I agree that your definition would be more intuitive, but I think that ship has sailed. It seems to be almost universally used to mean "performing the required duties of your role, and no more"

I think it's an indication of a totally dysfunctional work culture that "not doing extra" can be synonymous with "not working at all"

The fact that the author claims to have given "200% of [their] energy" to their job "throughout their career" is, to me, depressing rather than admirable

It also reeks of the typical productivity theatre I see in my parents generation. Highly visible self-sacrifice, everything for work.

But putting in 80 hours a week, going to work even when sick, neglecting rest and family, all these things reduce overall work output, often sharply. Especially when it's just performative, but even when it's honest.

I find it very similar to the mentality induced by rating systems, where 5 stars is 5 stars and 4 stars is 1 star. I remember a discussion about that some time ago here but haven’t been able to find it again.

I too found this definition perplexing, and I can only attribute it their knowing that "the minimum to not get fired, often including deceptions about the quality and quantity of work" sounds a lot worse, even if the reasons behind both attitudes are for generally the same reasons.

I am somehow a millennial despite being born in the early 80s and so I straddle the divide here somewhat. I share their cynicism and distrust of corporations and capitalism. Your employer is trying to minimize the amount they are paying you and maximize the amount of work you produce, so it only seems fair for a worker to have the inverse incentive.

At the same time, I can't really bring myself to do bad work or generally shirk my responsibilities. Part of this is due to the relationships with my bosses and coworkers, knowing that they are largely trapped in the same circumstances and that they will likely have to pick up the slack, and part of it is just a personal value on doing a thing as well as I can.

> At the same time, I can't really bring myself to do bad work or generally shirk my responsibilities. Part of this is due to the relationships with my bosses and coworkers, knowing that they are largely trapped in the same circumstances and that they will likely have to pick up the slack, and part of it is just a personal value on doing a thing as well as I can.

Sort of in the same position as you im terms of late millenial. I have always gotten kicked in the ass for doing this. I put a high personal value on the work that I do and go (what I consider) above and beyond. But at all my employments there was a time when I needed help (medical emergency, life emergency, burn-out, family issues etc.) and have always found that I didn't get the support I expected and needed; even from the bosses that I appreciated.

Ultimately, that always drives me to keep a more open eye on new offers.

It's absolutely being used loosely, people arguing against it are usually talking about doing the absolute bare minimum and people arguing for it are usually talking about working as expected without going above and beyond. It's very frustrating to watch and a pattern that occurs quite frequently

Indeed, its a weird terminology to use. Quit/Quitting typically has only one well-understood meaning !

"Quiet quitting" strikes me as being more like what was traditionally called "Work To Rule" in union circles.

I remember work to rule well. As a kid my teachers union were going through negotiations and on the verge of striking and we got to see first hand what that's like. Turns out all those sports and extra curricular activities your kids enjoy in school aren't in the contract. Same with staying late and providing any extra help, or supporting anything like a school dance. The contract is just show up, lecture, mark homework during prep. periods, leave. Parents were frustrated to say the least. Anyways, you can't expect your employees to go above and beyond for free. Any extra responsibilities need to be spelled out in the contract.

I can't imaging how that'd work for a developer. There can be an innumerable number of tasks different developers do and as they grow in a position, it can change enormously. I guess it would force contract and pay renegotiations every year? Otherwise your new team lead could just.. stop.. in the case where they were hired as just a senior developer.

FWIW: I taught high school English for about ten years. In addition to my regular 40 hrs, I routinely prepped, marked up writing, etc for an additional 15-20 hours per week.

I left in June and took a new job at a small tech consultancy here in Minneapolis. Teaching is a special job in many ways, but the material benefits of exiting education are stark (at least for me).

The students are required to work for hours more per week, why not the teachers?

Because I signed a contract that specifies contractual hours and duties?

Students are the ones benefiting from their own work AND the work of the teacher.

"doing the absolute smallest amount you can get away with without getting noticed and subsequently fired."

That is an interesting phrase. Isn't this what is required of you to do? If you are failing at the job, you will at least get noticed.

So, what is quiet quitting? In my mind, it seems like not having ambition to grow in the corporate world is (negatively) called out as quiet quitting.

This is going to depend on how much you are monitored, if you have key performance indicators, if management really has a useful gauge of your productivity to use.

If it's a 3-tier scale, the middle "doing your job" means you use your 8 hours / day to get work done (mostly). You don't push off as many duties as possible while "waiting" for more information. You don't go fishing while logging hours. You continue to see what you can get done throughout the day, and you do it, even if you're not being watched and monitored.

On that bottom tier, unless something is specifically measurable, unless there's a solid grasp of accountability that management can use to ensure the work you're doing is meaningfully productive from their point of view, you don't have to do much of anything. You could be in sales but not selling anything. You could show up for required meetings, but make up reasons why you didn't get anything done. You could spend 7 of your 8 hours watching Netflix. Basically, you quietly (as in, without being noticed) quit (as in, stopped doing your job.)

>> "doing the absolute smallest amount you can get away with without getting noticed and subsequently fired."

So many people do this already while spending all their time disrupting others and working long hours.

A term getting around at the moment is "Acting your Wage" which I like a lot better. Employers shouldn't be surprised when people do what they're paid to do.

That attitude is childish at best. If you're not happy with the wage, quit and go get it somewhere else. Employers would feel the pressure of "lack of labor" and wages would rise. Accepting a job and then deciding the wage is not enough for the duties you have to perform after the fact just slows the process down for everyone and usually puts extra work load on your colleagues.

I'm assuming of course that you mean what I ususally have seen which is "i arbitrarily decide how much work to do". If you mean this is just "not go above and beyond", then sure.

> Accepting a job and then deciding the wage is not enough for the duties you have to perform after the fact just slows the process down for everyone and usually puts extra work load on your colleagues.

Uh,no. It's usually getting more and more work coz someone left/got fired and employer goes "well, productivity looks the same" (coz everyone is working that bit more) "why hire more?".

Or frankly you just learned more and are more productive than you were year ago... for same wage.

Big +1!

This is like an employer failing to gauge the number of people needed to do a job, just tell you to do a little extra...

Never ever will you get the benefit of a cut from the cost of the missing people, but your employer WILL get the benefit of delivering something more valuable to the market.

Wait! You signed a contract saying A and you do A, meanwhile there's an "expectation" that you actually do A+B... That is not a healthy expectation.

Imagine if you were a contractor tasked with painting a room. Mid painting the expectation changes to "you're also expected to reinstall window and door trim, and paint it" (at no extra cost and by staying at jobsite longer), but with a remote probability of increased pay later. Or... The customer fires one of your colleagues and tells you that you and one more person must now deliver the job at the same pace.... but with only two thirds of the pay.

I think this is a miscommunication. Acting your wage would be doing your job as you should be fairly expected to do it. The culture of overwork and hustle is what people are opting out of, but by calling it quiet quitting they are making it sound like people are doing the bare minimum to not get fired.

It's pretty well-understood that a company does not function if everyone performs only the duties written on paper. There's even a counterproductive strategy that uses that as the hallmark: "malicious compliance." People aren't robots (if they were, they'd have been automated by now so owners could keep all the wealth by owning all the capital) and the challenges businesses face are too dynamic to survive a script-only approach to meeting people's needs.

I think the most important question to ask is "If the company dies, why don't the employees care?" And unpacking that box can answer all sorts of unasked questions about power imbalance in the modern (mostly service, non-union) economy.

What the...

No. If your company has to rely on people working extra hours and doing extra work, to actually function... then screw that company.

Imagine if you demanded your carpenter do your plumbing as well, because "as house can't operate without proper plumbing".

We don't demand that. But (for a small one-off home installation job) we do expect carpenters to finish with a broom-clean workspace, even if that's not explicitly in the contract. It's a basic professional standard and "common sense."

That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Except for some reason once people become employees, that "broom-clean workspace" turns into "spotless deep house clean" expectation.

Hence why you get "quitely quitting" as just doing the job you were hired to do.

This is an excellent point and goes to the unasked questions I was referring to.

Among the reasons this can happen is a variant of race-to-the-bottom cost / value creep due to competition. If some other carpenter is offering complementary deep-clean, then everyone else in the space has to offer it too (or risk losing work).

Now, they should of course ideally pay their staff to do the thing that has become the new norm. But it's easy for a frog-boil to cause something to creep into the new norm without corresponding compensation increasing (especially if the guy offering the deep-cleans originally has some kind of economic advantage the competition doesn't that allows him to offer it for free... Maybe his partner is co-owner and does the deep cleans, or they have kids who work for them for free).

There's a lot of power imbalances that I think become obvious if one asks the question "Why would the employees not care if this company went belly-up tomorrow?" The kids / partner circumstance, for example, involves employees working for below-market rate but they do care if the company goes belly-up tomorrow.

I've never heard young people use this term the way the author claims - that's the definition used by people of the author's generation. Young people, by and large, seem to call it "doing your job", as you say.

In my experience, young people saying "quiet quitting" are referring explicitly to the judgmental attitude around work-life balance that's held by some older members of the workforce.

> Fulfilling my duties but not doing overtime seems like "doing your job" rather than "quiet quitting."

Yeah, but the employers see 'just doing your job' as you not working enough. They want you to go 'above and beyond' and 'dedicate yourself to the mission' with 'passion'. Hence, quiet quitting.

Exactly. I don't know who created this term, but its a real bastard when the meaning is "doing your job".

It's a way for some people to try and reinforce the hustle culture status quo that doing unpaid labour for your employer, even to the detriment of your own physical or mental health is a moral or worthy goal that will definitely (maybe) be rewarded. Label/name it in a way that seems derogatory and many people will make the implicit assumption that it's derogatory for a good reason

> "doing the absolute smallest amount you can get away with without getting noticed and subsequently fired."

The delta between that and "normal work as required" depends hugely on the job type and company culture. If you're flipping burgers, that difference may well be zero - if you're working as a programmer, it may be huge.

Personally I suspect Quiet Quitting is a quasi-immune response to an employer's expectation that your job should be your life's main activity. Again, how well justified that expectation is comes in a huge spectrum.

In a recession, this response is (reasonably) heightened by an inability to enjoy the economic or personal benefits that an employee expects to come with "giving 110%" for the company.

> Fulfilling my duties but not doing overtime

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might even suspect that the term "quiet quitting" was actually coined by people who were cynically looking for a way to goad people to work more unpaid overtime.

On top of that, using the term "millennial" to refer to "kids these days". A lot of millennials are pushing forty, own houses, and have multiple kids now.

To add on: some millennials have kids who are adults. finishing college and starting families of their own.

We're reaching a point where "boomer" and "millennial" lose all meaning and are just catch-all terms for "the olds" and "these kids".

I had a conversation with my wife about this just about a week ago. We have a different background (America vs Europe, me being Europe). When she explained “Quiet quitting” to me, my reaction was the same as yours. Quiet Quitting is just doing the job which you are paid for. Which to me is perfectly reasonable.

Culture probably plays a role here. Like that joke about an American making calls / texting for work while in the hospital, and a European taking 4 weeks vacation for the summer, just dropping everything work related.

In the programming world, there is no clear definition of just "doing your job". Two programmers can both work 8 hour days, doing their best work, and one can literally provide 10x or more value than the other. It seems like in programming the only definition of "doing your job" is "do your best".

With such a range of skills and loose definitions, it it is almost impossible to tell who is doing their job and who isn't.

In creative fields - it's hard to define, but engineering is not exactly an open ended profession. We as programmers have a clear objective to get to. The ways of getting there are different, but it's akin to asking a portrait painter to paint a portrait - the result isn't a novel impressionist painting.

It was never about "doing the smallest", it's a result of corporate culture demanding that you work extra as part of your job.

Which results in people saying that "quietly quitting" is "doing the smallest", when it's actually just sticking strictly to your contract obligations.

I think the issue is that articles are trying to tie something that is a mentality to something physical. My analogy for quiet quitting is the lame duck time after you've put in your two weeks but extending that to full time. It's doing your duties, but not being engaged; going to meetings, but not participating; doing your job per say, but reducing your role to absolute minimal possible. You have mentally checked out from the job and your team, more so than normal or what is expected at a position.