The workplace backlash to quiet quitting is here, and it’s exactly as exhausting as you’d expect. Workers are now “loud working” – basically turning their jobs into personal performance art – because apparently just doing your work well isn’t enough anymore.

When Showing Up Became a Spectator Sport

Look, I get it. The job market’s gotten weird. You can’t hop around like you could two years ago, layoffs keep hanging over everyone’s heads like some corporate sword of Damocles, and suddenly people feel trapped. So what’s the move? Make yourself so visible, so undeniably present, that they can’t possibly lay you off. Just look at Meta's 90-day safety purge, where workers were hired, fired, and left wondering what loyalty even means anymore.

Vicki Salemi from Monster (the job site, not the energy drink) says employees need to be “more visible and more vocal about their achievements” instead of just, you know, doing their jobs. Because keeping your head down and actually completing tasks? That’s so 2019.

“Leaving may feel risky, so workers may concentrate more energy on demonstrating their value internally where they already are,” Salemi said. Which is a very professional way of saying people are scared to quit, so they’re compensating by becoming the human equivalent of a car alarm.

The LinkedIn Industrial Complex

But here’s where it gets really interesting. Some people aren’t just performing for their bosses – they’re building entire personal brands online. We’re talking LinkedIn posts about “lessons from my Monday morning coffee” and Twitter threads about “10 things I learned getting promoted at BigTech Corp.”

And I mean… I can’t entirely hate on it? In an economy where your company could decide you’re expendable on a random Tuesday, having an audience might actually be smart. If your job disappears tomorrow, at least you’ve got 10,000 people who know your name.

Take Abhinav Bohra, an applied scientist at Amazon. He says visibility strategies helped him snag multiple promotions. The article cuts off there (frustrating, I know), but you can fill in the blanks. He probably wasn’t just quietly crunching data in a corner somewhere. He was making sure people knew he was crunching that data.

The Pendulum Always Swings Too Far

The thing is, quiet quitting was never really about being lazy. It was about boundaries. It was workers saying “I’ll do my job, but I’m not going to let it consume my entire existence for no extra pay.” Which, honestly? Fair.

But now we’ve swung to the other extreme. Instead of working reasonable hours and going home, people are basically running internal PR campaigns for themselves. Sending recap emails about meetings everyone was already in. Posting updates about projects that aren’t finished yet. Making sure every single contribution gets documented, credited, and broadcast.

“Workers may concentrate more energy on demonstrating their value internally where they already are.”

Who This Actually Benefits

Let’s be real about something. Loud working isn’t some grassroots worker movement – it’s a symptom of a broken system. When employees feel like they have to perform visibility just to keep their jobs, that’s not empowerment. That’s anxiety with a personal brand.

And it definitely doesn’t help everyone equally. You know who’s good at loud working? People who are already comfortable promoting themselves. People whose work can be easily showcased. People who have time and energy left over after doing their actual jobs to also perform doing their jobs.

If you’re an introvert, if you’re in a behind-the-scenes role, if you’re barely keeping your head above water with caregiving responsibilities or just… life? Good luck competing with someone who’s got the bandwidth to treat every day like an audition.

What This Actually Means

Here’s what bugs me most: we’ve somehow arrived at a place where doing excellent work quietly is considered a career liability. Where being competent and reliable without broadcasting it makes you forgettable. Where the person who spends 30% of their time telling people what they did might get ahead of the person who spent 100% of their time actually doing it.

And maybe that’s always been true to some extent. Office politics aren’t new. But social media and the current job market paranoia have turbocharged it into something more relentless.

The real question isn’t whether loud working “works” – clearly it does for some people. The question is whether we want to keep building workplaces where it’s necessary. Because if we do, we’re going to end up with offices full of people who are better at performing work than doing it. And that seems like a pretty stupid way to run anything.