Quiet firing is where your manager basically makes your work life a combination of demoralizing, boring and irritating in the hopes you'll quit. They might exclude you from meetings, give you the most boring tasks, and ask you to do tedious follow up things. In more extreme cases, they set you up to fail and point the finger at you.
Rather than have the balls/tits to tell you that you've f**ked up, they passively-aggressively just try to push you out, thinking it'll be nicer for all – when it's extremely demoralizing, and a huge waste of company finances.
It's happened to me. It's so depressing I ended up “quiet quitting” for months until I finally quit, cos my self-esteem was damaged which hindered my motivation to find a new job. What a waste of everyone's time.
Anyway, I later realized there's signs to take note of, which are strong indicators to jump ship quickly:
- You get a new manager and a colleague in your team quits soon after. It's probably time to go before the crappy manager turns their attention to you.
- Your manager takes a motherly or fatherly mannerism towards you. Or otherwise condescending. Micromanaging, etc.
- They implement stupid rules, are flippant with what they want and/or conduct the performance review in an unfair way – even if it's only towards your peers.
- Skips one-on-ones with you, cuts back hours or adds too much work in, and cuts you out of meetings.
- Upper management seems incompetent and your own manager seems stressed.