Grumpy Coworker

  • Quiet Shitting: The Ancient Art of Paid Porcelain Time

    Look, we’ve seen a lot of workplace terms come and go. “Synergy.” “Agile.” “Growth hacking.” And now everyone’s clutching their pearls over “quiet quitting” like it’s some revolutionary Gen Z invention. Please. These kids discovered setting boundaries and suddenly you think they’re leading a communist revolution. You know what their grandparents invented? Quiet shitting.

    That’s right. For every thinkpiece about “acting your wage” and “doing the bare minimum,” there were three generations before the current one who perfected the art of the 45-minute bathroom break. And let me tell you, they didn’t need a TikTok to figure it out.

    Your grandfather worked in a factory for 32 years. You think he spent eight hours a day riveting widgets with a smile on his face? Hell no. He spent at least 90 minutes of every shift in that bathroom, and not because of the cafeteria meatloaf. He called it “decompression time.” Management called it “concerning.” His union called it “protected.”

    The bathroom break is the original quiet quit. It’s the Switzerland of workplace passive aggression: technically neutral, completely defensible, and occupied by people who just want to be left the hell alone.

    The Golden Age of Bathroom Avoidance

    Boomers love to talk about their work ethic, but nobody could stretch a bio-break like a 1970s middle manager with a newspaper and a grudge. These weren’t quick pit stops. These were expeditions. Lewis and Clark spent less time exploring the Louisiana Purchase than Clark Griswold’s peers spent in Stall 3 avoiding quarterly reviews.

    You’d see someone grab the sports section at 10:15 AM and know you wouldn’t see them again until 11:00. And God help you if you needed something from them. “Oh, Dave? Yeah, he’s in a meeting.” A meeting with his bowels and the crossword puzzle. Also, if you notice a section of the newspaper goes missing and then later reappears, just assume it’s touched the bathroom floor and/or been handled after a wipe.

    Gen X took it to new levels. They brought magazines. Then Game Boys. Then the first smartphones. One thing to watch out for… if they bring a change of shoes, they’re probably moving into that stall like its a studio apartment.


    The Economics of Excretion

    Here’s the math everyone knows but nobody talks about: if you take one 15-minute bathroom break every day beyond your actual biological needs, that’s 65 hours a year. At $25 an hour, you’re paying yourself an extra $1,625 annually to sit on a toilet and scroll through your phone.

    Your great-grandfather knew this. He just did it with a racing form instead of Instagram.

    The difference is, he felt vaguely guilty about it. He’d come back looking sheepish, maybe mention something about the chili from lunch. There was at least a performance of remorse. Now? Now people are writing Medium posts about “reclaiming your time” and “setting bathroom boundaries.”

    The Passive-Aggressive Olympics

    You know what the most passive-aggressive move is? The post-meeting bathroom break. Someone says something annoying in the conference room, and suddenly you need to “freshen up” for 20 minutes. It’s the workplace equivalent of leaving someone on read, except you’re getting paid for it.

    And the beauty is, it’s completely bulletproof. What’s your boss going to do? Install a timer? Monitor stall occupancy? Stand outside with a stopwatch? HR would have a field day. “Yes, officer, my manager was tracking my bowel movements” is one hell of a lawsuit waiting to happen. Yeah, I know that several companies with trillion dollar market caps basically do do this. Heh. “Do do.”


    The Modern Era

    Now we’ve got people working from home, and even that hasn’t stopped the tradition. We’ve been on Zoom calls where someone’s camera goes off and you just know they’re not “stepping away briefly.” They’re taking a full constitutional while technically still clocked in. It’s remote quiet shitting, and honestly, I respect the innovation. Just don’t flush off mu… oh no, Bob, your avatar lit up with that flushing sound.

    The real quiet quitters aren’t the ones doing the bare minimum at their desks. They’re the ones who’ve calculated exactly how long they can disappear without triggering a wellness check. They’re the ones who know which bathroom on which floor has the best cell service. They’re the institutional knowledge holders of strategic bowel timing.

    In Conclusion

    So before anyone tells me about how revolutionary it is to only do what you’re paid for, remember: your ancestors were pioneering workplace disengagement one bathroom break at a time, long before you could hashtag it.

    They just had the decency to pretend they had diarrhea.

  • Stack Shanking

    Stack ranking (see Vitality Curve)

    Constantly replacing (or threatening replacement of) the bottom performers on an annual basis seems like incremental optimization. So you get two classes of performers replaced: Ones in a long term slump and ones that are persistent performance problems/bad fits. If you’re looking at machinery, then being unable to distinguish between the temporarily malfunctioning and the permanently broken is of no major consequence. But with humans, if they are temporarily malfunctioning due to life circumstances, personal issues, or recovering from burnout, you’ve just discarded someone who likely has institutional knowledge, established relationships, and could return to being a high performer.

    The real problem is that stack ranking treats your workforce like a statistical distribution that must maintain its shape regardless of actual performance. Got a team of eight excellent engineers? Sorry, two of them are now “bottom performers” by definition. Hired nothing but rockstars this year? Congratulations, some of your rockstars are now officially mediocre.

    This creates perverse incentives. Smart employees learn to avoid teams with other high performers. Why join the infrastructure team full of senior engineers when you could join the feature team with a couple of passengers? You’ll rank higher, and ranking is what matters at review time.

    The statistical absurdity compounds when you realize that the bottom 10% getting cut this year might have been middle-of-the-pack last year, and could be top performers next year—but they’ll never get the chance because we needed to satisfy our quota of ritualistic firings. We’re not optimizing for performance; we’re optimizing for the appearance of optimization, which is a very different thing.

    Meanwhile, the stack ranking process itself consumes enormous amounts of management time that could be spent on actual work. Managers spend weeks arguing over whether Sarah deserves a 3 or a 4, while the real problems—unclear requirements, technical debt, process inefficiencies—remain unaddressed.

    And let’s talk about what happens to team dynamics. The moment you tell people they’re competing against their teammates for survival, collaboration dies. Why would I help you solve that gnarly bug when it might make you rank higher than me? Why would I share that clever solution when keeping it to myself might be the difference between keeping my job and losing it?

    Stack ranking is management by spreadsheet, the corporate equivalent of deciding which child to abandon based on their last report card.

  • Congrats on the Trillion, Bro – Hope It Buys You a New Personality

    Oh, for the love of—here we go again with Captain Planet over here getting another galactic jackpot while the rest of us are fighting over the last stale donut in the break room. Apparently the board looked at a guy who’s already got more money than every god combined and said, “You know what this dude needs? Another cool trillion. Yeah, let’s just yeet a trillion dollars at him like it’s a participation trophy for showing up and tweeting memes at 3 a.m.”

    Meanwhile, Susan in accounting hasn’t had a working space heater since 2019 and HR told her to “layer up.” LAYER UP. It’s negative four degrees in her cubicle, Karen, she’s not training for the Iditarod.

    And the excuses! Oh my god, the excuses are richer than the man himself. “He created so much shareholder value!” Yeah, cool, so did the guy who invented the McFlurry machine that actually works for once, where’s HIS trillion? “He’s a once-in-a-lifetime genius!” Buddy, I’ve seen this dude try to pronounce “worcestershire” sauce—there’s no lifetime genius there, just lifetime Wi-Fi money.

    The vote was basically a room full of yes-men in $5,000 sneakers nodding so hard their AirPods fell out. “All in favor of giving the guy who owns the company more money than the GDP of Europe?” Every hand shoots up like they’re trying to flag down a waiter at a crypto conference. Democracy in action, baby.

    But sure, tell me again how “no one works harder.” Bro, I’ve seen this man’s sleep schedule—it’s just Red Bull and spite. I work hard too; I once answered 47 Slack messages while on the toilet. Where’s my trillion? Exactly.

    So yeah, congrats on the trillion, champ. Hope it keeps you warm when the rest of us are burning our performance reviews for heat. Enjoy counting it—I hear it only takes about 31,700 years if you count one dollar per second. Don’t strain yourself.

  • RE: When Your Boss Makes More Money Than God (And That’s Apparently “Market Rate”)

    You know what’s wild? I’ve been in tech for decades now, and I’ve watched a lot of ridiculous compensation packages get approved. But there’s something uniquely insulting about watching a board of directors look at a number with so many zeros that Excel switches to scientific notation and going “yeah, this seems reasonable for like, four years of work.”


    The justification is always the same tired song: “unprecedented value creation.” As if value just spontaneously generates from one person’s brain without, you know, the tens of thousands of engineers actually building the products. As if stock price going up is purely a function of executive genius and not market conditions, government subsidies, investor hype, and the labor of people who’ll never see a fraction of that wealth.


    And here’s the kicker – the shareholders voted for it. Again. After a court already said “this is so absurd it violates fiduciary duty.” But hey, let’s just vote again until we get the answer we want, right? That’s definitely how good governance works.


    What really gets me is the argument that “if we don’t pay this, he might leave.” Brother, WHERE IS HE GOING TO GO? To start another company? Great! Do it! See how well it goes without the infrastructure, the brand recognition, the existing customer base, and the thousands of employees who actually make things work. There’s this mythology that certain executives are so uniquely valuable that they deserve compensation equivalent to a medium-sized country’s GDP, and it’s just… exhausting.


    Meanwhile, back on earth, the rest of us are told there’s no budget for cost-of-living adjustments. That layoffs are necessary for “operational efficiency.” That we need to “do more with less.” But somehow there’s always money for executive compensation packages that would make Croesus blush.


    The really infuriating part is watching people defend it with “but he took stock options, not cash!” as if that makes it better. Stock options ARE compensation. They have value. Massive, incomprehensible value. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.


    I’m tired, folks. I’m tired of watching wealth concentrate at levels that would have embarrassed robber barons. I’m tired of the reality distortion field around executive compensation. And I’m especially tired of boards that are supposed to represent shareholder interests acting like a rubber stamp factory.


    But sure, let’s keep pretending this is normal and fine and just how business works.


    [sips cold coffee and returns to actually working]

  • The “Quick Call” Lie: A Field Guide to Time Theft

    Look, I need to talk about something that’s been grinding my gears since the invention of the telephone, but has reached absolutely apocalyptic levels in the Slack/Teams/Zoom era: the “quick call.”

    You know the one. It starts innocently enough:

    “Hey, got a minute for a quick call?”

    NO. No, I don’t. Because we both know it’s not going to be quick. It’s NEVER quick. It’s a lie we tell ourselves and each other, like “I’ll just have one drink” or “I’ll start going to the gym next Monday.”

    The Anatomy of the “Quick” Call

    Let’s break down what actually happens when someone suggests a “quick call”:

    Minute 0-3: You’re scrambling to find your headphones because they’ve mysteriously teleported to another dimension since you last used them. You finally locate them tangled with your phone charger in a knot that would impress a Boy Scout.

    Minute 3-5: The actual dialing/joining process. Because someone—and let’s be honest, it’s always Greg from Marketing—can’t figure out how to unmute, can’t find the link, or is “having audio issues.” We can land rovers on Mars but Greg can’t click the microphone icon.

    Minute 5-7: The small talk. “How was your weekend?” “Did you see the game?” “Crazy weather we’re having!” Nobody cares. We’re all pretending to care, but we’re actually screaming internally because we KNOW this was supposed to be quick and we’re already seven minutes in WITHOUT DISCUSSING THE ACTUAL TOPIC.

    Minute 7-12: Finally getting to the point, except the point could have been an email. It’s always something that could have been an email. “I just wanted to get your thoughts on this thing that’s not time-sensitive and has seventeen moving parts that I’m now explaining verbally while you frantically try to take notes instead of just READING THE DOCUMENT I COULD HAVE SENT.”

    Minute 12-20: The scope creep. “Oh, and while I have you…” NO. No, you don’t “have me.” You HAD me for a quick call. This is now a medium call approaching long-call territory, and I had things planned. Important things. Like staring blankly at my actual work while contemplating the heat death of the universe.

    Minute 20-25: The ending that won’t end. You’ve said goodbye three times. You’ve wrapped up twice. But someone keeps thinking of “one more thing.” It’s like trying to leave a party at your aunt’s house. The door is RIGHT THERE but somehow you’re still talking about her neighbor’s cat’s surgery.

    Minute 25-30: The post-call recovery period where you try to remember what you were doing before this “quick” call obliterated your flow state like a meteor hitting a sandcastle.

    The Real Problem

    Here’s the thing that really gets me: people who ask for “quick calls” have a fundamental misunderstanding of how human beings work. We’re not CPUs that can context-switch instantaneously. When you pull me out of deep work for your “quick call,” you’re not borrowing 5 minutes—you’re stealing 30-45 minutes of productivity because it takes that long to get back into the zone.

    And don’t even get me started on the “got a sec?” variation. A “sec” is ONE SECOND. If you need one second, send me a YES/NO question in chat. If you need more than that, you need to schedule time like a civilized human being who respects the space-time continuum.

    The Solution

    Schedule. The. Call. Put it on my calendar. Give me context about what we’re discussing. Let me prepare. Let me block the appropriate amount of time. Revolutionary concept, I know.

    And if you MUST have a synchronous conversation RIGHT NOW, at least have the decency to say “Hey, I need 30 minutes to discuss X, Y, and Z—do you have time now or should we schedule it?” Honesty! What a concept!

    The Book You Need

    If you’re the person who keeps asking for “quick calls,” you need to read Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal (Amazon affiliate link). It’s about managing distraction and respecting both your time and others’. Maybe it’ll help you realize that every interruption has a cost, and that cost is compounding faster than credit card debt.

    And if you’re the victim of constant “quick calls,” read it anyway. It might give you the tools—and the courage—to push back against this tyranny of stolen time.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, someone just Slacked me “got a minute?” and I need to go update my résumé.

    This rant brought to you by someone who just lost 47 minutes to a “quick sync” about something that was already explained perfectly well in a three-paragraph email.

  • The Micromanagement Death Spiral: How to Turn Your Best People Into Zombies

    This post somewhat inspired by Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (Amazon affiliate link)

    Look, I get it. You’re a manager. You’re responsible for outcomes. Things need to get done right. But let me tell you what happens when you decide that “managing” means hovering over your senior engineers like a helicopter parent watching their kid cross the street for the first time.

    You know Sarah? The one who shipped three major features last quarter while mentoring two juniors? Yeah, she doesn’t give a shit anymore. And it’s your fault.

    Here’s What You Did

    You hired intelligent, capable people. People with track records. People who’ve been solving complex problems since before you got promoted. Then you proceeded to treat them like they just graduated from a coding bootcamp yesterday.

    Every. Single. Decision. needs your approval now. They can’t choose a library without a meeting. They can’t refactor a function without running it by you first. They can’t take a bathroom break without wondering if you’ll ask why they were gone for seven minutes.

    Congratulations! You’ve invented the least efficient way to run a team since someone thought “let’s make all decisions by committee.”

    The Insult You’re Not Seeing

    When you micromanage senior people, here’s what you’re actually saying:

    “I don’t trust your judgment.”

    “I think you’re going to screw this up.”

    “Despite your years of experience, I know better than you about literally everything.”

    These are smart people. They hear you loud and clear. And you know what smart people do when you tell them they’re not smart enough? They stop trying to be smart.

    Welcome to Learned Helplessness Town, Population: Your Entire Team

    You wanted control? Cool, you got it. Now enjoy fielding 47 questions a day about things your team used to handle themselves.

    • “Should I use a switch statement or if-else?” (They know. They’re asking because last time they didn’t ask, you “had concerns.”)
    • “Which color should this button be?” (They’ve designed 100 interfaces. They’re asking because you changed it last time.)
    • “Can I go ahead and fix this obvious bug?” (It’s a two-line fix. They’re asking because apparently that requires Product sign-off now.)

    You’ve trained them that initiative gets punished. Compliance gets rewarded. So now nobody shows initiative. They’re just waiting for you to tell them what to do, exactly how to do it, and when to breathe during the process.

    This is learned helplessness, and you’re the world’s most effective teacher.

    Your Best People Are Already Gone (Mentally)

    Here’s the thing about talented people: they have options. Lots of them.

    Sarah’s not arguing with you anymore. She’s not pushing back on your “suggestions” (demands). She’s not bringing new ideas to the table. She just nods, says “sure thing,” and does exactly what you asked—nothing more, nothing less.

    She’s quiet-quit on actually caring about the work. She’s doing the bare minimum to keep her job while her resume is out there getting interviews. Every recruiter message on LinkedIn looks more appealing than it used to.

    You think you’re getting compliance. You’re getting malicious compliance at best, and a resignation letter at worst.

    The Really Stupid Part

    The absolute kicker? You hired these people specifically because they could handle complex work independently. That was literally the job description. “Self-starter.” “Takes ownership.” “Minimal supervision required.”

    Then you proceeded to eliminate every condition necessary for those qualities to exist.

    You wanted ownership? You can’t give someone ownership while controlling every decision.

    You wanted innovation? You can’t innovate when every experiment needs a risk assessment and three levels of approval.

    You wanted engagement? People don’t engage with work when they’re just following orders.

    What You Should Do Instead

    Here’s a radical idea: Let people do their jobs.

    Set clear goals. Provide context. Get out of the way. Be available when they need you. Trust that the experienced professionals you hired are, in fact, experienced professionals.

    If someone’s screwing up consistently, address that person. Don’t punish your entire team with process because one person can’t be trusted.

    And for the love of everything holy, stop checking in every two hours. They know you don’t trust them. You’re not subtle.

    The Bottom Line

    Micromanagement isn’t management. It’s abdication of management dressed up as diligence. Real management is about enabling people to do their best work, not ensuring they can’t do anything without you.

    Your best people don’t need a babysitter. They need a leader who trusts them, supports them, and gets the hell out of their way.

    But sure, keep doing what you’re doing. I’m sure the constant turnover and the team of disengaged zombies is exactly what the company had in mind when they promoted you.

    Filed under: things your team is thinking but too professional to say to your face

  • An Instagram Link

    https://instagram.com/elonmusksjet

  • 10 Signs That You’ve Made a Horrible New Job Choice

    When we decide to make a job change, we often do it for a variety of reasons and only after much consideration.  If we’ve been working for a number of years, and family and relocation issues are present, our decision becomes even more consequential.  Even if we’re just starting out, we always try to go the extreme due diligence route.

    But sometimes, no matter how assiduous our vetting was, there is that rare occasion when you are sitting in your new office, staring out the window, and whispering to yourself, “Good Lord, what have I done?”

    If you’ve found out that you’ve made a terrible career/life choice, you need to do something about it, and the sooner the better. Recognizing the fact as quickly as possible increases your chances of surviving a bad job choice. The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Poor Career Choices has published a guide to help you find out if you’ve possibly ruined your career, your marriage, and financial future. The pamphlet is aptly named “10 Signs That You’ve Made a Horrible New Job Choice.”   They have given their permission to reprint them here.

    10 Signs That You’ve Made A Horrible New Job Choice

    1. Stranger In A Strange Land

    After several days people are still asking you who you are and demanding that you show some ID.

    1. Employee #347783920-3AFX76

    Even after three attempts, your office door nameplate is still being   misspelled.

    1. Titanic!

    After one week you still have yet to meet anyone who is NOT interviewing elsewhere.

    1. You’re Good, But You’re Not Derek Jeter

    You grow tired of hearing how utterly fantastic the person you replaced was, and how much they are missed.

    1. “We’re Working On Getting You One That Works.”

    After 10 days, you still don’t have a restroom key that works and are getting a little annoyed at having to run down to the bathroom in the Subway in the lobby.

    1. Toxic Waste?

    As you explore a new hallway in the bowels of the building you are repulsed by the stench of what seems to be three-month-old chicken parts that have been left out in the sun.  When you inquire about it, you are told quite curtly to, “Never mention it to anyone.”

    1. Palace Coup

    Shortly after you start, you are called to a company-wide meeting where it is announced that your boss and four people in your group have been fired for embezzling company funds.

    1. Locked Out

    One morning, you swipe your card to enter the parking garage and it no longer works. HR assures you that it was just “a clerical error.”

    1. Cash, A High Draft Choice, And A Player To Be Named Later

    You discover that your old company hired the person you replaced and it is rumored that their salary is much higher than the one you had.

    1. Merger Mania

    Everyone receives a memo with the subject “Great News.” It explains that your company has been acquired by a huge multinational. Everyone knows what that means.

     

     

    If you have experienced any of these signs, The Department of Labor recommends their booklet “Do I Have a Snowball’s Chance of Getting Unemployment!”

     

  • Meeting Reminders Kill Time, Too

    tl;dr: Use 5-minute meeting reminders unless people have more than a five minute walk/travel time to the meeting site.

    The Problem

    Copyright: neyro2008 / 123RF Stock Photo

    Meeting reminders are just as much an impediment to productivity as meetings themselves are. Ok, fine, meetings aren’t always an impediment to productivity, but they do prevent attendees from accomplishing their own individual tasks, etc…

    Anyway… back to meeting reminders. What happens when your Outlook pops up a reminder? One of several things happens:

    • You completely ignore the reminder.
    • You acknowledge the reminder but go back to what you were doing.
    • You dismiss the reminder, hoping that you’ll actually get another for this meeting you’re supposed to attend.
    • You fully acknowledge the reminder, attempt to go back to work until meeting time, but you focused on not missing the meeting.

    As you can see, the only option that gives you a solid chance of making the meeting means that your focus cannot be on something else. Add to this the setup/teardown time involved in switching contexts from your normal tasks and being engaged in the meeting. (This assumes that you are only going to meetings that you actually engage in—I’m sure that’s not an issue for anyone, right?)

    A Solution

    All of this brings me back to the problem of the meeting reminder. Think of the meeting reminder as a part of the meeting as well. If you have a 15-minute and no one has to travel more than a few feet to attend (or just has to boot up GoToMeeting), then don’t make the reminder 15 minutes as well (or worse, AN HOUR before). A five-minute reminder should be enough for a 15-minute meeting. Realistically, five minutes should be adequate for anything that isn’t going to block out a significant portion of the day.

    Actually, no… reserved reminder more than 5 minutes for abnormally early meeting start times. And make them end-of-day reminders for the previous day.

  • The Insecurity of Your Secure Password Policy

    Let’s say you have a password policy that mandates passwords change every 90 days. Also imagine it takes 1-2 days for the user to get everything back in sync. They have their password manager, different web applications, maybe their iOS keychain…  You start warning people 10 days in advance. Also, you have systems that only allow passwords of certain lengths, and…  where was I?

    What percentage of users do you think are using a password manager that randomly generates that password?  Don’t forget there are systems that people need to log into that don’t have anyway to directly insert from a password manager app.

    Instead, you’re going to get a password progression like:

    • Puppies1!
    • Puppies2?
    • Puppies3!
    • Puppies4.

    So if you have one set of compromised passwords, it is pretty likely that a WHOLE PASSWORD GENERATING METHOD is compromised for many users. The existence of a single digit and a single punctuation mark as above is a tell-tale sign of this. All an attacker needs to do is take those password patterns and increment or decrement the digit that comes with the password to try on other sites.

    The extra burden of trying to come up with memorable but unique passwords so often is forcing users to dumb down their passwords.