Climb, Coast, or Quit: The Three Types of Employees

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(No AI was used in the production of this article).

Generalizations and categorizations can be tricky and subjective (what’s a planet? how many continents are there? what’s an island?) but also useful as simplified thought models. That said, after over 30 years of working in different environments (government, startups, Big Tech), I see employees (at least engineers) can be roughly classified at a given point in time into three groups according to their internal motivation.

• Climb employees are the ones who want to get promoted, because of:

  • Recognition; being valued by your peers and society is one of the strongest motivators.
  • Money (which is in itself a form of recognition).
  • Autonomy: working on what you want, doing more fun “sexy” work, being involved in more advanced projects that help your career development, and no longer doing boring stuff.
  • Career progress. Having a more senior title helps with opportunities later on (actually, the title doesn’t matter or shouldn’t matter much inside a company, but it matters in order to interview for your next job).
  • Fight against ageism: if you are over 40 or 50 and don’t have a management title or a very senior title like Staff/Principal Engineer, then you can be laid off and end up driving a school bus.

• Coast (not a great name but it rhymes well): these are the “leave me alone with my toys” people; they are content with where they are and what they do and are not looking forward to new meetings, added responsibilities for little extra pay or the added stress of a promotion to a lead role (compulsory reminder than management is not a promotion but a different job than engineering). Coasting is underrated if you actually like the work.

• Quiet Quitting employees are the ones that are checked out, just going through the motions to get a paycheck and wishing they worked at a different place. They may be actively looking for a new job or not. They are burnt out and disillusioned with their position or their company. People don’t burn out because they have a lot of work; they burn out because they don’t feel valued, they care about things nobody else seems to care about, or it’s death by a thousand paper cuts in the form of meetings arguing with clueless management, filing expense reports or going through performance evaluations. Remember that “PIP” stands for “Paid Interview Preparation”.

The same person can go through different phases in the same company in a relatively short period of time and management can be very oblivious to where an employee is.