Harassment from toxic managers who abuse employees verbally (insults, etc.) It happens a lot sadly.

I would consider what my company is doing right now as board line abuse. They’ve done two rounds of layoffs this year, but the amount of work as not been reduced in the slightest. So everyone is overworked and scared of saying anything in case there is another round of layoffs. Of course this is also having a ripple affect where long-term hardworking employees are jumping ship.

I currently have a backlog that is four years long. That was when I had a team working for me. Now I’m the only person on the team and not a week goes by when I don’t get ask what the status of XYZ is. Or have 2-3 more “high priority” things added to my backlog.

• abuse in the US workplace is (generally) not openly visible in ways you expect
• and yet, sexual abuse is still extremely prevalent in all industries
• US companies can impose a MASSIVE chilling effect just by having your healthcare tied to your employment
• mental abuse can be subtle (a form of psychological warfare) with something as simple as “we’re like a family here” or “you wouldn’t want to let down the team, would you?”
• the first episode of Zom 100 gave a really good example of how far the mental abuse can escalate – between overwork, lack of sleep, verbal abuse, bad diet, you no longer have time to step back and think, you become completely dependent on someone else telling you what to do, you no longer have the strength of will to even contemplate saying “No”

I was an admin at a company that was borderline psychopathic. Yeah, tons of abuse at all levels. No progression unless you were a member of the executive teams family or married to one of them. Completely dysfunctional workplace.

remember that “2 weeks notice” is a kindness you’re giving them, it’s not a requirement and companies will never show you that kindness when they fire you

I’m likely to do that shortly. I’m in an environment with a few toxic colleagues who know fuck all about what needs to be done, or how to do it, but manage to impact decision making and cast doubt on my abilities and deliverables to date. I have had to step outside of my role to deliver multiple big ticket tasks (e.g. I’ve been brought on to uplift code for multiple applications, but have also had to build a MEM deployment from scratch as there was no endpoint management), but no-one has the knowledge or the interest in taking over the finished products, expecting I’ll add it to my responsibilities.

A job is about to open up elsewhere that I’ve been encouraged to apply for, so I’ll keep trudging along and will let them know at my notice period. I’ve tried so hard to get involved with no luck, so now they’ll be forced to take interest.

I read about the term “silent quitting”: quitting without any prior warning, just handing in the resignation without a chance to remedy the situation.

Here’s the thing - finding the next job took me effort. I’m not wasting that because the boss suddenly realized they can do better. They needed to figure that out before I took the effort to find my next gig.

And I expect the same now that I’m the boss. I do a one on one meeting with each of my direct reports like clockwork, and I ask probing questions about work conditions, career trajectory, and work/life balance.

It’s not their job to make sure I know if they’re satisfied with their job. It’s my job.

Their job is to do all the other amazing things they do to make me look like an amazing boss.

Is salary the most important factor for you?

My employees have taught me that salary is the least important thing - right up until the moment when it becomes the most important thing. No one knows when that will be: surprise car repair, medical bill, whatever.

People tend to figure out their market value. I’ve never successfully retained a significantly underpaid professional over the long term. Of course, I do always get a healthy discount on the talent I hire. People value a great boss a lot. But having a great manager doesn’t fix a leaking roof, so that discount amount has to be an amount they feel great about, not an insult to them.

I am okay with some discount on my salary if I am really happy with my colleagues. We go to work every day, it is important to be happy.

If most of my friends are gone, and the salary is not satifactory, I will definitely quit for higher pay!

War metaphors real examples:

Literally calling your employees your soldiers, calling starting positions as trenches, brainwashing your employees to a us versus the world mentality, ex-employees are ‘dead’ or ‘on a suicidal path’, etc.

Business is not war anyone who think it is has never saw what a single rifle bullet does to human flesh. Freaking psychos.

Task was being discussed, I raised valid concerns, they listened, agreed to the concerns and said ‘yeah we still want you to do it’. I say I won’t do this. They push harder. I left on the spot. Notice was on director desk the next day. I suspect management wanted me to take on a botched task so to have something negative over me. There may of may not have some level of nepotism there.

but I do use the period to hand off as much as possible to those who I don’t want to set up to fail.

If there’s nobody to hand things off to, I just slack off and use it as free money until my next gig.

both are totally fair opinions/decisions

personally I’ve been in too many toxic companies that I couldn’t stomach staying even a day within the company

Return to office.

Absolutely delicious, thank you for asking. I’ve been very fortunate and had a lot of help.

Because real manufacturing draws scrutiny, and these companies are audited regularly enough to make licensing fees palletable.

Anything simple. I’m using Linear at my current job, which is fine. I’ve used Trello in the past, also fine. Best experience so far was using the GitLab issue tracker, but it as not a product team so YMMV.

Maybe. I guess I hate the idea behind Jira more than Jira itself. I call it middle management driven Agile.

Also doesn’t help that Jira (and Confluence) were fucking slow for a long while. Nobody wants to use slow software as an integral part of the dev chain.

Never heard of it, but it looks aweful

Thankfully, we migrated to git entirely right before I joined the company