Gabrielle Judge, better known as "antiworkgirlboss" on social media, left her career in the tech industry in hopes of attaining better work-life balance elsewhere.
The 26-year-old content creator says that she now makes an average of $20,000 a month, and encourages her followers to be more mindful of what their hustle is and what it means to them.
Judge is on multiple social media platforms explaining ways she's found to make money in the digital age. Just one of those methods is making UGC, or user generated content, of her dog, which she claims makes her $2,000 a month just from recording her pup.
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In 2021, Judge suffered an accident that left her with a concussion. After being away from work for two months, she realized just how unhappy she was and how much her job played a part.
“A lot of these ideas that I have today started to surface where it was like, 'Why do we center our self-esteem and self-worth and all our time around a 9-to-5?'” Judge said.
The TikTok star has over 100,000 followers, posting content regarding workplace trending topics and buzz words like "quiet quitting" and “lazy girl jobs”.
“I think that sometimes when we take the gas pedal off of our career and we’re not specifically making just an upwards transition, it’s considered lazy,” Judge said.
What is quiet quitting?
Quiet quitting is a buzzword that has been receiving a lot of attention in the workplace from both employers and employees.
It’s a term used to describe when a worker doesn’t necessarily quit their job but refuses to take on extra tasks within their job scope.
According to the Harvard Business Review, quiet quitting is the idea that work shouldn't be the central focus of an employee's life, and employees are unwilling to take on more than what's expected of them at work.
For Judge, this means not going above and beyond in the traditional sense, where one overachieves in hopes of getting ahead in one's career, although it’s not always the case.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2023 report, nearly six in 10 employees are quiet quitting. When combined with disengaged employees, it's costing the global GDP over $8 trillion, according to the report.
What is a lazy girl job?
Judge came up with the idea of “lazy girl job” as a parody of traditional workplace values and expectations.
“The whole lazy girl job thing is a thing because it's a two-way street. Like of course this is attractive to employees, but there's a reason why this was caused and that's because employers in general just can't hold their weight when it comes to company loyalty like they used to be able to traditionally,” Judge said.
The Gallup report also found that over half of employees in the countries and areas surveyed are either actively or passively job seeking.
It’s been about three years since Judge began her entrepreneurial journey. Tech jobs like her previous position are growing in popularity among the incoming workforce, as more jobs continue to be created. The growing industry can be a desirable field for many looking for job security. However, Judge believes that things aren't always as they seem in the tech industry.
“I’ve had people sitting next to me at work be laid off. It happens for wildly different reasons. It was like soft skills, culture, fit performance, right? You just don't really know. So to put this bet on my company, that they’re going to save me for the rest of my life and I should put all my eggs in that basket, I don't think it's any safer than different options in our career,” Judge when comparing different careers.
Judge now would like to see these conversations happen more often in the workplace.
“With more direct level people, they have a lot of objection when it comes to questioning things in general in the workplace… and for me that really creeps me out, because I feel like you should be able to have a conversation about these things,” said Judge.
