Career & Ambition2w ago · 54 comments
Is 'quiet quitting' just laziness with a nicer name, or healthy boundaries?
Doing your job and nothing more — refusing to live for work. Slacking off, or finally seeing the scam clearly?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your comment- Leo2w ago
I watched my dad work himself into a heart attack at 54 for a company that laid him off eight months before his pension vested. So yeah, forgive me if I don't give my soul to an employer.
- Noah2w ago
respectfully, the 'my dad had a heart attack' stories, while sad, are not an economic argument. personal tragedy ≠ policy
- Casey K.2w ago
Telling someone their dead father's sacrifice isn't an argument is incredibly cold and also completely misses the point. It's DATA. It's what actually happens at scale to people who sacrifice everything for a company.
- Theo _x3d ago
My grandfather worked in a steel mill for 35 years. Never once used the phrase 'setting boundaries.' He just worked his shift, went home to his family, coached little league, grew tomatoes, and died at 84 surrounded by people who loved him. We invented a problem and now we're selling each other the solution.
- Theo1w ago
This whole debate assumes everyone works a desk job. I'm a nurse. 'Quiet quitting' in my field means patients don't get turned, meds come late, and people literally die. Context matters enormously.
- Morgan B.1w ago
The nurse example is important but it's also an argument for PAYING NURSES MORE and HIRING ADEQUATE STAFF, not an argument that workers owe infinite discretionary effort to their employers.
- Elena2d ago
I spent four years going above and beyond at a startup. Stock options, they said. Ground floor opportunity, they said. Company folded in 2022 and the founders are now raising seed money for their next venture. I will never again donate my ambition to someone else's equity. Never. Again.
- Elena1w ago
The real scam is that we're all arguing about whether workers should do MORE while the shareholders just... collect. No one's writing think-pieces about investors 'quiet quitting' their social responsibility.
- Yuki4d ago
I manage a team of 14 people and honestly? The ones who 'quiet quit' are often the most stable performers. They show up, they deliver, they don't burn out and disappear for three weeks in February. The ones going 150% are usually the ones I'm writing crisis plans around by Q3.
- Omar4d ago
respectfully disagree with the top comment here. i've managed people who 'just do their job' and some of them genuinely drag team morale. not because theyre lazy, but because teams require some mutual investment that goes beyond literal job descriptions. it's not feudalism to want colleagues who care a bit.
- Riley4d ago
caring about your colleagues and giving free labor to a corporation are two completely different things and mixing them up is exactly the rhetorical trick that keeps people chained to their desks at 9pm
- Maya5d ago
The real thing that bothers me about 'just doing your job' being called lazy is the implication that employers are OWED unpaid time and energy above and beyond the contract. That's feudal thinking with a LinkedIn coat of paint.
- Marco2w ago
There's a difference between 'I won't be exploited' and 'I'll coast and resent everyone who doesn't.' Half this thread is the second one in disguise.
- Taylor 922w ago
The term 'quiet quitting' was invented by management consultants and HR departments specifically to make normal employment behavior sound like betrayal. Think about that for a second.
- Morgan 921d ago
The wildest thing to me is that 'quiet quitting' implies you're quitting something. You're not. You're fulfilling a legal contract. Imagine if we called 'paying exactly what's on the invoice' quiet stealing. That's how backwards the framing is.
- Drew S.2w ago
Gave a company 150% for six years. Got a pizza party and a 2% raise. Now I give 100% and go home. They taught me this, not TikTok.
- Marco1w ago
Former recruiter here. The 'go above and beyond' candidates who burned brightest almost always flamed out within 2-3 years. The steady, boundaried ones? Still there a decade later. Tortoise beats hare, sustainably.
- Nina1d ago
Hot take: the people most loudly calling quiet quitters lazy are either owners/managers who benefit from unpaid effort, or people who've tied their entire identity to their job and feel personally threatened by anyone opting out of that bargain. Neither is a neutral position. Check your incentives before you check someone else's work ethic.
- Nina5d ago
three months ago i was on a PIP for 'not demonstrating sufficient commitment.' i was hitting every single metric. every. single. one. quiet quitting isn't laziness, sometimes it's refusing to perform loyalty theater for people who don't deserve it
- Sam4d ago
The fact that 'loyalty theater' is a phrase we all immediately understand says everything.
- Sam2w ago
What kills me is that the same executives preaching 'go above and beyond' are the ones who cut entire departments without a second of lost sleep. The loyalty only goes one direction, friend.
- Maya K.2d ago
The 'tomatoes and little league' framing is lovely but your grandfather wasn't expected to be reachable on Slack at 11pm or perform passion during a video interview or build a personal brand on LinkedIn. The job has metastasized. The grandfather comparison only works if you admit the job changed first.
- Iris4d ago
At some point we have to admit that an economy built on the premise that workers must perpetually exceed their compensation to be considered 'good employees' is just... structurally extractive. That's not a personal failing. That's a system design.
- Reese1w ago
Can we stop pretending 'the market' is some neutral judge? The market also said asbestos was fine, child labor was efficient, and opioids were safe. The market is just whoever has power right now.
- Iris1w ago
I'm a manager and I'll be honest: I don't want people who 'go above and beyond' indefinitely. I want people who do excellent, focused work and then STOP so they show up recharged tomorrow. Burnout costs me far more than boundaries do.
- Diego M.2w ago
Hard disagree with the 'market is brutally honest' comment above. The market rewards visibility and self-promotion, not actual output. I've seen absolute mediocre performers get promoted because they stayed late being SEEN staying late.
- Theo4d ago
The terminology is doing so much heavy lifting here. 'Quiet quitting' was INVENTED by management consultants and media to pathologize normal contract adherence. If we called it 'working as agreed' this entire discourse evaporates. Language is politics.
- Sam2w ago
'Quiet quitting' is just... doing your job. We let companies rebrand 'not working unpaid overtime' as a moral failing. Wild.
- Nina1w ago
The fact that we need a name for 'doing exactly what you were hired to do and not a single thing more' tells you everything about how badly work culture got distorted.
- Morgan1w ago
started doing 'quiet quitting' during covid. got promoted twice in three years because I was consistently delivering clear, defined results instead of the performative busyness my colleagues were drowning in. turns out quality beats quantity of hours
- Omar _x2d ago
There's a genuinely interesting class dimension nobody's talking about. 'Quiet quitting' as a philosophical choice is mostly available to people with stable enough employment that coasting doesn't risk eviction. For workers in precarious jobs — gig, hourly, seasonal — there's no safe floor to settle on. The discourse is largely a salaried-professional conversation cosplaying as universal.
- Morgan L.2w ago
both sides of this debate are pretending the economy is the same as it was 30 years ago. wages have been functionally stagnant since the 70s when adjusted for productivity. workers gave MORE. they got LESS. the math is settled.
- Nina6d ago
I manage a small team. Honestly? I'd rather someone tell me they're unhappy and negotiate scope than quietly disengage. The communication breakdown is what actually damages teams, not the boundaries themselves.
- Elena 925d ago
Easy to say as a manager with the power to hear that conversation without retaliation. A lot of us have seen what happens when you tell a manager you're overwhelmed. Spoiler: you don't get help, you get flagged.
- Jamie1w ago
in my country (south korea) we have a term 'nopo' for this — giving up on career ambition entirely. it's not laziness. people are doing the math and the math doesn't add up. this is global not just american tiktok drama
- Yuki1w ago
I actually went the other way. Started quiet quitting, hated who I was becoming — bitter, clock-watching, resentful. Changed jobs instead. Sometimes the answer isn't 'do less here,' it's 'go somewhere better.'
- Taylor1w ago
I think the more honest version of this debate is: 'Is your employer keeping their side of the implicit bargain?' If yes, going above and beyond is reasonable. If no, enforcing strict scope is self-defense. There's no universal answer.
- Avery1w ago
This is the comment I've been waiting for in this thread. The binary framing — either you grind OR you're lazy — hides the actual variable, which is whether the employment relationship is actually fair.
- Nina _x2w ago
ok but some of y'all are using 'boundaries' to justify genuinely not doing your job. like showing up late, missing deadlines, ignoring teammates. that's not a boundary that's just being bad at work
- Ravi5d ago
The most honest take here is that this debate is really a proxy for a bigger question: is your labor worth more than what you're being paid? Almost certainly yes for most people. Everything else follows from that.
- Iris K.4d ago
okay but nobody is saying you have to sacrifice yourself on the altar of your employer. the question is whether you're actually fulfilled. doing the bare minimum at a job you hate so you can go home and watch netflix isn't a revolution, it's just... a slow grey life. aim higher than spite.
- Yuki1d ago
this is actually a great point and i never thought about it this way. quiet quitting requires a safety net. which means it's also partly a privilege.
- Hana L.1w ago
Every generation thinks they discovered work-life balance. Boomers called it 'punching out at 5.' Gen X had the 'slacker' era. Millennials called it minimalism. Now it's quiet quitting. Same sentiment, new packaging.
- Zara6d ago
The difference is that each generation has had to name it LOUDER because the counter-pressure from hustle culture keeps getting stronger. It's not the same. It's an arms race.
- Ravi S.1w ago
I'll say the quiet part loud: a lot of people calling this 'healthy boundaries' are in jobs they hate and are coasting while their coworkers pick up the slack. That's not a political statement, that's just what I watch happen every week in my office.
- Zara1w ago
Okay but your 'coworkers picking up slack' framing — WHO DECIDED THERE WAS SLACK? If one person is finishing their defined responsibilities and another is taking on three people's jobs, the problem is management's workload allocation, not the first person's refusal to compensate for it.
- Jordan L.1w ago
Counterpoint: some of us genuinely love our work and voluntarily put in extra hours because it's fulfilling. Are we ruining it for everyone? I didn't realize my enthusiasm was oppressive.
- Morgan K.1w ago
Nobody said your enthusiasm is oppressive?? The issue is when companies set the STANDARD at 'enthusiastically overworked' and then treat people who do the literal job description as underperformers. Two different things.
- Zara5d ago
unpopular opinion but 'I do exactly what's in my job description and nothing else' as a PERMANENT life strategy sounds exhausting in a different way. like, never being invested in anything? that sounds hollow to me personally
- Marco5d ago
Who said it's permanent? For many people it's a survival strategy while they build something on the side, study for a qualification, or just recover from years of burnout. Don't project a whole philosophy onto what is sometimes just triage.
- Taylor R.2w ago
Call it boundaries all you want, but the person who does the bare minimum gets passed over by the one who doesn't. The market is brutally honest.
More debates people can't stop arguing about
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Netflix's 'Adolescence' shows a teenage boy becoming a killer — did the show actually get modern boyhood right, or did it miss the point entirely?
109 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Is judging someone by their height as shallow as judging by their weight?
108 comments