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.
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.
I don’t think “unicorn” means what he think it means…
Yeesh talk about a massive red flag. Guy wanted serfs more than employees.
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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.
Holy shit, that sounds so similar to the last time I worked in an office LMAO
What country was this?
In the UK! Haha it would be crazy if it was the same one!
Ah nope, I’m not in the UK. I guess there are more phantom shitters that shut down an entire office than I realized!
I have seen things, things that no office worker should see…
Anyways, that may or may not be one of the reasons I don’t want to work in an office again lol
Haha, you’d think this was a rare thing! Good job to keep away from offices!
If there is a bestof on Lemmy or kbin, this post needs to be featured on there lmao
You can’t just leave us with that.
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.
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.
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Yes, but you should always be applying and interviewing. Getting a new job generally gives you a 20% raise, while staying at the same job gives you like 5% if you’re lucky and you take on new responsibilities.
Large turds are used to making a big splash
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.
Note: if you are in the US work places aren’t allowed to go over 76°F. This is something OSHA would be interested if the owner isn’t interested in fixing things.
Unfortunately that’s not true like the other guy said, what did happen though was the cooling cabinets wouldn’t stay within for safety limits so there was a chance that things would be in the temperature danger zone for too long.
After I left I did call the health department as I was concerned with how the bakery manager was that they wouldn’t try and fix any of the issues unless forced too.
I also found out, last week that the business owner finally fired her as she didn’t want to close the business for a couple days when they had an active sewage leak in the basement and instead of trying to solve the problem she just complained how it was inconveniencing her and then she left to go to a Phillies game.
That’s not true. How do you suppose people work outside in most summer climates? There are rules regarding water availability and such, but no outright prohibitions on working above a certain temperature.
Hell, I keep my AC set at 78F because it takes the edge off but is easy on my energy bill.
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”.
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I’m not even mad. I thought about searching something new for longer time already, and since i have gotten some recruiter messages which look like i could almost double my salary, i take this whole story as a sign that this time i do it for real. I won’t lose too much. All the colleagues i am considering my friends will stay my friends, since we have established regular happening DnD and MTG sessions. I work as a Cloud Engineer, so the tools and tasks at a new job will stay the same as well. So, why not?
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.
“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 there 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
