This was years ago at a job I don't add to my resume.
I was the incident.
I worked at a plastic bottle factory as a packer, and I had gotten this job through a friend. The 2 of us got along with the manager pretty well. Had common interests and about the same mindset about being employed there. A few positions opened up and he came to us and asked if we'd like to move up to one of them. I chose to move up to forklift operator, he chose machine operator. We both liked the jobs a lot more after that. Of course with a promotion comes a raise right?
The manager that had us promoted actually found a new job shortly after we had been trained and were starting to handle our jobs independently, he brought us into the office along with his replacement that he was currently training and told us that we were due raises and he had started the ball rolling on that. The new manager said he was informed of everything and would follow up on it to make sure we were taken care of.
3 months go by, our old manager is long gone, and we were still making the same pay. We approached the new manager about this. "I just need you to bear with me, I'm still working on that"
Ok fine whatever...3 more months go by and we don't see a dime. 6 months we've been making less than we should be now. Hell people are being hired at a higher rate than we make at this point. We confront him again. "Bear with me" he says again. I beared with him until about noon that day. I parked my forklift. I got in my car and left. All afternoon I'm getting calls and texts from people. My buddy tells me "you have no idea how many people days you just fucked up".
I gently reminded him that we were getting taken advantage of. That we've been working for a lower wage than new hires after getting a promotion for 6 months. I also spilled these beans to other coworkers texting me about what happened. It didn't take long...my buddy left mid day, 2 other machine operators left mid day. A string of packers stopped showing up, all but one daytime forklift driver either quit or walked out. They lost 10 people of varying positions in a month.
I couldn't help but grin when my buddy told me he was done and one of my coworkers told me how many people quit before they left. I felt like my walkout made a difference that time.
Most satisfying comment in the thread. A true "fuck around and find out" story
It sounds to me like you weren't the only person the company was screwing with. Once everybody started comparing notes, that company was dead in the water.
I'm not sure if they were already being screwed or just thought they were next in line. This was my first real delve into corporate fuckery though.
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The full office being pulled into a meeting and lectured about how disheartening it was to see everyone leaving the office on time at the end of working hours. What we call good time management they apparently saw an laziness and a lack of commitment.
That and the message that discussing pay and bonuses wasn’t allowed (despite being protected by the Equalities Act here in the UK). This of course got us wondering why this would be discouraged and turns out our salaries seemed to have very little to do with length of service or performance.
Worked at a place where we got a company wide ass chewing from the CEO for leaving right at 5:00 PM. Apparently he interpreted this as everyone was slacking off the last few minutes.
The results: instead of walking out the door right at 5:00, all the other departments would stand at the exit and wait for the accounting department to walk out of the building first. CEO favored the accounting department so I guess everyone figured they wouldn't get in trouble if accounting left first.
I think his little tiff actually resulted in more time being wasted.
It's always 'fun' when a US company tries opening an office in Europe - and even more so when they try to close one!
The head of IT where I work quit on the spot during a meeting with the president of the company because the president wouldn't agree with any security measure IT wanted to put in place because they were too expansive, and also because he was fedup of being micro-managed by someone who's only achievement was being the child of the founder. That was a couple months after being hit with a ransomware that made us lose rougly 10 years of data. (IT had no budget to implement proper backups and everything)
Then the whole IT department left the company the same week.
That was a year ago. They tried hiring new IT staff, they keep leaving because the president still micro-manage them.
Edit : I still work there, I'm not in IT, and I never have to deal with the shenanigans of the president. Only thing that changed as far as I know is that they changed the structure of our file servers, and we are slightly more restricted than before, but we still all have access to way too much files on there and we still all have admin rights on our laptops, so anyone can install anything.
As an IT guy, that whole situation is terrifying.
As a non IT guy, I can say the same. Feels like the ship is sinking.
Still haven't found another job without a massive pay cut...
And yet, extremely common.
Wow even ransomware didn't teach a lesson.. I'd be worried about personal data being indexed on some onion site..
Someone asked a question about work-life balance during an all-hands meeting and the CEO laughed at him.
A couple weeks later my entire location started eating lunch together and discussing our job searches.
Many years ago - many jobs ago, we got a new CEO, and she wanted to make a big splash, so she started firing people. And this is a public, non-profit job, so most people were working in less than stellar conditions simply because they were passionate about public service.
I was two days away from putting in my 2 weeks' notice because I had landed another job, but they fired me and gave me two months' severage. So instead of having to work another 2 weeks, I didn't have to go another day. I said "Sorry it didn't work out." and held my smile till I got out the door.
Not really an incident but I am amazed at how many groups of senior tech managers and engineers navigate from organization to organization together!
For example, a tech VP joins a new company and within a year many of the senior positions are occupied by the VP’s previous coworkers. They give each other promotions and eventually either get outmaneuvered by another similar group of people or simply choose to move on to the next place to do it all over again.
I had no idea such groups existed, until I was invited into one. Now that I’m aware I’ve seen the same pattern happening at pretty much every place that I’ve worked at since.
There’s some collective bargaining in that, though. “You lose this person, you lose all of these persons”.
I’m someone in that group. My last 2 jobs have been following a former manager. Now about 70% of the engineering department are from previous companies
As long as the abuse unethical companies, I truly don't care. Good for them. Just don't do this at places that make a difference
It shouldn't work unless they're not keeping up with wage increases. Jumping from place to place is only profitable if your current work is banking on you not expecting col increases.
No matter how good hearted your workplace is, they shouldn't be stealing labour.
Student in engineering, this is 100% the Departement i work at. You are an out liner if you have not worked at that one other company before. Also, more are on the way from the vorher company to us.
A couple executive-types gathered the more senior developers for an "open" discussion about recruitment and retention. They suggest multiple ideas that would destroy morale (like non-compete clauses, poorly designed work-role pipelines, etc), and all of us suggest against them, and provided alternatives instead (like a shift in direction of certain efforts, more autonomy and less micromanaging, etc). They end up accusing us of not supporting our company's mission and tell us that if we don't agree then they don't want us there and we should just quit. I think after that meeting, only 2 people stayed out of about 30, and hiring numbers have significantly declined.
And I’m sure the owners tell their family and friends about how lazy the workforce is. Probably spend hours talking about how Americans don’t know how to work hard any longer.
I have a couple of these.
First one, I worked for a small engineering consulting firm. Maybe 8 people tops, including the President, who owns the company and our building.
We were renovating the second floor, and I overheard him tell his contractor that he shouldn't put women's restroom signs up, because only engineers will work on the second floor and therefore no women. I had an offer within 6 weeks, but disappointingly this did not slow the success of the company.
More recently, I left a position as the facility manager for a biotech manufacturer. My workload was immense, despite a <1yo child, and I was on call for emergencies 24/7.
Around September, I heard rumor that we were planning a plant shutdown over the Christmas to New Year holidays - this would give all manufacturing personnel a guaranteed 2 week paid vacation, while the facilities team of 20 people would be on vacation blackout and have the busiest two weeks of the year.
I brought up the rumor to my boss and begged him to advocate against it. He said he'd try, and within 24 hours told me that he decided to advocate in favor of the shutdown during that period because he doesn't celebrate the holidays anyway and it's a great time to get stuff done.
So I got to tell my team, who had family around the world and always agreed amongst themselves who got to travel and who stayed local, that nobody gets to travel for the holidays and we all get to work.
I got a new job very quickly, but unfortunately had to see the shutdown through and worked through Christmas. However, I took one tech with me and heard that the team dropped to under 8 people before we lost touch with current emoyees. They took my departure as writing on the wall and opted to get out before there was a repeat.
Wow, that second one really takes the cake. The self-centredness to just go with the I don't care, so nobody should is really appalling.
It is not a spicy interesting incident, but when the senior jumps ship it will be followed by some juniors that smell that difficult times and promotions with only increase in responsibilities will come. I am the next senior doing this btw
My final straw was when my boss quit. Not only did I really like her, but she was also the only thing left between me and the top exec who was part of, if not the only, reason most people left.
That sounds like the other side of my dad's experience. He was a mid-level district manager whose primary job, alongside managing a district of grocery stores under a certain Ohio-based conglomerate, was serving as the barrier between the incompetent good-ol-boys C-suite and the people who actually know what they are doing. The two worst offenders were his immediate boss, the regional VP who we'll call Jane, and the company VP, who we'll call James. James was probably the biggest Trump fan, in that he mimicked his behavior: a chauvinist braggart who was quick to anger and honestly had no right to be that high up aside from his relationships. Promotions for him were a way to reward his friends or those who... "accommodated" him, like one store manager who, despite having not passed the evaluation, still got a store director promotion due to his intervention. Jane, meanwhile, was a kiss-ass whose management style started and ended at anger and threats. Both were Dunning-Kruger personified and my dad had to spend most of his time taking their useless and unrealistic demands and translating them into something halfway-workable in the store, while making sure the managers were ready to revert to whatever dumbass preferences they had the instant one of the two came in for a store walk (something they only did when absolutely required around the holidays, because god forbid they actually manage or something).
He was successful at serving as the barrier, and he commanded immense respect within the district, to the point that when I got my first job working in an adjacent district, the managers (many of whom were hired away from competitors by my dad when the store was still under his purview) still spent a lot of time talking about how much they respected him. That said, he could only take so much, and he knew he had no chance of promotion as long as he stayed there. A while back, he finally got a chance for change, as there was an opening working for the flagship brand of the conglomerate. It was a lateral move, but there was a chance for upward mobility, it was halfway across the country in a place with better weather, and, most importantly, it offered a chance to get the hell away from James and Jane. However, that meant the barrier he erected was gone, and all of a sudden, the micromanagement and bullshit of the c-suite was unleashed on his district. While corporate was happy to get an opponent to their reign of terror brilliance out of their way, the actual rank-and-file, many of whom still remained good friends with my dad, could barely stand it. Every week was a new update on which store manager or department manager ended up quittinf and going to which competitor, all because James and Jane just couldn't help themselves.
(As an aside, and just to give an idea of my dad's management capabilities, when his replacement (a toady who had tried and failed to undermine him and get him fired) himself got fired due to someone needing to get thrown under the bus a pretty bad manager evaluation error, the store managers started calling him for advice, and he basically ended up spending his free time serving as unofficial district manager from halfway across the country as a favor to his old store managers. While appreciated, it did not stop the shitstorm.)
While the exodus was pretty bad, it looks like it ended up being pretty short-lived. Right before he left, the conglomerate installed a new president hired from outside of the company. James was supposed to be the next in line if looking at the company hierarchy, but was passed over. (Another aside, they needed some fresh ideas badly. Even beyond the c-suite fuckery, the company in general was stubborn and overly set in its ways, even rejecting some ideas about tech and home shopping from the conglomerate that would have dragged them into the 21st century in favor of continuing to do things "their way"). The new president took a few months to get situated, but when she finally got adjusted, heads started rolling. First, James. I still don't have all of the details, but he was gone a few months after my dad left. Maybe the misconduct caught up to him, maybe he was still livid about not getting the promotion, maybe it had to do with his son (also an unqualified store manager. Go figure) getting arrested for assault.
As soon as he left, it was only a matter of time for Jane, and about 6 months later, she was gone. According to her Facebook, she left to "go into teaching" (a lot of incredulous laughter was shared at the dinner table when he read that), but we all knew what happened: the exodus was bad in the region, and now that James couldn't protect her, and after some time to see if she would adjust or remain the same, the president presented her with two options: quietly walk away, or receive a not-so-quiet boot out the door. Either way, the worst of the worst was gone, but the damage was done. A lot of good managers left in the year after my dad left the company, and regaining that level of talent assembled will take a long time, especially as other competitors are eyeing expansion into that district.
As for my dad, he's doing great with the conglomerate, has built up a similar rapport with his new managers, and may have a promotion on the way (especially if the FTC decides to not do its job and permits a large merger to go through).
Safeway, a part of Albertsons, takes its market position for granted near its own HQ. I hate to see what will happen with the merger.
I'm hoping a lot of stores are spun off and thrive. Albertsons is good at shenanigans with that and the government needs to pay attention.
Basically my last cave job when the pandemic hit. We all got furloughed, and when they asked us to come back none of the long timers came back. A lot of the fresh folks left after seeing how many never came back.
One of our engineering teams who normally builds our products in-house was made to bid against contractors who promised the moon.
Them and multiple other teams then had to spend a total of 18 months getting the contractor's shoddy work up to scratch. When they were done, the lead engineers from three teams left, as well as their manager.
Oh boy. My current employer had an app built inhouse over 18 months I think. Nobody cared to be involved in the reviews providing nothing more than "good good" until the thing was done. Then suddenly everything was "ugly and not what they wanted". An external company was hired who promised to rebuild it from scratch in 3 months. The internal devs were shuffled around, many quit. 2 years later the external company finally releases version 1 and celebrates themselves as absolute heroes. The were then set to work on taking over the current project the internal team had been working on... They again changed everything and made pretty much everyone on the team leave. That was another 2 years ago and they are getting close to release which no doubt will be celebrated again.
Luckily my work is a whole lot more specialized and the consultants we work with are actually competent and not greedy.
The story of every "outsourcing your core work" ever - and every time they are certain that the expected result won't happen to someone as smart as them.
The told us to return to the office. By that time people had built whole lives far from the office.
Yep. That was the organization exodus for my last job. Without any warning or planning, a state government agency, demanded everyone come back first week June 2021 when not a single other state office was even considering it. It was way out of left field and threatened to completely fuck up many people's lives and there was a mass exodus. Staff left agency wide. I think it was somewhere around 300 employees of a several thousand. Which may not seem like that much, but when 300 people quit in one agency over the course of two weeks, it's extremely noticable lol. The leadership at the top got berated publicly by the governor and they had to reverse course to stop people from leaving. But hey, I got a promotion, a huge raise, and got to demand my telework schedule because I instantly became more important hahaha.
The next exodus was my specific division. The deputy director we all liked and the media relations manager we all liked were fired out of nowhere by the same agency leadership that fucked up in the telework debacle. They placed their own drones in the two spots and it absolutely decimated morale. Not to mention the stool pigeons they selected are two of the most incompetent people I've ever had the displeasure of working with. I took a high-paying job with a federal contractor and bounced. Four people left in the few months following. They hired new people, two of which left within three months. I still talk to the social media manager who's still there and she fills me in on all the bullshit they're continuing with. Out of a public affairs division of 14 people, there's only six still there that were there when I left last September.
Yeah, it's when they install their bozo friends, who in turn hire more bozos. No quicker way to fuck up a business.
Yup, mine too. We had developers in two different cities, with a few other roles in a third city. We had actually had some significant improvements in how collaborative we could be thanks to going remote-first over the pandemic.
Then a new company buys us out and decides that collaboration can't happen without being in a physical room together. Never mind that we're still not in the same room because...different cities. That, plus pay "rises" that came in at a maximum of 3% at a time when inflation is like 7.6%, and came in 6 months late. Plus multiple rounds of layoffs.
Over the 12 months before I left the company, more than 50% of the software development team's years of experience had already left. And more have gone since I did.
Not me but a friend worked at a start up that was acquired by a bigger competitor. The new CEO stated in their first company wide meeting that he believes the ideal employee is a 'unicorn'. One who eats, sleeps and lives in the office working long hours. CEO laughed at people who asked about their benefits which were being reduced to the minimum (this is the UK so we have minimums but the startup originally had unlimited holidays etc). The CEO took over the board with a misogynistic vibe, all women left and then the guys followed.
Yeesh talk about a massive red flag. Guy wanted serfs more than employees.
I don't think "unicorn" means what he think it means...
Happened when management started treating the IT department like crap and demanding we work overtime with no extra pay. Almost all the experienced developers left in the spam of a year.
Before I left, I told them they would never be able to assemble such a good team again.
Four years later and they are still struggling to keep the department running, according to a friend that chose to stay. The few developers they are able to hire are either terrible or quit after a while.
I get the feeling the same will happen in my current job :/
We had something similar, but not only were we being treated like crap, we were basically told to be "yes men" and that we were all perpetually on call. And there were only 3 of us. No vacations, and I even had my VP calling me 2 days after having surgery done asking me to come back to the office, despite not being able to sit due to the nature of the surgery. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
So I found a new job and put in my two weeks. Then my coworker got fired less than a week later for explaining that terminating all EC2 instances running our app would in fact cause an outage rather than just doing it. Within a week of that, my boss, the last guy on my team, up and left.
I'm curious if they ever got someone knowledgeable on how to run the ship on board after that. Last I heard, the entire office I had worked at was shuttered during COVID.
The more IT stories I hear about the more I'm convinced that no management understands what IT does.
Over the years I've come to the conclusion that good managers in general are rare and the few good ones don't go far in their careers because big companies favors backstabbing psychopaths and narcissists, just like in politics.
Even without the politics, the Peter Principle all but guarantees incompetent leaders.
Big manager decided that our dept had been not using enough holiday days, so kinda forced all of us to take holiday. Then he got really angry with us that work wasn't being done and he slashed our budget, meaning we couldn't afford department essentials, meaning we couldn't do our basic tasks, so big boss yelled at us even more.
Probably the impetus for the mass exodus at my old job was the “We’ll Miss You” Zoom call we had for a beloved senior developer. The company had recently added a new manager role that hadnt existed before and things were fine. The new guy started micromanaging like crazy. The SD who was leaving basically went off during the call about how the company didn’t need NG’s role and how it was burning people out.
I stuck around for another year-ish, and NG managed to make a group of about 20 developers dwindle to 5-ish. Saw the writing on the wall after getting shafted, changed jobs and am now making double that salary along with far less stress.
"Merger" that was really a purchase. New CEO started immediately talking about making our $30mil company a $100mil company within 3 years and we all then knew they were going to work is to death and then sell us as soon as the multiples became unbound from revenue.
2 years later they're in their 3rd CEO and they're was just another max exodus. Glad I left early.
Recently caught up with a former coworker. When we worked together the company was led by the founder who wanted to pursue other ideas and sold the company to some managers. The company had also grown a ton with a clever new product so the culture changes could easily be attributed to that.
But neither of the new owners were particularly high EQ people so to speak. I left because there was no room for growth and I had already put ten years into it. The coworker told me that they worked the remaining crew "to death" in order to inflate the value of the company to the maximum. Their best buddies got promoted and many others got eeked out. They cleaned out all the satellite offices by inviting them to an orientation meeting and sending in "hired guns" to just fire the entire management on the spot. A few years of this and they sold it to a big player and walked out without even saying goodbye to anyone.
"We {company owners/founders} are excited to announce that {company} is partnering with {venture capital firm} to take {company to the next level}. {company owners/founders} will be moving to the board of directors and a new CEO is coming aboard. It's a very exciting time for {company}."
Received a few of those emails in my time... it's always bad news and might as well get your resume together right then.
I’ve resigned twice in my career following that type of communication. Both were smallish startups outperforming the other company, which then acquired them and proceeded to turn everything to shit.
I am a union member so this isn't a thing that happens. If management does something unacceptable, we do a strike authorization vote which, if passed by the membership, starts a clock ticking down to strike time and management knows that they are on notice and need to start negotiations.
All of which is just to say that unions are good for workers, regardless of what kind of bullshit you may have been led to believe.
I didn't think judges were unionized! Good for y'all!
That strike authorisation is very interesting, I don't even know if we have that here. Great idea!
I was a teacher at a small rural school. Five people in my department. Our department head was the worst possible choice for the position - she wasn't the most senior, wasn't the best equipped, wasn't the most innovative, wasn't the best peacemaker. She bullied and belittled, her lessons were the same for years, her scores weren't even particularly strong. We frequently went to professional development as a team which she didn't attend. Couple this with an admin who was incompetent and constantly double talking and it was a giant pain.
The final straw was when one of our colleagues found a better job (department head at a neighboring school) and they needed to reshuffle classes to find a replacement. Despite being more qualified and more experienced, they refused to give any honors or AP courses to me or my colleagues, instead hiring a first year teacher with only a BA and shutting the rest of the department out of the entire hiring project. We were literally in the building running summer school and planning for the following year while they did every interview with no input, promised to talk to us, then made their offers and class decisions. We were told that we'd all meet to discuss it, then they reversed course and said they didn't want input and we'd instead have a meeting at the start of the following school year to essentially admonish us for not blindly following our department head.
We finally decided we'd dealt with it enough. Three of the five of us left that summer, the fourth left the next year. They had to hire an entirely new department because of that one person. I'm in a better school with a better team now, one of my colleagues was poached by the same one who was originally leaving, and another sold her house and is touring the country in her RV home. The superintendent fired the admin the following year as well.
I was expecting most issues would be the result of senior management making stupid decisions, and was not disappointed. At our local office someone decided to randomly raise salaries. Instead of choosing the most talented people, it was like they did it on purpose to choose the ones that did the least. It broke not only the individual's willingness to work, as it made a joke of the performance evaluation. It was bad: top performers and team leaders left, morale took a deep dive (because why make an effort if it doesn't matter) and I am sure management still doesn't see it was a stupid decision to pay more to keep useless developers and lose top talent. Brilliant.
I'm going through something like that now.
Why do they pay me for my 20+ years of experience, then ignore my recommendations based on that experience? It doesn't make any sense!
Why do they have me doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with that experience? I spend half my time on a project I hate and have no interest in, and has nothing to do with my real job...which, by the way, wasn't cut back to make room for this project. (Management calls it critical work, then asks for volunteers. If it's that critical, why aren't we assigning people to do it? I didn't volunteer, I was told to do it. It's insane.)
It's really killing my motivation, as I post this during work hours... I'm actively looking and have applied for promotions in other areas just to get out of this.
I hope you find something that motivates you soon!
Thanks. The stupid part is that I love my actual job, and although I've been in the current position 10 years, I feel like I still have new ideas to improve our work. I'm still capable of recognizing my mistakes. I'm not to phoning it in. When I get to think about a thorny issue there, I start to really enjoy things again. I remember why I took the job in the first place.
But that other work, that has nothing to do with my main job, is poisoning the well. When I log in in the morning and see something for that work, it just kills my energy.
I've been at mine for 4 years, I hope to still enjoy it the same as you when I reach 10. Good luck, maybe the project implodes while you're on holiday or something hehe
I am currently in the middle of such an event. Small company, 30 persons. The CEO has an unnatural bond with the HR lady. She has shares of the company, and it is an open secret that he very much would like to fuck her.
As a result she gets more and more freedom and behaves as she is somehow entitled of being a second CEO. She is absolutely terrible in management, and has an unusual high amount of fluctuation in her department which covers everything which isnt operative business. So far, in the last 5 years the company hired and was left by six salespeople and no less than 10 team assistants. We usually have two sales jobs and two assistance jobs to fill. This situation alone does not help to keep up our morale.
The CEO keeps up a facade of "we are all family here" and therefore is quite open with announcements when someone new joins us and someone else leaves us. In the past week a newly hired Senior Account Manager quit after less than two weeks in the company. When he made the round of saying goodbye, he told everyone that he quits because he cant stand the management of HR Lady which is his boss.
Since the CEO wants to fuck her he is always somehow covering her faults and trying to hide her incompetence.
However, when he announced that not the account manager quit, but instead was fired, since they "could not accept his way of doing the work", which was very obviously a blatant lie, this was the final straw.
Currently all senior employees are either searching for something new or have already written, printed and signed their notice letters.
Mine was quite personal to me.
Fairly small European IT department for a much larger Asian company. With about 30 offices in Europe. Worldwide something like £80 billion turnover.
1 x IT Director
1 x IT infrastructure manager
4 x Business Analysts / Programmers
2 x Infrastructure Analyst (me +1) who ultimately ran all of Euro
3 x Help desk with one manager
I worked well with the Infrastructure Manager. But he had to scale back his time so moved to a new role. It wasn't uncommon for us to do 16 hour days, but I was young and could handle it.
The assumption was they would promote the Help desk manager, which I was fine with. Instead they brought in a guy from the QA department.
Now I liked this guy to start with but it became apparent it wasn't going to work between us with in a couple of months.
So I went to the director and said I can't work for him. You need to do something or I'm going and so will my colleague. I gave him a month, the I'll start the hunt. Then I talked to the hr director, the md and my original boss who I regularly had status meetings with
I had done a lot to bring the IT provision forward in my 3 years there and gained a lot of respect in the company for it.
So nothing happened in that month and in my second week of looking I got a decent job offer. So I walked in the next day and handed the it director my resignation, promptly followed by my colleague and then two of the business analysts and one from the help desk. The only ones left were the really inexperienced or just plain useless ones.
HR call me in and I told them the story of me and the manager. How he had said to the Help desk Manager that it was me or him. That the director had decided to call my bluff so I decided I wasn't that valuable, so it was time to go.
They asked what they could do so I told them. Move this guy on, make the help desk manager the boss and I'll reconsider my resignation. But I can't talk for my colleagues. A couple of days later they show me a proposal to shuffle the manager. I said I'll on reconsider when I see it happen.
Nothing happened until two weeks before I was due to leave. Word gets back to head office in Asia that the IT department has resigned on mass. Now I spent a lot of time in head office and built a strong friendship with the chairman's daughter, still is a fairly good friend all these years later.
She flys over, in my final week and asks what happened. I tell her about the offer from hr but I hadn't seen any movement from them. She marches upstairs and talks to the md and hr director. Ten minutes goes by and I'm called into the MD's office to see the IT manager escorted from the building and asked if I want his job. Apparently he was offered early retirement but rumour had it they told he was being relocated to a different department and told them to shove it.
I declined the offer and said it wasn't about getting his job, I didn't want it and I wasn't mentally ready for it. The other guys weren't staying anyway as they had better offers. But my friend the help desk manager did get the job. I still left as the job was about the team and the amazing work relationship we had.
For the next two months they kept calling me with improved offers, I declined. It was never about the money but it was about listening to their staff. How could I work in a company that didn't value me until I came through with my promised consequence?
I've bumped into the hr manager at events since and the now it director (who was the help desk manager) and we often talk about the lessons learnt. It took them years to recover from IT department imploding.
Yeah, sounds familiar. For me its also not about the job in general. I like what i do, and i know that i'm good at it. I like my colleagues and am considering some of them being my friends.
It is about the somehow toxic atmosphere, the lies, and the behind-closed-doors murmurs despite "we are all family here".
Company hired a new recruiter who complained it was too hard for him to find Perl devs. Announced we were going to transition to java, resulting in all our perl devs exiting and no further work being done. Last I heard they bought a shitty asp.net code base from a random guy and that became the new platform for whatever’s left of the company.
How the hell do you find Perl devs these days? Recruiting at retirement homes?
If you build a project in a dead language you end up having to migrate to something to mass market like Java just so anyone else can work on it.
Shit man, I love Ruby but it would be professional malpractice to start a new project on Rails.
Man, I entered my company two years ago for cobol and basic development. The only way to continue is to spend a lot to train new devs.
I left on holiday for 3 weeks from the bakery I used to work at where I was the main line guy and handled the ordering and scheduling.
A few days before another line guy left as he was moving so this meant that between the 2 of us we used to do 6 days and the weekend so now the other 3 people trained on the line were going to have to do that some more.
I come back and in week 1 one guy quit as he literally couldn't handle the heat (the AC wasn't great so the line would easily get to about 100 F after being open for a few hours), week 2 another was fired because he wasn't keeping up with prep (but he was on the line 5 days so how was he supposed to), and then once I get back after another few days they fire number 3 who was also the kitchen manager because of how poorly the last few weeks had been.
I put my notice in there and then.
And that's how they lost 80% of their kitchen team in less than a month.
Oh I got a story for this one.
"Of course I recognize him, he's me."
So I got hired at a company that was a sub contracting company. I had looked at some of their work they had done in the past and I thought that it'd be a fun place to work. Spin up new stuff for peoplez then move onto the next job.
When I got hired, there was one client who was forking out a lot of money. The client had more dollars than sense, and had before been paying for the cheapest labor he could find to build his dream application and had been burned by hiring a group that quite clearly did not know what they were doing. We basically started from scratch and got him something he was quite happy with.
In fact he was so happy, he decided to cut out the middle man and buy the subcontracting group I was working with outright. Cut a very nice big check to the owner who took it and bounced. Supposedly he was still helping out but I dont think I remember seeing him after that point other than one point.
Well, like I said, my new ceo had more dollars than sense, and thought himself the next Steve Jobs. He liked to call employees directly to ask why things were taking so long (which is why I know he thought of himself as the next Steve Jobs, he told me in a phone call)
I don't think a single person at this company, except for those who were in his inner circle, liked this dude. I know every developer at the company did. I know one of the other companies he contracted with hated his guts. (more on that in a bit)
The thing is, while he sucked, the rest of us liked each other. In all honesty, if any of them called me up and said they wanted to work with me again I'd happily jump up to join them again.
So at the end of this all, we got into a reverse Mexican stand off. No one wanted to quit because we didn't want to screw each other over.
Then it got taken out of our hands, because I was let go.
My response to being told I was let go was to make myself a drink, take a selfie and send it to my coworkers with the caption, "See you suckers!" And call up an old coworker who I had been discussing a project with that we had been thinking of doing as a side gig.
My coworkers flipped their shit. They went into the company chat and publicly called out the short sightedness of letting me go. I no longer had access to the company chat but my now former coworkers were more than willing to let me see them insulting the CEO and his friends.
Then one of my friends quit. Which then made the CEO reach out to my other friend asking what on earth is going on. My friend told him "well, as we said, you made a really dumb decision. So, we aren't sticking around any more. Also, I'm quitting too."
They wound up having to beg one of my friends to stay because he had been in charge of some very VERY important projects (that they only allocated one person to, gave no oversight to, and had no documentation or road map written down) and he told them he'd stick around, but they had to pay him 5 times more, and he wasn't coming in for a 40 hour work week.
And soon after THAT, it turned out the CEO and Owner of the company pissed off one of the dev shops we worked with so badly, that when it became time to renew the contract they told him they had no desire to continue their relationship with him.
Within a year, they had lost every developer they had worked with. And it makes me smile.
Worked for a shoe retailer where the head office was attached to the distribution center (DC) for the US.
The CFO fired the long-time and very popular DC manager. The rounded up the DC staff in our large meeting room with the CFO and the director of HR to discuss the change in management in the DC. The DC staff were already unhappy because they all liked the manager very much. After the spiel from CFO and HR, one of the DC staff asked if they would still be getting double time for all overtime. HR director, confused, asked what he meant. He explained the DC director would go and modify their timecards so they would get paid double for overtime instead of time and a half.
The HR director, without putting any thought into their answer or the consequences, immediately stated that would be ending immediately.
The DC damn near went on strike right there. Several of them left over the next few weeks, and the ones who didn't leave worked much slower and were unavailable for overtime work. They ended up requiring all of us office staff to work 4-8 hours a week in the DC for a few months while they unfucked everything.
That employee mentioning the time card modification sure did the fired manager dirty, hope they didn't face serious legal consequences for that.
Based on the earnest way in which it was asked, I don't think the employee asking knew that the manager wasn't supposed to be doing that - they thought it was a legitimate incentive approved by the company.
As far as I know the company didn't try going after the manager about it, but it's possible I wouldn't have known about that. I only know the above because I was working in that room re-configuring some tech stuff that needed to be fixed ASAP, while the meeting was happening.
It's happening to my place right now. CEO lied about raise and bonus amounts. Additionally, both were lower than two years ago (last time we got a raise) especially factoring in inflation.
They drastically altered the shift patterns from a relatively simple 2 day, 2 night, 4 off to a pretty complicated 5 on 3 off with 7 start times that you would cycle through each week. (5 straight 2100-0700 shifts suuuucked.) They also made us bid for team assignments. The real wtf moment was when they didn’t bother posting enough vacancies for everyone to bid on because of the anticipated attrition.
My company has 24/7 shifts, but they're static and you get a large differential for working nights, which I did for many years. Hearing about these rolling shifts just blows my mind, and I can't understand why anyone would enjoy it.
Worked for a shitty MSP in a large Midwestern city. They started hiring more managers, more "executives," they brought in consultants to make us more efficient, hired folks fresh out of college to tell us how to do our jobs - people that didn't know the first thing about tech - then decided they were going to make us start coming back into the office because they were salty that they dropped a couple of million on a new office a month before the pandemic.
I quiet quit, collected that sweet severance and unemployment (with the pandemic bonus) for a year, and was making more money than when I was working. I found all sorts of new hobbies in that year, and eventually found a job with a massive corporation. I work from home 3 days a week. I go into the office twice a week now, but said office is right in the middle of downtown and my view from my desk is insane, so I don't really mind. No one else really goes into the office anyways, so it's a nice two day quiet time each week. Also, I doubled my salary and have triple the PTO now. Fuck Framework IT.
I was going to guess another MSP that I worked for also in the midwest. They basically did the same thing and lost a good amount of quality people. We went thru a VC coming on board, 3 mergers in less than a year. Company grew in clients, employees stayed about the same. It was hell
Living it right now, my sister department was caught up in the Jeffery Epstien situation. It came to light a few weeks ago after our company settled for 290 million.
I'm abandoning my success in this field to go back to school as a Nurse. Fuuuuuuck my company, and my field. Hoping i can be a benefit to humanity for a change.
What do you mean caught up on the situation? How was your company related?
In short: it was criminal negligence with intent to keep revenue streams flowing. I work as a Fraud Investigator, our sister department handles higher profile cases such as this.
Needless to say, the situation certainly faltered my trust in our processes, procedures, and integrity. So, I'm leaving lol. I dont have kids or anything so i'm able to make the leap into schooling
good on you for moving on. it can be a tough call when actually faced with following your morals, or just forgetting it.
I appreciate it a lot, its been a very hard decision and I'm worried im making a mistake. The largest concern is how to make enough money working part time while i study.
Fortunately, i have a very supportive partner and without them i would have abandoned the prospect already
keep it up, you can do it!
Thanks for the response, I read the article but other than Jeffrey being a client of Chase, I don't quite know what they did wrong. Were they booking the flights for free? How were they invoiced in the crimes and turning a blind eye to them?
We handled his money for him while we knew what was going on. When the proedures inevitably brought the case to our department, our upper management and execs turned a blind eye.
I couldnt tell you details,I would if i knew them. Chase operates under a very segmented structure that prevents information from bleeding into one department to another. I found out in the news first, then brought my concerns to my manager
Well if they decided to settle for such a large number, they knew they were screwed and did something very wrong. Thank you!
Long story short: Criminal Negligence to keep the revenue stream flowing.
Yeah, this need a little more details. Lawyer? Movie studio?
Posted some details below
I work a union job, most people never leave. Usually the old guys retire in waves though. They've all known each other for decades and don't want to have to have to train the next generation.
Company was bought by a VC group with no experience in the industry. They spent their resources in all the wrong places, leading to alienated employees with no morale. They were also behind on office rental payments.
We had no formal IT or standard laptop hardware or software. One team decided they were all done after their director left. The CEO decided that they were colluding and fired them all at once. Nobody else was cleared for that project's SCIF, meaning nobody could contact the customer over secure channels. Additionally, their drives were encrypted with personal passwords that were never turned over as the employees had no proper exit process.
Between that and my team slowly leaving due to morale, they lost 2/3 of the few contracts they had, along with the technical expertise responsible for them.
My town changed our insurance from a decent PPO to a HSA and didn’t grandfather in the current membership. So everyone eligible to retire retired so they can keep their PPO. We had over 15 people leave. It was great for Overtime not great for personal life. I am a firefighter.
Holy crap... TIL that the USA has a specialized savings account for medical expenses. Like... if they know it's inevitable that people have to spend money for their health in one way or another, this is kinda like the ultimate "Don't care if you die or suffer" attitude. Surely the bureaucracy to figure out the tax codes behind this kind of thing would costs more than just implementing universal health care... wouldn't it?
It sure would but then what will happen to all their billionaire friends? We can’t expect them to have only one yacht! The real kick in the dick was they made the FD go on it but management and town hall staff got to keep the good health plan.
The building manager, Oscar, was recently put in charge of the whole department/building because things weren't working out well. Well it got worse under Oscar. First he made a push to end working from home, and then he got into so many arguments and fights with my boss Theo. It didn't take long for Theo to say fuck it and leave, which is when things got worse.
For a 2 month period or so, our entire team of like 13 people were in limbo with no direction. Oscar temporarily took control of our team until he found a replacement. And in that time he constantly was grilling us for answers about what our team did and how it worked. Not fun. A little bit later he fired two people off our team.
We then got a replacement manager, David. He's not the best manager, but he's not the worst. He struggles to comprehend what our team does, but he trusts that we know enough to get by with a little bit of direction on what project we should be working on. Another 2 people left over the course of a few months on their own.
Then in March, Oscar fired about 30 people across the department for "budget" reasons. From what I heard, the company lost a shit load of money due to all the project delays. Those delays have only gotten worse now that morale is in the garbage. Nobody wants to work hard at a place they fear they will be fired from at any moment while constantly being interrogated by Oscar. Some more people left on their own over the following months.
Cut to today, and there are 5 people left on the team I'm in. And I put my two weeks notice in because I got a better job. I don't know what kind of shit show it's gonna turn into, or what's gonna happen when there is nobody left on my team. But on my team at least, every member has been looking for the door, and it's been a race to not be the last person still working there.
So yeah, if your a manager, maybe don't interrogate people and make people fear for their livelihoods.
People quit managers, they don't quit jobs.
Priorities shifted, "we're doing good" became "we need to reduce the workforce" over weekend and most of the people who they would have liked to keep decided this is a good time to look for something new.
A very unqualified but very good at bullshitting for 5 minutes VP moved in to run my team. The old VP was great, we all loved her. My boss (Director level), I loved her too. She's the reason I joined the team.
They moved the SVP head of the dept to a new area and brought in some marketing lackeys. Our department's job was to analyze marketing and they were terrible at it. Not our fault the results were shit.
So new head of the dept, new head of our team. They were just stupid and sinister. A female friend of mine who worked with my new manager on a project referred to her as "That evil cunt". My old manager 2 managers before that had her kicked off a project because she nearly ruined it
I tried to give her a chance but she was awful and a liar. We already lost 3 out of 6 people on my team who bailed. Dozens in the dept. I left before she could fire me for some made up shit she was planning (another manager clued me in)
Eventually the entire dept of 200 people was whittled down and absorbed into another group.
First the boss throws a hissy fit and starts handing out "verbal writeups" for things that were his fault. Then he imposes 7:30am demos every day to prove we were actually working and not... I guess slacking?
I was working for an Australian company, that was bought by a big (F500) American company. Actually they bought over 200 companies globally to become what they were.
After the dust settled, the American corp started talking all sorts of stupid American stuff that would never fly in Australia. For example ALL Aussies have the right to 4 weeks annual leave, and 2 weeks of sick leave per year. They wanted to change that to 3 weeks and NONE! (again would never have happened, legally, but damage was being done..)
Staff started to leave.
Next thing was then global conferences at stupid times of the night/morning with staff that were not typically the type to take meetings AT ALL. (Not upper or middle management, I mean workers and supervisors) This was around 2015, way before anything we are more familiar with today.
More left (work/personal life balance)
And finally was all the stupid buzzwords and never ending general shit that we just didn't care about. "Bi-weekly" (ambiguous globally and simply should not be used. It's either fortnightly or twice a week..) Not to mention the plethora of other buzzword shit like "holistically engaging in resource-maximising virtualisation" and bluesky or "data-only sales" (we made manufacturing equipment ffs!!)
Middle management started to walk, it was becoming a rolling stone covered in moss.
Then when there was a bit of a market shift and the economy went down (and therefore the American company took an EBITA hit, they laid off 20% of the staff). This led to further insecurity in the company and about 30% of the rest of the workers said fuck it and left. What do you expect when they are assembly/production or electricians etc who can get more stability from working out of a van and a mobile phone.
They managed kill themselves and even drop out of the F500 list!
Bi-weekly is not a buzz word but it is absolutely ambiguous. I love throwing out fortnightly meetings in my American office. I always get a smile. Also, who schedules meetings with blue-collar workers that are not at the start/end of a shift? That's just really bad leadership. I can understand a once-a-year thing but not on a regular cadence.
Someone incompetent was promoted to manager, they became drunk with power and a complete micromanaging piece of shit. Half the team quit within a couple of months.
(Hello to my current boss who may be here, no it wasn't at our job).
Worked in supermarket. New manager came in and decided to change everything, everybody hated it.
So as a good 23 year old I decided to start harassing him by ordering free magazines, free stuff, furniture, kitchens etc etc online and get it delivered to his house.
this is awesome petty revenge and i am here for it.
IBM rocked up.
Don’t believe that IT guys have safe jobs. An IBM sales guy can promise to replace any developer or project with a better version. Happened twice to me now.
Bought out by a PE leveraged shitshow. Disaster was inevitable.
PE firms are killing off all the tech companies still worth working for.
Been there, done that...
Although, the PE firm that owns the company I work for now has shelled out a lot of cash for major improvements to the technology. There are a few that are trying to make things better, but they are hard to find.
I was just listening to a podcast about private equity. Sounds ridiculous to be a part of something like that
Previous company decided that not only would they make people redundant but they'd also gut the benefits of those who stayed and worsen working conditions all whilst trying to transition their entire manufacturing process to entirely different equipment.
Unsurprisingly all the experienced and skilled workers took their generous payouts or bailed as soon as the new process and working conditions went to shit.
Literally 10s of millions invested in machinery and a few million in redundancy all to end up making less and worse product at a higher cost than before. Combined with the few that stayed having zero morale and it was cluster fuck that's irreparably damaged a 140 year old company.
I bounced once I'd got enough experience to be of value elsewhere.
I just can’t understand the rationale for all that. Was it all for cost cutting? You would think after 140 years they would be relatively stable.
My guess is that they made two contradictory policies and didn't realize the combined effect.
Ah my mistake to omit that bit.
It was new ownership combined with an actual need for new machinery. The old lines were multiple decades old and being held together by creative engineering.
Now new more efficient machinery and some redundancies would be normal and kind of expected. But the manner in which it was done was the issue. Immediately alienated the entire workforce and lost the most skilled workers to boot. All tied together with a nice little bow of utterly incompetent planning regarding the implementation and procurement process. The final cherry on top was the complete inability to market the new product.
It was sad seeing a company that was profitable with good brand recognition and actual competitive advantages literally piss it all away inside 12 months of a 140 year history.
Worked for a F500 company in their data science department. Given the global footprint of the company and the nature of my work, all I did was sit in front of the computer (meetings, coding, etc). The pandemic struck and we went remote. Afterwards, they insisted on 100% return to office. Said I would quit if they did that. They pushed for it so I quit. So did most of the team. Apparently, interns were left picking up the pieces, and the dept has never fully recovered since
Poo Gate
Go on…
no please, don't
Oh my, if you insist.
It was a grey and damp October when The Incident occurred. At first, some people thought it was an accident - but then it happened again. The first was a mystery, the second an enigma. Both were massive shits that no human could possibly have left - or so we thought.
These colossal beasts were sometimes in the toilet, but sometimes hanging over the edge - trying to escape like a big slug or angry brown whale.
It kept happening, mystery upon mystery. And yet no one observed the source. How could this be?
Soon, these things were not just on or in the toilet, but on the cubical walls and in the sink. They were advancing and threatening to break out of the bathrooms and into the corridors - or who knows where. Would you turn in your chair and see one right next to you when you least expect it?
October turned into November, and then December and with various notices pinned up and emails and whispers and gossip, the poos seemed finally to have gone back from whence they came (or at least, stopped happening).
Then, in December just before Christmas, an awful present was left. It could not have been Santa, although it was definitely from someone who had eaten the world's supply of mince pies relatively recently. The massive shite was so big it blocked the plumbing and the office had no working toilets at all. There was an exodus of people, leaving early for the day - with that giant turd, Christmas had come early.
Every December I look back on those events and the unexpected gift, and wonder if the magic of Christmas will ever happen again.
You can't just leave us with that.
I worked for a dollar store in the ghetto, and we got held up repeatedly at gun point.
Corporate wouldn't do anything for our safety.
Store manager lined up a better gig, and all but two employees decided to quit, because he spent his free time up there, not working but guarding us. More people at the front, bigger deterence - plus him being an MMA fighter helped.
It was timed for black Friday for maximum impact. Finding another minim wage job wasn't too hard at time, we just had all worked together in the past and liked each other, so we stuck around each other.
The department head was an absolute bag of dicks. This guy was so bad, you would think that he was doing a bit or something. He would use company resources for his side projects and would constantly try and get us to work on one of his dipshit app ideas. He would find any excuse to travel to remote sites so he could cheat on his wife with the local sex workers, and worse, would drag us around with him as his entourage or some shit. He would stand behind us and watch us while we worked. Every few days he would partially read an article espousing some new technology and then give us shit for not using it.
We generally learned to work around his shenanigans and even got pretty successful at self managing and knocking out projects, but after a while he decided to show us all who's boss and siloed us completely. The whole team left within a month of each other.
On a side note, to this day, the lead dev from that team is my absolute biggest hero. That dude bore the brunt of the dep head's stupidity, kept us sane, kept us on task, let us vent, managed projects, dealt with customers, and was an all around awesome guy.
One of our engineering teams who normally builds our products in-house was made to bid against contractors who promised the moon.
Them and multiple other teams then had to spend a total of 18 months getting the contractor's shoddy work up to scratch. When they were done, the senior engineers from three teams left.
This was years ago at a job I don't add to my resume.
I was the incident. I worked at a plastic bottle factory as a packer, and I had gotten this job through a friend. The 2 of us got along with the manager pretty well. Had common interests and about the same mindset about being employed there. A few positions opened up and he came to us and asked if we'd like to move up to one of them. I chose to move up to forklift operator, he chose machine operator. We both liked the jobs a lot more after that. Of course with a promotion comes a raise right?
The manager that had us promoted actually found a new job shortly after we had been trained and were starting to handle our jobs independently, he brought us into the office along with his replacement that he was currently training and told us that we were due raises and he had started the ball rolling on that. The new manager said he was informed of everything and would follow up on it to make sure we were taken care of.
3 months go by, our old manager is long gone, and we were still making the same pay. We approached the new manager about this. "I just need you to bear with me, I'm still working on that"
Ok fine whatever...3 more months go by and we don't see a dime. 6 months we've been making less than we should be now. Hell people are being hired at a higher rate than we make at this point. We confront him again. "Bear with me" he says again. I beared with him until about noon that day. I parked my forklift. I got in my car and left. All afternoon I'm getting calls and texts from people. My buddy tells me "you have no idea how many people days you just fucked up".
I gently reminded him that we were getting taken advantage of. That we've been working for a lower wage than new hires after getting a promotion for 6 months. I also spilled these beans to other coworkers texting me about what happened. It didn't take long...my buddy left mid day, 2 other machine operators left mid day. A string of packers stopped showing up, all but one daytime forklift driver either quit or walked out. They lost 10 people of varying positions in a month.
I couldn't help but grin when my buddy told me he was done and one of my coworkers told me how many people quit before they left. I felt like my walkout made a difference that time.
Most satisfying comment in the thread. A true "fuck around and find out" story
It sounds to me like you weren't the only person the company was screwing with. Once everybody started comparing notes, that company was dead in the water.
I'm not sure if they were already being screwed or just thought they were next in line. This was my first real delve into corporate fuckery though.
Leave a note: Your free trial of 'Dubz the forklift driver' has expired. Insert coin to continue
The full office being pulled into a meeting and lectured about how disheartening it was to see everyone leaving the office on time at the end of working hours. What we call good time management they apparently saw an laziness and a lack of commitment.
That and the message that discussing pay and bonuses wasn’t allowed (despite being protected by the Equalities Act here in the UK). This of course got us wondering why this would be discouraged and turns out our salaries seemed to have very little to do with length of service or performance.
Worked at a place where we got a company wide ass chewing from the CEO for leaving right at 5:00 PM. Apparently he interpreted this as everyone was slacking off the last few minutes.
The results: instead of walking out the door right at 5:00, all the other departments would stand at the exit and wait for the accounting department to walk out of the building first. CEO favored the accounting department so I guess everyone figured they wouldn't get in trouble if accounting left first.
I think his little tiff actually resulted in more time being wasted.
It's always 'fun' when a US company tries opening an office in Europe - and even more so when they try to close one!
The head of IT where I work quit on the spot during a meeting with the president of the company because the president wouldn't agree with any security measure IT wanted to put in place because they were too expansive, and also because he was fedup of being micro-managed by someone who's only achievement was being the child of the founder. That was a couple months after being hit with a ransomware that made us lose rougly 10 years of data. (IT had no budget to implement proper backups and everything)
Then the whole IT department left the company the same week.
That was a year ago. They tried hiring new IT staff, they keep leaving because the president still micro-manage them.
Edit : I still work there, I'm not in IT, and I never have to deal with the shenanigans of the president. Only thing that changed as far as I know is that they changed the structure of our file servers, and we are slightly more restricted than before, but we still all have access to way too much files on there and we still all have admin rights on our laptops, so anyone can install anything.
As an IT guy, that whole situation is terrifying.
As a non IT guy, I can say the same. Feels like the ship is sinking.
Still haven't found another job without a massive pay cut...
And yet, extremely common.
Wow even ransomware didn't teach a lesson.. I'd be worried about personal data being indexed on some onion site..
Someone asked a question about work-life balance during an all-hands meeting and the CEO laughed at him.
A couple weeks later my entire location started eating lunch together and discussing our job searches.
Many years ago - many jobs ago, we got a new CEO, and she wanted to make a big splash, so she started firing people. And this is a public, non-profit job, so most people were working in less than stellar conditions simply because they were passionate about public service.
I was two days away from putting in my 2 weeks' notice because I had landed another job, but they fired me and gave me two months' severage. So instead of having to work another 2 weeks, I didn't have to go another day. I said "Sorry it didn't work out." and held my smile till I got out the door.
Large turds are used to making a big splash
Not really an incident but I am amazed at how many groups of senior tech managers and engineers navigate from organization to organization together!
For example, a tech VP joins a new company and within a year many of the senior positions are occupied by the VP’s previous coworkers. They give each other promotions and eventually either get outmaneuvered by another similar group of people or simply choose to move on to the next place to do it all over again.
I had no idea such groups existed, until I was invited into one. Now that I’m aware I’ve seen the same pattern happening at pretty much every place that I’ve worked at since.
There’s some collective bargaining in that, though. “You lose this person, you lose all of these persons”.
I’m someone in that group. My last 2 jobs have been following a former manager. Now about 70% of the engineering department are from previous companies
As long as the abuse unethical companies, I truly don't care. Good for them. Just don't do this at places that make a difference
It shouldn't work unless they're not keeping up with wage increases. Jumping from place to place is only profitable if your current work is banking on you not expecting col increases.
No matter how good hearted your workplace is, they shouldn't be stealing labour.
Student in engineering, this is 100% the Departement i work at. You are an out liner if you have not worked at that one other company before. Also, more are on the way from the vorher company to us.
A couple executive-types gathered the more senior developers for an "open" discussion about recruitment and retention. They suggest multiple ideas that would destroy morale (like non-compete clauses, poorly designed work-role pipelines, etc), and all of us suggest against them, and provided alternatives instead (like a shift in direction of certain efforts, more autonomy and less micromanaging, etc). They end up accusing us of not supporting our company's mission and tell us that if we don't agree then they don't want us there and we should just quit. I think after that meeting, only 2 people stayed out of about 30, and hiring numbers have significantly declined.
And I’m sure the owners tell their family and friends about how lazy the workforce is. Probably spend hours talking about how Americans don’t know how to work hard any longer.
I have a couple of these.
First one, I worked for a small engineering consulting firm. Maybe 8 people tops, including the President, who owns the company and our building.
We were renovating the second floor, and I overheard him tell his contractor that he shouldn't put women's restroom signs up, because only engineers will work on the second floor and therefore no women. I had an offer within 6 weeks, but disappointingly this did not slow the success of the company.
More recently, I left a position as the facility manager for a biotech manufacturer. My workload was immense, despite a <1yo child, and I was on call for emergencies 24/7.
Around September, I heard rumor that we were planning a plant shutdown over the Christmas to New Year holidays - this would give all manufacturing personnel a guaranteed 2 week paid vacation, while the facilities team of 20 people would be on vacation blackout and have the busiest two weeks of the year.
I brought up the rumor to my boss and begged him to advocate against it. He said he'd try, and within 24 hours told me that he decided to advocate in favor of the shutdown during that period because he doesn't celebrate the holidays anyway and it's a great time to get stuff done.
So I got to tell my team, who had family around the world and always agreed amongst themselves who got to travel and who stayed local, that nobody gets to travel for the holidays and we all get to work.
I got a new job very quickly, but unfortunately had to see the shutdown through and worked through Christmas. However, I took one tech with me and heard that the team dropped to under 8 people before we lost touch with current emoyees. They took my departure as writing on the wall and opted to get out before there was a repeat.
Wow, that second one really takes the cake. The self-centredness to just go with the I don't care, so nobody should is really appalling.
It is not a spicy interesting incident, but when the senior jumps ship it will be followed by some juniors that smell that difficult times and promotions with only increase in responsibilities will come. I am the next senior doing this btw
My final straw was when my boss quit. Not only did I really like her, but she was also the only thing left between me and the top exec who was part of, if not the only, reason most people left.
That sounds like the other side of my dad's experience. He was a mid-level district manager whose primary job, alongside managing a district of grocery stores under a certain Ohio-based conglomerate, was serving as the barrier between the incompetent good-ol-boys C-suite and the people who actually know what they are doing. The two worst offenders were his immediate boss, the regional VP who we'll call Jane, and the company VP, who we'll call James. James was probably the biggest Trump fan, in that he mimicked his behavior: a chauvinist braggart who was quick to anger and honestly had no right to be that high up aside from his relationships. Promotions for him were a way to reward his friends or those who... "accommodated" him, like one store manager who, despite having not passed the evaluation, still got a store director promotion due to his intervention. Jane, meanwhile, was a kiss-ass whose management style started and ended at anger and threats. Both were Dunning-Kruger personified and my dad had to spend most of his time taking their useless and unrealistic demands and translating them into something halfway-workable in the store, while making sure the managers were ready to revert to whatever dumbass preferences they had the instant one of the two came in for a store walk (something they only did when absolutely required around the holidays, because god forbid they actually manage or something).
He was successful at serving as the barrier, and he commanded immense respect within the district, to the point that when I got my first job working in an adjacent district, the managers (many of whom were hired away from competitors by my dad when the store was still under his purview) still spent a lot of time talking about how much they respected him. That said, he could only take so much, and he knew he had no chance of promotion as long as he stayed there. A while back, he finally got a chance for change, as there was an opening working for the flagship brand of the conglomerate. It was a lateral move, but there was a chance for upward mobility, it was halfway across the country in a place with better weather, and, most importantly, it offered a chance to get the hell away from James and Jane. However, that meant the barrier he erected was gone, and all of a sudden, the micromanagement and bullshit of the c-suite was unleashed on his district. While corporate was happy to get an opponent to their
reign of terrorbrilliance out of their way, the actual rank-and-file, many of whom still remained good friends with my dad, could barely stand it. Every week was a new update on which store manager or department manager ended up quittinf and going to which competitor, all because James and Jane just couldn't help themselves.(As an aside, and just to give an idea of my dad's management capabilities, when his replacement (a toady who had tried and failed to undermine him and get him fired) himself got fired due to
someone needing to get thrown under the busa pretty bad manager evaluation error, the store managers started calling him for advice, and he basically ended up spending his free time serving as unofficial district manager from halfway across the country as a favor to his old store managers. While appreciated, it did not stop the shitstorm.)While the exodus was pretty bad, it looks like it ended up being pretty short-lived. Right before he left, the conglomerate installed a new president hired from outside of the company. James was supposed to be the next in line if looking at the company hierarchy, but was passed over. (Another aside, they needed some fresh ideas badly. Even beyond the c-suite fuckery, the company in general was stubborn and overly set in its ways, even rejecting some ideas about tech and home shopping from the conglomerate that would have dragged them into the 21st century in favor of continuing to do things "their way"). The new president took a few months to get situated, but when she finally got adjusted, heads started rolling. First, James. I still don't have all of the details, but he was gone a few months after my dad left. Maybe the misconduct caught up to him, maybe he was still livid about not getting the promotion, maybe it had to do with his son (also an unqualified store manager. Go figure) getting arrested for assault.
As soon as he left, it was only a matter of time for Jane, and about 6 months later, she was gone. According to her Facebook, she left to "go into teaching" (a lot of incredulous laughter was shared at the dinner table when he read that), but we all knew what happened: the exodus was bad in the region, and now that James couldn't protect her, and after some time to see if she would adjust or remain the same, the president presented her with two options: quietly walk away, or receive a not-so-quiet boot out the door. Either way, the worst of the worst was gone, but the damage was done. A lot of good managers left in the year after my dad left the company, and regaining that level of talent assembled will take a long time, especially as other competitors are eyeing expansion into that district.
As for my dad, he's doing great with the conglomerate, has built up a similar rapport with his new managers, and may have a promotion on the way (especially if the FTC decides to not do its job and permits a large merger to go through).
Safeway, a part of Albertsons, takes its market position for granted near its own HQ. I hate to see what will happen with the merger.
I'm hoping a lot of stores are spun off and thrive. Albertsons is good at shenanigans with that and the government needs to pay attention.
Basically my last cave job when the pandemic hit. We all got furloughed, and when they asked us to come back none of the long timers came back. A lot of the fresh folks left after seeing how many never came back.
One of our engineering teams who normally builds our products in-house was made to bid against contractors who promised the moon.
Them and multiple other teams then had to spend a total of 18 months getting the contractor's shoddy work up to scratch. When they were done, the lead engineers from three teams left, as well as their manager.
Oh boy. My current employer had an app built inhouse over 18 months I think. Nobody cared to be involved in the reviews providing nothing more than "good good" until the thing was done. Then suddenly everything was "ugly and not what they wanted". An external company was hired who promised to rebuild it from scratch in 3 months. The internal devs were shuffled around, many quit. 2 years later the external company finally releases version 1 and celebrates themselves as absolute heroes. The were then set to work on taking over the current project the internal team had been working on... They again changed everything and made pretty much everyone on the team leave. That was another 2 years ago and they are getting close to release which no doubt will be celebrated again.
Luckily my work is a whole lot more specialized and the consultants we work with are actually competent and not greedy.
The story of every "outsourcing your core work" ever - and every time they are certain that the expected result won't happen to someone as smart as them.
The told us to return to the office. By that time people had built whole lives far from the office.
Yep. That was the organization exodus for my last job. Without any warning or planning, a state government agency, demanded everyone come back first week June 2021 when not a single other state office was even considering it. It was way out of left field and threatened to completely fuck up many people's lives and there was a mass exodus. Staff left agency wide. I think it was somewhere around 300 employees of a several thousand. Which may not seem like that much, but when 300 people quit in one agency over the course of two weeks, it's extremely noticable lol. The leadership at the top got berated publicly by the governor and they had to reverse course to stop people from leaving. But hey, I got a promotion, a huge raise, and got to demand my telework schedule because I instantly became more important hahaha.
The next exodus was my specific division. The deputy director we all liked and the media relations manager we all liked were fired out of nowhere by the same agency leadership that fucked up in the telework debacle. They placed their own drones in the two spots and it absolutely decimated morale. Not to mention the stool pigeons they selected are two of the most incompetent people I've ever had the displeasure of working with. I took a high-paying job with a federal contractor and bounced. Four people left in the few months following. They hired new people, two of which left within three months. I still talk to the social media manager who's still there and she fills me in on all the bullshit they're continuing with. Out of a public affairs division of 14 people, there's only six still there that were there when I left last September.
Yeah, it's when they install their bozo friends, who in turn hire more bozos. No quicker way to fuck up a business.
Yup, mine too. We had developers in two different cities, with a few other roles in a third city. We had actually had some significant improvements in how collaborative we could be thanks to going remote-first over the pandemic.
Then a new company buys us out and decides that collaboration can't happen without being in a physical room together. Never mind that we're still not in the same room because...different cities. That, plus pay "rises" that came in at a maximum of 3% at a time when inflation is like 7.6%, and came in 6 months late. Plus multiple rounds of layoffs.
Over the 12 months before I left the company, more than 50% of the software development team's years of experience had already left. And more have gone since I did.
Not me but a friend worked at a start up that was acquired by a bigger competitor. The new CEO stated in their first company wide meeting that he believes the ideal employee is a 'unicorn'. One who eats, sleeps and lives in the office working long hours. CEO laughed at people who asked about their benefits which were being reduced to the minimum (this is the UK so we have minimums but the startup originally had unlimited holidays etc). The CEO took over the board with a misogynistic vibe, all women left and then the guys followed.
Yeesh talk about a massive red flag. Guy wanted serfs more than employees.
I don't think "unicorn" means what he think it means...
Happened when management started treating the IT department like crap and demanding we work overtime with no extra pay. Almost all the experienced developers left in the spam of a year.
Before I left, I told them they would never be able to assemble such a good team again. Four years later and they are still struggling to keep the department running, according to a friend that chose to stay. The few developers they are able to hire are either terrible or quit after a while.
I get the feeling the same will happen in my current job :/
We had something similar, but not only were we being treated like crap, we were basically told to be "yes men" and that we were all perpetually on call. And there were only 3 of us. No vacations, and I even had my VP calling me 2 days after having surgery done asking me to come back to the office, despite not being able to sit due to the nature of the surgery. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
So I found a new job and put in my two weeks. Then my coworker got fired less than a week later for explaining that terminating all EC2 instances running our app would in fact cause an outage rather than just doing it. Within a week of that, my boss, the last guy on my team, up and left.
I'm curious if they ever got someone knowledgeable on how to run the ship on board after that. Last I heard, the entire office I had worked at was shuttered during COVID.
The more IT stories I hear about the more I'm convinced that no management understands what IT does.
Over the years I've come to the conclusion that good managers in general are rare and the few good ones don't go far in their careers because big companies favors backstabbing psychopaths and narcissists, just like in politics.
Even without the politics, the Peter Principle all but guarantees incompetent leaders.
Big manager decided that our dept had been not using enough holiday days, so kinda forced all of us to take holiday. Then he got really angry with us that work wasn't being done and he slashed our budget, meaning we couldn't afford department essentials, meaning we couldn't do our basic tasks, so big boss yelled at us even more.
Probably the impetus for the mass exodus at my old job was the “We’ll Miss You” Zoom call we had for a beloved senior developer. The company had recently added a new manager role that hadnt existed before and things were fine. The new guy started micromanaging like crazy. The SD who was leaving basically went off during the call about how the company didn’t need NG’s role and how it was burning people out.
I stuck around for another year-ish, and NG managed to make a group of about 20 developers dwindle to 5-ish. Saw the writing on the wall after getting shafted, changed jobs and am now making double that salary along with far less stress.
"Merger" that was really a purchase. New CEO started immediately talking about making our $30mil company a $100mil company within 3 years and we all then knew they were going to work is to death and then sell us as soon as the multiples became unbound from revenue.
2 years later they're in their 3rd CEO and they're was just another max exodus. Glad I left early.
Recently caught up with a former coworker. When we worked together the company was led by the founder who wanted to pursue other ideas and sold the company to some managers. The company had also grown a ton with a clever new product so the culture changes could easily be attributed to that.
But neither of the new owners were particularly high EQ people so to speak. I left because there was no room for growth and I had already put ten years into it. The coworker told me that they worked the remaining crew "to death" in order to inflate the value of the company to the maximum. Their best buddies got promoted and many others got eeked out. They cleaned out all the satellite offices by inviting them to an orientation meeting and sending in "hired guns" to just fire the entire management on the spot. A few years of this and they sold it to a big player and walked out without even saying goodbye to anyone.
"We {company owners/founders} are excited to announce that {company} is partnering with {venture capital firm} to take {company to the next level}. {company owners/founders} will be moving to the board of directors and a new CEO is coming aboard. It's a very exciting time for {company}."
Received a few of those emails in my time... it's always bad news and might as well get your resume together right then.
I’ve resigned twice in my career following that type of communication. Both were smallish startups outperforming the other company, which then acquired them and proceeded to turn everything to shit.
I am a union member so this isn't a thing that happens. If management does something unacceptable, we do a strike authorization vote which, if passed by the membership, starts a clock ticking down to strike time and management knows that they are on notice and need to start negotiations.
All of which is just to say that unions are good for workers, regardless of what kind of bullshit you may have been led to believe.
I didn't think judges were unionized! Good for y'all!
That strike authorisation is very interesting, I don't even know if we have that here. Great idea!
I was a teacher at a small rural school. Five people in my department. Our department head was the worst possible choice for the position - she wasn't the most senior, wasn't the best equipped, wasn't the most innovative, wasn't the best peacemaker. She bullied and belittled, her lessons were the same for years, her scores weren't even particularly strong. We frequently went to professional development as a team which she didn't attend. Couple this with an admin who was incompetent and constantly double talking and it was a giant pain.
The final straw was when one of our colleagues found a better job (department head at a neighboring school) and they needed to reshuffle classes to find a replacement. Despite being more qualified and more experienced, they refused to give any honors or AP courses to me or my colleagues, instead hiring a first year teacher with only a BA and shutting the rest of the department out of the entire hiring project. We were literally in the building running summer school and planning for the following year while they did every interview with no input, promised to talk to us, then made their offers and class decisions. We were told that we'd all meet to discuss it, then they reversed course and said they didn't want input and we'd instead have a meeting at the start of the following school year to essentially admonish us for not blindly following our department head.
We finally decided we'd dealt with it enough. Three of the five of us left that summer, the fourth left the next year. They had to hire an entirely new department because of that one person. I'm in a better school with a better team now, one of my colleagues was poached by the same one who was originally leaving, and another sold her house and is touring the country in her RV home. The superintendent fired the admin the following year as well.
I was expecting most issues would be the result of senior management making stupid decisions, and was not disappointed. At our local office someone decided to randomly raise salaries. Instead of choosing the most talented people, it was like they did it on purpose to choose the ones that did the least. It broke not only the individual's willingness to work, as it made a joke of the performance evaluation. It was bad: top performers and team leaders left, morale took a deep dive (because why make an effort if it doesn't matter) and I am sure management still doesn't see it was a stupid decision to pay more to keep useless developers and lose top talent. Brilliant.
I'm going through something like that now.
Why do they pay me for my 20+ years of experience, then ignore my recommendations based on that experience? It doesn't make any sense!
Why do they have me doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with that experience? I spend half my time on a project I hate and have no interest in, and has nothing to do with my real job...which, by the way, wasn't cut back to make room for this project. (Management calls it critical work, then asks for volunteers. If it's that critical, why aren't we assigning people to do it? I didn't volunteer, I was told to do it. It's insane.)
It's really killing my motivation, as I post this during work hours... I'm actively looking and have applied for promotions in other areas just to get out of this.
I hope you find something that motivates you soon!
Thanks. The stupid part is that I love my actual job, and although I've been in the current position 10 years, I feel like I still have new ideas to improve our work. I'm still capable of recognizing my mistakes. I'm not to phoning it in. When I get to think about a thorny issue there, I start to really enjoy things again. I remember why I took the job in the first place.
But that other work, that has nothing to do with my main job, is poisoning the well. When I log in in the morning and see something for that work, it just kills my energy.
I've been at mine for 4 years, I hope to still enjoy it the same as you when I reach 10. Good luck, maybe the project implodes while you're on holiday or something hehe
I am currently in the middle of such an event. Small company, 30 persons. The CEO has an unnatural bond with the HR lady. She has shares of the company, and it is an open secret that he very much would like to fuck her.
As a result she gets more and more freedom and behaves as she is somehow entitled of being a second CEO. She is absolutely terrible in management, and has an unusual high amount of fluctuation in her department which covers everything which isnt operative business. So far, in the last 5 years the company hired and was left by six salespeople and no less than 10 team assistants. We usually have two sales jobs and two assistance jobs to fill. This situation alone does not help to keep up our morale.
The CEO keeps up a facade of "we are all family here" and therefore is quite open with announcements when someone new joins us and someone else leaves us. In the past week a newly hired Senior Account Manager quit after less than two weeks in the company. When he made the round of saying goodbye, he told everyone that he quits because he cant stand the management of HR Lady which is his boss.
Since the CEO wants to fuck her he is always somehow covering her faults and trying to hide her incompetence. However, when he announced that not the account manager quit, but instead was fired, since they "could not accept his way of doing the work", which was very obviously a blatant lie, this was the final straw.
Currently all senior employees are either searching for something new or have already written, printed and signed their notice letters.
Mine was quite personal to me.
Fairly small European IT department for a much larger Asian company. With about 30 offices in Europe. Worldwide something like £80 billion turnover.
1 x IT Director 1 x IT infrastructure manager 4 x Business Analysts / Programmers 2 x Infrastructure Analyst (me +1) who ultimately ran all of Euro 3 x Help desk with one manager
I worked well with the Infrastructure Manager. But he had to scale back his time so moved to a new role. It wasn't uncommon for us to do 16 hour days, but I was young and could handle it.
The assumption was they would promote the Help desk manager, which I was fine with. Instead they brought in a guy from the QA department.
Now I liked this guy to start with but it became apparent it wasn't going to work between us with in a couple of months.
So I went to the director and said I can't work for him. You need to do something or I'm going and so will my colleague. I gave him a month, the I'll start the hunt. Then I talked to the hr director, the md and my original boss who I regularly had status meetings with
I had done a lot to bring the IT provision forward in my 3 years there and gained a lot of respect in the company for it.
So nothing happened in that month and in my second week of looking I got a decent job offer. So I walked in the next day and handed the it director my resignation, promptly followed by my colleague and then two of the business analysts and one from the help desk. The only ones left were the really inexperienced or just plain useless ones.
HR call me in and I told them the story of me and the manager. How he had said to the Help desk Manager that it was me or him. That the director had decided to call my bluff so I decided I wasn't that valuable, so it was time to go.
They asked what they could do so I told them. Move this guy on, make the help desk manager the boss and I'll reconsider my resignation. But I can't talk for my colleagues. A couple of days later they show me a proposal to shuffle the manager. I said I'll on reconsider when I see it happen.
Nothing happened until two weeks before I was due to leave. Word gets back to head office in Asia that the IT department has resigned on mass. Now I spent a lot of time in head office and built a strong friendship with the chairman's daughter, still is a fairly good friend all these years later.
She flys over, in my final week and asks what happened. I tell her about the offer from hr but I hadn't seen any movement from them. She marches upstairs and talks to the md and hr director. Ten minutes goes by and I'm called into the MD's office to see the IT manager escorted from the building and asked if I want his job. Apparently he was offered early retirement but rumour had it they told he was being relocated to a different department and told them to shove it.
I declined the offer and said it wasn't about getting his job, I didn't want it and I wasn't mentally ready for it. The other guys weren't staying anyway as they had better offers. But my friend the help desk manager did get the job. I still left as the job was about the team and the amazing work relationship we had.
For the next two months they kept calling me with improved offers, I declined. It was never about the money but it was about listening to their staff. How could I work in a company that didn't value me until I came through with my promised consequence?
I've bumped into the hr manager at events since and the now it director (who was the help desk manager) and we often talk about the lessons learnt. It took them years to recover from IT department imploding.
Yeah, sounds familiar. For me its also not about the job in general. I like what i do, and i know that i'm good at it. I like my colleagues and am considering some of them being my friends.
It is about the somehow toxic atmosphere, the lies, and the behind-closed-doors murmurs despite "we are all family here".
Company hired a new recruiter who complained it was too hard for him to find Perl devs. Announced we were going to transition to java, resulting in all our perl devs exiting and no further work being done. Last I heard they bought a shitty asp.net code base from a random guy and that became the new platform for whatever’s left of the company.
How the hell do you find Perl devs these days? Recruiting at retirement homes?
If you build a project in a dead language you end up having to migrate to something to mass market like Java just so anyone else can work on it.
Shit man, I love Ruby but it would be professional malpractice to start a new project on Rails.
Man, I entered my company two years ago for cobol and basic development. The only way to continue is to spend a lot to train new devs.
I left on holiday for 3 weeks from the bakery I used to work at where I was the main line guy and handled the ordering and scheduling.
A few days before another line guy left as he was moving so this meant that between the 2 of us we used to do 6 days and the weekend so now the other 3 people trained on the line were going to have to do that some more.
I come back and in week 1 one guy quit as he literally couldn't handle the heat (the AC wasn't great so the line would easily get to about 100 F after being open for a few hours), week 2 another was fired because he wasn't keeping up with prep (but he was on the line 5 days so how was he supposed to), and then once I get back after another few days they fire number 3 who was also the kitchen manager because of how poorly the last few weeks had been.
I put my notice in there and then.
And that's how they lost 80% of their kitchen team in less than a month.
Oh I got a story for this one.
"Of course I recognize him, he's me."
So I got hired at a company that was a sub contracting company. I had looked at some of their work they had done in the past and I thought that it'd be a fun place to work. Spin up new stuff for peoplez then move onto the next job.
When I got hired, there was one client who was forking out a lot of money. The client had more dollars than sense, and had before been paying for the cheapest labor he could find to build his dream application and had been burned by hiring a group that quite clearly did not know what they were doing. We basically started from scratch and got him something he was quite happy with.
In fact he was so happy, he decided to cut out the middle man and buy the subcontracting group I was working with outright. Cut a very nice big check to the owner who took it and bounced. Supposedly he was still helping out but I dont think I remember seeing him after that point other than one point.
Well, like I said, my new ceo had more dollars than sense, and thought himself the next Steve Jobs. He liked to call employees directly to ask why things were taking so long (which is why I know he thought of himself as the next Steve Jobs, he told me in a phone call)
I don't think a single person at this company, except for those who were in his inner circle, liked this dude. I know every developer at the company did. I know one of the other companies he contracted with hated his guts. (more on that in a bit)
The thing is, while he sucked, the rest of us liked each other. In all honesty, if any of them called me up and said they wanted to work with me again I'd happily jump up to join them again.
So at the end of this all, we got into a reverse Mexican stand off. No one wanted to quit because we didn't want to screw each other over.
Then it got taken out of our hands, because I was let go.
My response to being told I was let go was to make myself a drink, take a selfie and send it to my coworkers with the caption, "See you suckers!" And call up an old coworker who I had been discussing a project with that we had been thinking of doing as a side gig.
My coworkers flipped their shit. They went into the company chat and publicly called out the short sightedness of letting me go. I no longer had access to the company chat but my now former coworkers were more than willing to let me see them insulting the CEO and his friends.
Then one of my friends quit. Which then made the CEO reach out to my other friend asking what on earth is going on. My friend told him "well, as we said, you made a really dumb decision. So, we aren't sticking around any more. Also, I'm quitting too."
They wound up having to beg one of my friends to stay because he had been in charge of some very VERY important projects (that they only allocated one person to, gave no oversight to, and had no documentation or road map written down) and he told them he'd stick around, but they had to pay him 5 times more, and he wasn't coming in for a 40 hour work week.
And soon after THAT, it turned out the CEO and Owner of the company pissed off one of the dev shops we worked with so badly, that when it became time to renew the contract they told him they had no desire to continue their relationship with him.
Within a year, they had lost every developer they had worked with. And it makes me smile.
Worked for a shoe retailer where the head office was attached to the distribution center (DC) for the US.
The CFO fired the long-time and very popular DC manager. The rounded up the DC staff in our large meeting room with the CFO and the director of HR to discuss the change in management in the DC. The DC staff were already unhappy because they all liked the manager very much. After the spiel from CFO and HR, one of the DC staff asked if they would still be getting double time for all overtime. HR director, confused, asked what he meant. He explained the DC director would go and modify their timecards so they would get paid double for overtime instead of time and a half.
The HR director, without putting any thought into their answer or the consequences, immediately stated that would be ending immediately.
The DC damn near went on strike right there. Several of them left over the next few weeks, and the ones who didn't leave worked much slower and were unavailable for overtime work. They ended up requiring all of us office staff to work 4-8 hours a week in the DC for a few months while they unfucked everything.
That employee mentioning the time card modification sure did the fired manager dirty, hope they didn't face serious legal consequences for that.
Based on the earnest way in which it was asked, I don't think the employee asking knew that the manager wasn't supposed to be doing that - they thought it was a legitimate incentive approved by the company.
As far as I know the company didn't try going after the manager about it, but it's possible I wouldn't have known about that. I only know the above because I was working in that room re-configuring some tech stuff that needed to be fixed ASAP, while the meeting was happening.
It's happening to my place right now. CEO lied about raise and bonus amounts. Additionally, both were lower than two years ago (last time we got a raise) especially factoring in inflation.
They drastically altered the shift patterns from a relatively simple 2 day, 2 night, 4 off to a pretty complicated 5 on 3 off with 7 start times that you would cycle through each week. (5 straight 2100-0700 shifts suuuucked.) They also made us bid for team assignments. The real wtf moment was when they didn’t bother posting enough vacancies for everyone to bid on because of the anticipated attrition.
My company has 24/7 shifts, but they're static and you get a large differential for working nights, which I did for many years. Hearing about these rolling shifts just blows my mind, and I can't understand why anyone would enjoy it.
Worked for a shitty MSP in a large Midwestern city. They started hiring more managers, more "executives," they brought in consultants to make us more efficient, hired folks fresh out of college to tell us how to do our jobs - people that didn't know the first thing about tech - then decided they were going to make us start coming back into the office because they were salty that they dropped a couple of million on a new office a month before the pandemic.
I quiet quit, collected that sweet severance and unemployment (with the pandemic bonus) for a year, and was making more money than when I was working. I found all sorts of new hobbies in that year, and eventually found a job with a massive corporation. I work from home 3 days a week. I go into the office twice a week now, but said office is right in the middle of downtown and my view from my desk is insane, so I don't really mind. No one else really goes into the office anyways, so it's a nice two day quiet time each week. Also, I doubled my salary and have triple the PTO now. Fuck Framework IT.
I was going to guess another MSP that I worked for also in the midwest. They basically did the same thing and lost a good amount of quality people. We went thru a VC coming on board, 3 mergers in less than a year. Company grew in clients, employees stayed about the same. It was hell
You mean this?
Living it right now, my sister department was caught up in the Jeffery Epstien situation. It came to light a few weeks ago after our company settled for 290 million.
I'm abandoning my success in this field to go back to school as a Nurse. Fuuuuuuck my company, and my field. Hoping i can be a benefit to humanity for a change.
What do you mean caught up on the situation? How was your company related?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jpmorgan-chase-reaches-settlement-jeffrey-epstein-victim-rcna88807
In short: it was criminal negligence with intent to keep revenue streams flowing. I work as a Fraud Investigator, our sister department handles higher profile cases such as this.
Needless to say, the situation certainly faltered my trust in our processes, procedures, and integrity. So, I'm leaving lol. I dont have kids or anything so i'm able to make the leap into schooling
good on you for moving on. it can be a tough call when actually faced with following your morals, or just forgetting it.
I appreciate it a lot, its been a very hard decision and I'm worried im making a mistake. The largest concern is how to make enough money working part time while i study. Fortunately, i have a very supportive partner and without them i would have abandoned the prospect already
keep it up, you can do it!
Thanks for the response, I read the article but other than Jeffrey being a client of Chase, I don't quite know what they did wrong. Were they booking the flights for free? How were they invoiced in the crimes and turning a blind eye to them?
We handled his money for him while we knew what was going on. When the proedures inevitably brought the case to our department, our upper management and execs turned a blind eye.
I couldnt tell you details,I would if i knew them. Chase operates under a very segmented structure that prevents information from bleeding into one department to another. I found out in the news first, then brought my concerns to my manager
Well if they decided to settle for such a large number, they knew they were screwed and did something very wrong. Thank you!
This may shed some light on it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jpmorgan-chase-reaches-settlement-jeffrey-epstein-victim-rcna88807
Long story short: Criminal Negligence to keep the revenue stream flowing.
Yeah, this need a little more details. Lawyer? Movie studio?
Posted some details below
I work a union job, most people never leave. Usually the old guys retire in waves though. They've all known each other for decades and don't want to have to have to train the next generation.
Company was bought by a VC group with no experience in the industry. They spent their resources in all the wrong places, leading to alienated employees with no morale. They were also behind on office rental payments.
We had no formal IT or standard laptop hardware or software. One team decided they were all done after their director left. The CEO decided that they were colluding and fired them all at once. Nobody else was cleared for that project's SCIF, meaning nobody could contact the customer over secure channels. Additionally, their drives were encrypted with personal passwords that were never turned over as the employees had no proper exit process.
Between that and my team slowly leaving due to morale, they lost 2/3 of the few contracts they had, along with the technical expertise responsible for them.
My town changed our insurance from a decent PPO to a HSA and didn’t grandfather in the current membership. So everyone eligible to retire retired so they can keep their PPO. We had over 15 people leave. It was great for Overtime not great for personal life. I am a firefighter.
Holy crap... TIL that the USA has a specialized savings account for medical expenses. Like... if they know it's inevitable that people have to spend money for their health in one way or another, this is kinda like the ultimate "Don't care if you die or suffer" attitude. Surely the bureaucracy to figure out the tax codes behind this kind of thing would costs more than just implementing universal health care... wouldn't it?
It sure would but then what will happen to all their billionaire friends? We can’t expect them to have only one yacht! The real kick in the dick was they made the FD go on it but management and town hall staff got to keep the good health plan.
The building manager, Oscar, was recently put in charge of the whole department/building because things weren't working out well. Well it got worse under Oscar. First he made a push to end working from home, and then he got into so many arguments and fights with my boss Theo. It didn't take long for Theo to say fuck it and leave, which is when things got worse.
For a 2 month period or so, our entire team of like 13 people were in limbo with no direction. Oscar temporarily took control of our team until he found a replacement. And in that time he constantly was grilling us for answers about what our team did and how it worked. Not fun. A little bit later he fired two people off our team.
We then got a replacement manager, David. He's not the best manager, but he's not the worst. He struggles to comprehend what our team does, but he trusts that we know enough to get by with a little bit of direction on what project we should be working on. Another 2 people left over the course of a few months on their own.
Then in March, Oscar fired about 30 people across the department for "budget" reasons. From what I heard, the company lost a shit load of money due to all the project delays. Those delays have only gotten worse now that morale is in the garbage. Nobody wants to work hard at a place they fear they will be fired from at any moment while constantly being interrogated by Oscar. Some more people left on their own over the following months.
Cut to today, and there are 5 people left on the team I'm in. And I put my two weeks notice in because I got a better job. I don't know what kind of shit show it's gonna turn into, or what's gonna happen when there is nobody left on my team. But on my team at least, every member has been looking for the door, and it's been a race to not be the last person still working there.
So yeah, if your a manager, maybe don't interrogate people and make people fear for their livelihoods.
People quit managers, they don't quit jobs.
Priorities shifted, "we're doing good" became "we need to reduce the workforce" over weekend and most of the people who they would have liked to keep decided this is a good time to look for something new.
A very unqualified but very good at bullshitting for 5 minutes VP moved in to run my team. The old VP was great, we all loved her. My boss (Director level), I loved her too. She's the reason I joined the team.
They moved the SVP head of the dept to a new area and brought in some marketing lackeys. Our department's job was to analyze marketing and they were terrible at it. Not our fault the results were shit.
So new head of the dept, new head of our team. They were just stupid and sinister. A female friend of mine who worked with my new manager on a project referred to her as "That evil cunt". My old manager 2 managers before that had her kicked off a project because she nearly ruined it
I tried to give her a chance but she was awful and a liar. We already lost 3 out of 6 people on my team who bailed. Dozens in the dept. I left before she could fire me for some made up shit she was planning (another manager clued me in)
Eventually the entire dept of 200 people was whittled down and absorbed into another group.
First the boss throws a hissy fit and starts handing out "verbal writeups" for things that were his fault. Then he imposes 7:30am demos every day to prove we were actually working and not... I guess slacking?
I was working for an Australian company, that was bought by a big (F500) American company. Actually they bought over 200 companies globally to become what they were.
After the dust settled, the American corp started talking all sorts of stupid American stuff that would never fly in Australia. For example ALL Aussies have the right to 4 weeks annual leave, and 2 weeks of sick leave per year. They wanted to change that to 3 weeks and NONE! (again would never have happened, legally, but damage was being done..)
Staff started to leave.
Next thing was then global conferences at stupid times of the night/morning with staff that were not typically the type to take meetings AT ALL. (Not upper or middle management, I mean workers and supervisors) This was around 2015, way before anything we are more familiar with today.
More left (work/personal life balance)
And finally was all the stupid buzzwords and never ending general shit that we just didn't care about. "Bi-weekly" (ambiguous globally and simply should not be used. It's either fortnightly or twice a week..) Not to mention the plethora of other buzzword shit like "holistically engaging in resource-maximising virtualisation" and bluesky or "data-only sales" (we made manufacturing equipment ffs!!)
Middle management started to walk, it was becoming a rolling stone covered in moss.
Then when there was a bit of a market shift and the economy went down (and therefore the American company took an EBITA hit, they laid off 20% of the staff). This led to further insecurity in the company and about 30% of the rest of the workers said fuck it and left. What do you expect when they are assembly/production or electricians etc who can get more stability from working out of a van and a mobile phone.
They managed kill themselves and even drop out of the F500 list!
Bi-weekly is not a buzz word but it is absolutely ambiguous. I love throwing out fortnightly meetings in my American office. I always get a smile. Also, who schedules meetings with blue-collar workers that are not at the start/end of a shift? That's just really bad leadership. I can understand a once-a-year thing but not on a regular cadence.
Someone incompetent was promoted to manager, they became drunk with power and a complete micromanaging piece of shit. Half the team quit within a couple of months.
(Hello to my current boss who may be here, no it wasn't at our job).
Worked in supermarket. New manager came in and decided to change everything, everybody hated it. So as a good 23 year old I decided to start harassing him by ordering free magazines, free stuff, furniture, kitchens etc etc online and get it delivered to his house.
this is awesome petty revenge and i am here for it.
IBM rocked up.
Don’t believe that IT guys have safe jobs. An IBM sales guy can promise to replace any developer or project with a better version. Happened twice to me now.
Bought out by a PE leveraged shitshow. Disaster was inevitable.
PE firms are killing off all the tech companies still worth working for.
Been there, done that...
Although, the PE firm that owns the company I work for now has shelled out a lot of cash for major improvements to the technology. There are a few that are trying to make things better, but they are hard to find.
I was just listening to a podcast about private equity. Sounds ridiculous to be a part of something like that
Previous company decided that not only would they make people redundant but they'd also gut the benefits of those who stayed and worsen working conditions all whilst trying to transition their entire manufacturing process to entirely different equipment.
Unsurprisingly all the experienced and skilled workers took their generous payouts or bailed as soon as the new process and working conditions went to shit.
Literally 10s of millions invested in machinery and a few million in redundancy all to end up making less and worse product at a higher cost than before. Combined with the few that stayed having zero morale and it was cluster fuck that's irreparably damaged a 140 year old company.
I bounced once I'd got enough experience to be of value elsewhere.
I just can’t understand the rationale for all that. Was it all for cost cutting? You would think after 140 years they would be relatively stable.
My guess is that they made two contradictory policies and didn't realize the combined effect.
Ah my mistake to omit that bit.
It was new ownership combined with an actual need for new machinery. The old lines were multiple decades old and being held together by creative engineering.
Now new more efficient machinery and some redundancies would be normal and kind of expected. But the manner in which it was done was the issue. Immediately alienated the entire workforce and lost the most skilled workers to boot. All tied together with a nice little bow of utterly incompetent planning regarding the implementation and procurement process. The final cherry on top was the complete inability to market the new product.
It was sad seeing a company that was profitable with good brand recognition and actual competitive advantages literally piss it all away inside 12 months of a 140 year history.
Worked for a F500 company in their data science department. Given the global footprint of the company and the nature of my work, all I did was sit in front of the computer (meetings, coding, etc). The pandemic struck and we went remote. Afterwards, they insisted on 100% return to office. Said I would quit if they did that. They pushed for it so I quit. So did most of the team. Apparently, interns were left picking up the pieces, and the dept has never fully recovered since
Poo Gate
Go on…
no please, don't
Oh my, if you insist.
It was a grey and damp October when The Incident occurred. At first, some people thought it was an accident - but then it happened again. The first was a mystery, the second an enigma. Both were massive shits that no human could possibly have left - or so we thought.
These colossal beasts were sometimes in the toilet, but sometimes hanging over the edge - trying to escape like a big slug or angry brown whale.
It kept happening, mystery upon mystery. And yet no one observed the source. How could this be?
Soon, these things were not just on or in the toilet, but on the cubical walls and in the sink. They were advancing and threatening to break out of the bathrooms and into the corridors - or who knows where. Would you turn in your chair and see one right next to you when you least expect it?
October turned into November, and then December and with various notices pinned up and emails and whispers and gossip, the poos seemed finally to have gone back from whence they came (or at least, stopped happening).
Then, in December just before Christmas, an awful present was left. It could not have been Santa, although it was definitely from someone who had eaten the world's supply of mince pies relatively recently. The massive shite was so big it blocked the plumbing and the office had no working toilets at all. There was an exodus of people, leaving early for the day - with that giant turd, Christmas had come early.
Every December I look back on those events and the unexpected gift, and wonder if the magic of Christmas will ever happen again.
You can't just leave us with that.
I worked for a dollar store in the ghetto, and we got held up repeatedly at gun point.
Corporate wouldn't do anything for our safety.
Store manager lined up a better gig, and all but two employees decided to quit, because he spent his free time up there, not working but guarding us. More people at the front, bigger deterence - plus him being an MMA fighter helped.
It was timed for black Friday for maximum impact. Finding another minim wage job wasn't too hard at time, we just had all worked together in the past and liked each other, so we stuck around each other.
The department head was an absolute bag of dicks. This guy was so bad, you would think that he was doing a bit or something. He would use company resources for his side projects and would constantly try and get us to work on one of his dipshit app ideas. He would find any excuse to travel to remote sites so he could cheat on his wife with the local sex workers, and worse, would drag us around with him as his entourage or some shit. He would stand behind us and watch us while we worked. Every few days he would partially read an article espousing some new technology and then give us shit for not using it.
We generally learned to work around his shenanigans and even got pretty successful at self managing and knocking out projects, but after a while he decided to show us all who's boss and siloed us completely. The whole team left within a month of each other.
On a side note, to this day, the lead dev from that team is my absolute biggest hero. That dude bore the brunt of the dep head's stupidity, kept us sane, kept us on task, let us vent, managed projects, dealt with customers, and was an all around awesome guy.
One of our engineering teams who normally builds our products in-house was made to bid against contractors who promised the moon.
Them and multiple other teams then had to spend a total of 18 months getting the contractor's shoddy work up to scratch. When they were done, the senior engineers from three teams left.