Is Your Project Management Software Secretly 'Quiet Firing' You?

By Del.GG Research Team | February 12, 2026 | 5 min read

Your calendar isn't just open; it's empty. Your Slack notifications have flatlined. You assume your manager is passive-aggressively pushing you out.

If only it were that simple. You aren't fighting a bad boss. You're fighting a feedback loop.

When Bonnie Dilber went viral defining "Quiet Firing," she framed it as a human failure—a manager too cowardly to have a tough conversation. She was half right. In 2026, the silence isn't always cowardice. It's automation.

The decision to isolate you likely didn't happen in a closed-door meeting. It happened in the backend of Lattice or Jira. We built the 'Quiet Firing' Probability Calculator to detect when the software—not the human—has decided you are obsolete.

The Algorithmic Death Spiral: It’s Not Paranoia, It’s Math

We used to blame people. Gallup data historically attributes 70% of engagement variance directly to manager behavior. But in modern "Up-or-out" cultures, managers are often just rubber-stamping decisions made by predictive resource allocation tools.

Platforms like 15Five and **Microsoft Teams** have evolved. They no longer just track work; they assign it based on "velocity probability." If your output metrics dip—even for a single sprint—the system doesn't send a warning. It simply stops routing high-value tickets your way.

We call this the "Algorithmic Death Spiral."

It works like a credit score for your career. If your "digital exhaust"—Git commit velocity, Slack sentiment, calendar density—dips below the team median, the system flags you as a dragging anchor. It creates a data vacuum. You aren't being bullied; you are being optimized into the background.

This automated neglect mimics Constructive Discharge—the legal term for making a workplace so intolerable that an employee is forced to resign. The difference? Proving intent is a nightmare when the "harasser" is a load-balancing script designed to maximize capital efficiency.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) looks for discriminatory patterns, but algorithms are excellent at hiding bias under the guise of "performance optimization." If the code decides you are inefficient, it hides you from cross-functional teams. It erases you from the org chart before a human ever intervenes.

The Calculator: How We Audit Your "Digital Exhaust"

Most people wait for a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) to realize they are in trouble. By then, it’s too late. The algorithm made up its mind three months ago.

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant emphasizes that **Psychological Safety** is the bedrock of effective teams. But when an algorithm creates a "survival of the fastest" environment, safety evaporates. You enter a state of **Workplace Isolation** engineered by code.

Our calculator doesn't ask if you "feel" sad. It looks for the hard signals of **Absentee Management**:

• Signal Decay: Did you decline two non-essential invites? The model logs a drop in "collaborative availability."
• The Gaslighting Gap: Are you completing tasks that never get mentioned in stand-ups? The system has likely tagged your output as "maintenance" rather than "growth."
• Career Stagnation Velocity: A measurement of how long you've remained in a role relative to the company's promotion cadence.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) guidelines distinguish between poor management and intentional "managing out." But when the manager relies on a dashboard to tell them who to talk to, the line blurs. The tool creates the distance; the manager just accepts it.