Quiet Firing
A reader's summary of quiet quitting's 2022 mirror term — the tweet reply that put it into circulation, the survey statistics that don't quite agree with one another, and the older legal concept it mostly renamed.
The term at a glance
“Quiet firing” names an employer making a job worse instead of ending it outright: withheld raises, stalled promotions, exclusion from meetings, no feedback, undesirable shifts or assignments — pressure applied until an employee resigns on their own. It surfaced in August 2022 as the employer-side counterpart to “quiet quitting,” reframing the disengagement debate as something management does to workers rather than the reverse.
Origins
The phrase traces to a reply Randy Miller, a software developer, posted in mid-August 2022 at the height of the quiet-quitting news cycle: “A lot of talk about ‘quiet quitting’ but very little talk about ‘quiet firing’ which is when you don't give someone a raise in 5 years even though they keep doing everything you ask them to.” The line spread across Twitter and LinkedIn quickly enough that Jack Kelly's Forbes piece, “You May Be Quiet Quitting, But Could Your Boss Be Quietly Firing You?”, ran on August 25 — about a week later — and two Washington Post explainers followed on September 1 and September 8.
History and context
The behavior the term describes is not new. Employment law has long recognized constructive dismissal — an employer intentionally making working conditions intolerable so an employee “chooses” to resign, letting the company avoid severance, unemployment insurance claims, and the paperwork of a formal termination. “Quiet firing” gave that pattern a catchier, non-legal name rather than identifying a new management tactic; several later explainer pieces made exactly that point, including one from YourDictionary titled, more or less, that the workplace concept isn't all that new.
Main claims
A reply, not a report, carried it
Software developer Randy Miller posted a reply in mid-August 2022, during the peak of the quiet-quitting news cycle: "A lot of talk about 'quiet quitting' but very little talk about 'quiet firing' which is when you don't give someone a raise in 5 years even though they keep doing everything you ask them to." It circulated widely enough on Twitter and LinkedIn to give the mirror-image behavior a name within days.
Forbes had an explainer within about a week
Jack Kelly's "You May Be Quiet Quitting, But Could Your Boss Be Quietly Firing You?" ran in Forbes on August 25, 2022, followed by two Washington Post pieces the following week — the fastest a workplace neologism on this site has gone from a tweet reply to national business-press coverage.
Survey numbers on it don't agree with each other
A 2022 JobSage survey found 56% of managers wished they could fire an employee and 29% admitted to intentionally "quiet firing" one; a separately cited LinkedIn News poll put the share of workers who'd witnessed the behavior anywhere from roughly half to "more than 80%" depending on which outlet is doing the citing — a spread wide enough to suggest the number itself was never rigorously sourced.
The behavior already had a legal name
Employment law has described an employer deliberately making conditions intolerable so a worker resigns "voluntarily" — avoiding severance and a formal termination record — as constructive dismissal for decades; "quiet firing" gave the same pattern a viral, non-legal vocabulary rather than describing something new.
It reads as quiet quitting's rebuttal
Much of the initial coverage was explicitly framed as pushback against the idea that only workers were disengaging — employers, the argument went, were doing the same thing to workers first, just without a TikTok to name it.
Critique
- The statistics circulating about it don't match. Outlets cite a LinkedIn News poll for wildly different figures — some put the share of workers who'd witnessed quiet firing at around half, others at “more than 80%” — without clarifying methodology or sample size, which makes the number look borrowed rather than checked.
- It blurs poor management with deliberate strategy. Withheld feedback and stalled promotions can just as easily be symptoms of an overloaded or conflict-avoidant manager as a calculated plan to push someone out, but the term implies intent every time it's applied.
- Renaming constructive dismissal doesn't add legal weight. Calling a pattern “quiet firing” online does nothing to meet the actual legal bar for a constructive-dismissal claim, which several employment-law sites published in 2022 specifically to correct that conflation.
- It functions as a rebuttal more than a diagnosis. Much of the initial coverage cared less about defining the behavior precisely than about symmetry — proving employers were “just as guilty” as quiet quitters — which is a framing goal, not a measurement one.
Impact
The term stuck in HR and management vocabulary alongside “quiet quitting,” “quiet hiring,” and “quiet promotion,” and it's now standard shorthand in return-to-office and layoff-adjacent coverage for softer forms of employer pressure. It gave workers a one-word way to name a pattern that previously required either a lawyer's vocabulary (“constructive dismissal”) or none at all.
Notable engagements
- Randy Miller, Twitter (mid-August 2022) — the reply that gave the behavior its name.
- Jack Kelly, Forbes (August 25, 2022) — one of the first major business-press explainers.
- The Washington Post (September 1 and 8, 2022) — “After quiet quitting, here comes quiet firing” and a follow-up on how to tell if it's happening to you.
- JobSage, 2022 workplace survey — found 56% of managers wished they could fire an employee and 29% admitted to having quietly done so.