The idea behind quiet quitting is based around the idea of shooting for a 3 on a scale of 1-to-5 instead of shooting for a 4 or 5: AFTER management has dropped the ball and failed to acknowledge their efforts. People have twisted this to mean "I am going to do the bare minimum without getting fired" -- these people very quickly end up on PIPs or equivalent at many other companies, not just stricter employers like Amazon.

As an aside, it doesn't really make sense to quiet quit as a SWE for the sole reason of there still a ton of career upside for those who do good work[1]. If you're thinking of quiet quitting you probably just need a better employer.

[1] "Good work" as in people who actually get stuff done and produce good software, not those who merely just grind long hours to impress founders.

"I have six bosses bob, my only real motivation is not to get hassled that and fear of losing my job. But here's the thing bob, that gets someone to work just hard enough to avoid getting fired." - Office Space

8, not 6 :) [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwlZQJyKZ2A

(I am pedantic, but also I just watched Office Space two days ago.)

“Quiet Quitting” is a wildly over-dramatic name for just doing your job at a “meets-expectations” level.

Thank you for this sentence that helps to correct my perspective. Not everyone is aiming high, some just want to go home and tend e.g. to their garden or walk the dog.

Or, you know, have energy leftover for their family

> They were compensated toward the top of market (considering all tech companies) while they were employed.

Yea but no. This isn’t about Amazon, it’s about business culture writ large. Also not everyone at Amazon is a software engineer, and therefore it paid crazy amounts.

> When some “quiet quits” it’s usually their peers who pay the price because the absentee coworker isn’t get their part of the team project done

Quiet quitting is simply doing your job but not being a “try-hard” and not trying to get ahead or go above-and-beyond. It’s a lack of loyalty and treating your job as a trade of exactly 8hrs with a paycheck. If your coworker wasn’t doing their work, they didn’t quiet quit.

> It’s the coworkers who bear the brunt.

Sounds like a manager (company) treating workers poorly. If a factory had people quit and expected everyone else work extra hours, it’d be a labor violation. If they’re doing that to knowledge workers we say it’s laziness?

Conversely, if you had a coworker who worked 8 hours a day, did their job, and didn’t try to give extra, you shouldn’t fall behind unless management had exploitative expectations.

(Source: I have a soul and work. Managers tried to make me suffer greatly at times).

>If a factory had people quit and expected everyone else work extra hours

Extra hours to cover is fairly common in factory work. What differentiated it in my experience is there was a union to ensure people were adequately compensated for overtime.

And that means that companies are incentivised to hire adequately. Whereas companies see no immediate (and attributable, this is important) problems when exempt employees are pushed to work overtime.

Ehh…from my experience, overtime was the rule, not the exception so I don’t know how strong that incentive was.

Isn't getting PIP'd and then fired not, "bare minimum to not get fired" though?

Sounds like those folks are doing much less than required not to be fired.

My understanding of "quiet quitting" was

a) it's a stupid term made up to give people a sense that they're in control of something they're not - needing to work to survive and;

b) you were explicitly not trying to climb any ladder and merely doing your job as it was described, not shooting for promotions or accolades of any kind.

"Quiet quit" team members are 100% fine to have around IMO, as long as they stay out of the way of the folks trying to take on the larger/harder problems. That's the thing I reject about modern workplaces: this idea that everyone has to be "progressing" or "climbing" all the time.

It's totally cool to punch in/punch out 9-5, it just needs to be clear that's what the role is, and how much that reduces your ability to determine what it is you work on during those hours.

I’m pretty sure I first saw “quiet quitting” coming from, like, the productivity fetishist LinkedIn set, or something along those lines (although I could be wrong, this was not allocated a high-priority sector of memory). Which is to say, I think it is a term originally intended to shame employees who are simply fulfilling their responsibilities. I guess it has been reclaimed or something, though?

"Quiet quitting" is just derogatory term to say "not working unpaid overtime"

> Companies plan for where the market is going, not last quarter’s results. It’s fully clear to everyone that the economy has shifted dramatically. They are adjusting as appropriate.

It goes both ways. If you planned so poorly and hired so fast that a minor perturbation in the market causes you to fire 17,000 people, you're still communicating that you putting profits above people.

17K people is about 1% of total employees. While each of these job losses matters a lot to the people involved, a 1% reduction in the face of what is surely more than a 10% change in medium-term projections is hardly proof of crazy over-hiring or terrible planning.

There’s no doubt that Amazon puts profits over people. They’re a profit-seeking enterprise (and a fairly effective one at that).

>minor perturbation

What are you defining as a "minor perturbation"? Because if they're responding to the last 12 mos., the NASDAQ is down 33%. Definitely not minor.

> They have Amazon on their resume

the parent comment talks about "these companies". what happens when less prominent companies take a cue from fangs and start booting people out, only with crappier severance and crappier resumes? this is far from the last layoff.

You make sure you have savings and don’t depend on the benevolence of any company…

And network, network, network!

In my whole career it was very rare that someone from my network helped. All calls for help would be met with a polite "sure" and then went missing. Some give me a lecture on how to lower my expectations or something else.

My “network” includes external recruiters. I’ve met them for lunch, in their office etc.

Mostly boutique shops. I only dealt with local recruiters in my former city (Atlanta) before remote work got to be big. I haven’t looked for a job post Covid.

Hopefully, I will never have to look for a job again. When I leave my current job - hopefully by choice - I will be semi-retired and doing consulting gigs (not staff augmentation).

Ironically, I work for the very company that this article is about. But, I work in the consulting department at AWS. There is a direct easy to measure metric of how much my work contributes to the bottom line compared to my compensation - I’m a billable consultant.

I think people have differing opinions on what a "network" means.

Some people define their network as professionals they know, even casually. That type of network isn't particularly useful. Other networks are people that you've provided some value to in some way so they know you're a valuable resource. Often, this means going out of your way to show value when there's little in it for you. That type of network is much more valuable because you've formed a relationship that goes beyond just "knowing a guy."

> Companies plan for where the market is going, not last quarter’s results.

Yet all of these companies overhired, which led to the current problem.

> It’s fully clear to everyone that the economy has shifted dramatically.

I don't think that's fully clear.

> They have Amazon on their resume

resumes.LastOrDefault();

> (Source: Had some “quiet quit” team members over my career, suffered greatly during those times)

Quiet quitting are people doing their job. If you suffered, it's because you were expecting slave labor.

I don't understand why Netflix is part of FAANG. We should take it out of the acronym.

This is why: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/netflix/salaries/software-e...

It's only one product that does one thing: shows videos. It's huge and great but I still think we should replace it with AirBnb, which also has high salaries, in the acronym.

The number of products produced by a given company has never been part of the definition of FANG. And the exact companies in the acronym don't really matter anymore anyway; the overall 'vibe' of it is simply top-tier tech companies, i.e. those that pay the most. Agreed that AirBnb should also qualify, but the exact companies that fit are fluid and it doesn't make sense to keep changing the acronym all the time as the constituent companies change, as the overall idea doesn't change. E.g. consider the Dow Jones index; the constituent companies have changed over time but the name of the index doesn't.

So FAANG is defined by nothing more than tech + high salary? Why wouldn't, say, a high paying fintech be included?

I think the real answer is that those companies were all high growth/high cap stocks. The guy who originally coined the term (Jim Cramer) has dropped Netflix from the list because their capitalization hasn't kept pace. (He also changed the acronym when Facebook was changed to meta)

It has a life of its own way beyond Jim Cramer these days (also Jim Cramer is pretty terrible at being a pundit overall).

As for fintech companies, it's just a different field, with different norms, expectations, and overall pay structure. It's also a much smaller field in total.