Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1vr90tk/quiet_quitting_when_deliberately_understaffed/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/antiwork by /u/wu-tang-killa-peas on 2026-08-17 23:53:49+00:00.

Need serious advice. In software industry. Our whole company has gone the “let half the people go and tell the remaining half to make up the difference with AI and some good ol’ hard work, late nights and weekends.” Or something.

The C-suite doesn’t care how the work gets done, just that the same output as before is accomplished after losing maybe 40-50% of the people who do real work. Their mantra is “you are empowered figure it out your own way (but here are the expectations and surprise it’s the same as when we had twice as many people).

Did I also mention the CEO makes 3 million + other incentives and the rest of the C-suite is also well compensated and their only duties are making shitty decisions with no idea what the people in the trenches do day-in-day-out?

I really want to quiet quit, let stories roll, let bugs take time to fix, let production pods crash. I’d love to see leadership get burned by their shitty decisions.

The problem is I’m on a small knit team and some of the “younglings” are just putting their heads down, working, stressed, and working more. I feel like I don’t want to sacrifice my nights and weekends because the person responsible for cutting people still takes home millions (and sure as hell doesn’t work past 5pm on weekdays).

But if I quiet quit, my young enthusiastic colleagues will just end up picking up my slack since they seem to lack the jadedness to see why they are so stressed and don’t realize it’s crazy and if we work tons of unpaid overtime we are rewarding leaderships decision to cut headcount by working extra to make up the difference.

Anyone else ever face this kind of situation?

I’m just so tired, burned out, pissed about my 1% raise for working so hard when “leadership” makes short sighted decisions that actively hurts the company, lays off tons of people, collects well over a million a year, and wants us to get up and cheer for them during town halls like a dumb fucking seal that just got tossed a fish during the Seaworld show.