'Bad work pays the same as excellent': Employee confirms with boss that promotions are no longer based on merit, starts doing the bare minimum

Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor

Oct 2, 2023 8:00 AM EDT

There's a moment in everyone's working lives when you suddenly become disillusioned and everything else becomes crystal clear. It's like the reverse of the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the world goes from being black-and-white to full technicolor. Instead, your rose-colored lenses disintegrate and everything becomes, well, bleak and cynical.

After five years of working to the bone at the same company and repeatedly being denied a promotion, this Redditor was able to get their boss to basically admit that promotions and raises are simply not based on merit anymore. Instead, they are based on office politics, if anything. At that moment, the technicolor experience of his workplace turned into black-and-white, and that's when the quiet quitting began. Now, he does the bare minimum at work and lives in fear that this lack of motivation will be discovered. It's the tale of the 2023 employee, isn't it? We hope that he finds the motivation to update his resume, put himself back out there, and hopefully find a place that values him.

Keep scrolling below for the full story. For more stories like this, here's one about a team of employees who got their tyrant manager fired.