Asklemmy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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!

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.