How to Automate “Quiet Quitting”: Create a Fake Progress Bar with Python

I’ve heard people actually pay money for this, but use at your own risk! Using this script at your place of work could get you fired. This script is for educational purposes only!

Free script below! Code breakdown and AI prompts also

Quiet quitting… Honestly, I hate this corporate buzz word, but that doesn’t matter because HR doesn’t care about my feelings. What I am sharing here is a little python script that you can code up yourself. Use this as a fun (and naughty) exercise to practice coding… Or take this as an opportunity to practice using AI to help you write code… Or just copy and paste my code, but then you will just be considered a “script kiddie” as they say in the industry. Technically, I am a script kiddie, also, for using this code because I just copied and pasted it from ChatGPT.

What is it?

— a fake progress bar that gets stuck at 33% so it always looks like your waiting for something to finish loading

Don’t get in trouble for using this at work! HR usually doesn’t have a good sense of humor, even though you can’t spell “humor” without HR

Why?

It is surprisingly simple! And if you recruit the help of AI, then it is stupidly simple. While this little project is on the naughty side, especially with regards to the media frenzy surrounding “quiet quitting,” that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from it. I share this with the hopes people can learn a little coding and/or how to work with AI.

Description

The script itself is written in Python. It uses the tkinter package and the python time module. tkinter is a package you can use to build GUIs with python. For example, I used it in this project to build the window that displays the fake progress bar. The time module was used to control the rate at which the progress bar proceeds.

To run the script yourself, just copy and paste the code into your code editor and then save it as a new file. Before running it you need to make sure python is on your machine. To run it, go to your terminal and run it from there, reference the screenshot below:

Run the code and the progress bar window will pop up to display a fake progress bar

Without further ado here’s the script:

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk
import time

def update_progress_bar(progress_bar, label, max_progress=33):
    progress = 0

    # Increment progress to 33%
    while progress <= max_progress:
        progress_bar['value'] = progress
        label.config(text=f"{progress}%\n Please wait while your updates are installed")
        root.update_idletasks()
        time.sleep(0.1)  # Simulate some work being done
        progress += 1

    # Keep the progress bar at 33%
    while True:
        progress_bar['value'] = max_progress
        label.config(text=f"{max_progress}%")
        root.update_idletasks()
        time.sleep(0.5)  # Delay to show it's stuck at 33%

# Create the main window
root = tk.Tk()
root.title("Updates in Progress")
root.geometry("850x350")  # Set the window size to 500x200 pixels

# Create a progress bar widget
progress_bar = ttk.Progressbar(root, orient="horizontal", length=400, mode="determinate")
progress_bar.pack(pady=40)  # Add padding around the progress bar

# Create a label to show progress percentage
progress_label = tk.Label(root, text="0%")
progress_label.pack(pady=10)  # Add padding around the label

# Start the progress bar update process
root.after(100, update_progress_bar, progress_bar, progress_label)

# Start the main event loop
root.mainloop()

Lastly, here’s the prompt I used in ChatGPT in case you want to try writing your own version of this with AI:

can you code a progress bar that never gets past 33% done

That was my starting point at least. After a few iterations, I got the script you see above.

Thanks for reading! I hope you have found this fun, informative and useful!