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.
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Most satisfying comment in the thread. A true “fuck around and find out” story
“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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You mean this?
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
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.
That strike authorisation is very interesting, I don’t even know if we have that here. Great idea!
I didn’t think judges were unionized! Good for y’all!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
