Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive.
If you "quiet quit" you're still working for someone you hate. They still own you.
Instead, you could ACTUAL QUIT and start a business. Then you work for yourself, who you hopefully don't hate as much, and you have the power to define how things are done. So if you think developers shouldn't be replaced by LLMs or whatever, then you can... not do that. I have zero doubt in my mind that that will be a niche somewhere in the global economy for many years to come.
Also you might make a lot of money. Make enough and you're basically free from all these assholes. It doesn't actually take a ton of money when you own 100%. You pretty quickly get to a point where you can start telling off any wanker you want to, but you don't even feel the need, you are your own boss, so you just walk away from them and deal with whoever you want to deal with instead.
Trust me, speaking from experience, this is 1,000,000% better than "quiet quitting" which is pretty much remaining a corporate serf, just the most useless and pussy one in somebody else's room. Of course it's harder, most people who try it fail, real economics, real laws and real people will call you out pretty fast if you don't do things that people other than you think are valuable!
Unless something has changed, "quiet quitting" means "do only what the job requires". Arrive at 9, leave at 5, no out-of-hours work functions, etc. It's more a return to normalcy, but with a bad name because it comes from a generation who has always been told they have to go above and beyond to succeed alongside a corporate culture that tries to lure people into work by making it more of a social experience.
> Don't take it personal. All business want to reduce costs. As long as people cost money, they'll want to reduce people.
"Don't take it personal" does not feed the starving and does not house the unhoused. An economic system that over-indexes on profit at the expense of the vast majority of its people will eventually fail. If capitalism can't evolve to better provide opportunities for people to live while the capital-owning class continues to capture a disproportionate share of created economic value, the system will eventually break.
You're absolutely correct on that. The technology industry, at least the segment driven by VC (which is a huge portion of it), is funded based on ideas that the capital-owning class thinks is a good idea. Reducing labor costs is always an easy sell when you're trying to raise a round.
Even in boring development jobs. For example, one of my first development jobs was for a large hospital, building an intranet app to make nurse rounds more efficient so they didn't have to hire as many.
Some businesses want to reduce costs. Some want to tackle the challenge of using resources available in the most profitable manner, including making their employees grow to better contribute in tackling tomorrow's challenges.
A business leader board that only consider people as costs are looking at the world through sociopath lenses.
