Act Your Wage is the New Meme as Career Ambitions Plunge – Mish Talk

Less Ambitious Workers and the New Work Order

For many workers the days of unpaid overtime and weekend work is gone. Work your wage has replaced quiet quitting as the new meme forcing employers to add more people to finish projects.

The Wall Street Journal reports Your Coworkers Are Less Ambitious; Bosses Adjust to the New Order

At law firm Nixon Peabody LLP, associates have started saying no to working weekends, prompting partners to ask more people to help complete time-sensitive work. TGS Insurance in Texas has struggled to fill promotions, and bosses often have to coax staffers to apply. And Maine-based marketing company Pulp+Wire plans to shut down for two weeks next year now that staffers are taking more vacation than they used to.

“The passion that we used to see in work is lower now, and you find it in fewer people—at least in the last two years,” says Sumithra Jagannath, president of ZED Digital, which makes digital ticket scanners. The company, based in Columbus, Ohio, recently moved about 20 remote engineering and marketing roles to Canada and India, where she said it’s easier to find talent who will go above and beyond.

In a November survey of more than 3,000 workers and managers by software firm Qualtrics, 36% said their overall career ambitions had waned over the past three years, compared with 22% who said their ambition had increased. Nearly 40% said work had become less important to them in the past three years, while 25% said it had grown more important, according to researchers at Qualtrics, which provides software to businesses to evaluate customer and employee experiences. 

In an American Bar Association survey of nearly 2,000 members this year, 44% of young lawyers said they would leave their jobs for a greater ability to work remotely elsewhere.