thoughts on quiet quitting
- Quiet quitting presents another example of how people's optimization objectives change as the needs of society change.
- Today, we don't really want people to be ambitious anymore. And that's exactly what's happening! A lot of people are just becoming willing to just do the minimal work necessary to get by, and live out their lives otherwise.
- Note that this is not universal by any means.
- For instance, people working in finance/management related areas: IB, consulting, trading
- Here, there's a lot of work to be done still in organizing society the way it needs to be organized.
The question remains of: what is the mechanism by which these changes occur?
- Labor vs management/capital power: this is the traditional explanation for why people are quiet quitting, switching jobs, and in general exercising less caution, more freedom in their career choices
- Is this the only possible conclusion, though, from labor gaining power? The other conclusion is unionization: still working hard, but for more pay.
- The difference is that in software, people are already getting paid plenty. They just want to work less.
- On the other hand, in investment banking for instance, people have always treated it as just a stepping stone onto a further career as management. There's therefore this inherent competitiveness.
- Compare this with a company/industry with a more flat structure: where engineer 2 and engineer 6 really don't have maybe that different of a role. And the pay at engineer 2 is already really good.
- Related:
- Locally Meaningful, Globally Meaningless - a Call to Action for the Future of Work: this is another example of a way in which we can start reducing the productive output of each individual person
- progress is whatever makes a society want to expand and conquer
To summarize, I wanted to understand quiet quitting in the light of my recent thinking on progress and the future of work. In particular, that people's objective functions are updated based on society's needs. Instead of engineering the hamiltonian, it seems like in these instances, the Hamiltonian engineers itself.