities. That’s more than fine, it’s good and healthy in the vast majority of circumstances. It’s not (again challenging the article here) an organizing principle with much merit for improving workers lives broadly, but it’s at least a good balance for most workers to strike for their own wellbeing.

I don’t know if you’re conflating these things because the article poorly laid out its premise, or because you’re sympathetic to the demanding expectations you’ve participated in, or because it was so traumatic you see in your own right laziness where people are merely enjoying the fruits of their labor without toiling for other people’s fruits. In any case, I sincerely wish you recovery from any remaining burnout. And I sincerely invite you to have solidarity with others who don’t want to experience the severity of overwork we have, and to defend them in rejecting cultures of overwork rather than defending caricatures of workers who would be just as harmed if they were in our position.

If you don’t want to be overworked, don’t drive excessive work for those who’d benefit at your expense.

Lol. No