They hired full time the contractor who brought down prod 3 times in his 6 month contract. I updated my resume that very day. Edit:spelling

I work retail in a place which was a pretty chill. But lately management has been making minute changes, tiny ones to solidify their management dynamic. We used to wear any hats we wanted (provided they were tasteful and didnt have a competing brand but everything else was fair) but now we can’t wear any headware. We used to wear personal pins, and yes some of us were a little political in our pin choices, but mostly it was happy fun nerd nonsense. But the pins had to go. Then visible stickers on things. So basically you come to work in only company designated attire now. They are also making changes to how we can personalize our breakroom which is a long tradition in the company.

When the former boss had to quit due to health reasons, we got a two-faced lying PITA instead. He was an overall unpleasant employer in the first place, but the final nail in the coffin for the cashiers was that he demanded from them that they have to make sure customers stay 6 feet apart from each other during Covid.

• If we didn’t pester everyone in line to keep their distance, we got shouted at in front of the customers for “not doing our job”. Customers that didn’t want to obey the rules after being asked nicely were automatically our fault.

• If we DID try to enforce the policy, a lot of customers went to the front desk to complain about it, he did a 180° turn every time, apologized to the customers and handed out coupons. The more drama they caused, the bigger they were rewarded for it, and the cashier was chewed out for doing what HE wanted them to do.

If you have the choice between “wrong” and “worse” and you WILL get shouted at for both, there is no room left for morale.

I haven’t gotten a raise in 10 years (since I turned 50). In fact, switching jobs often resulted in a decrease in salary. From 2018 to today, counting inflation, my effective salary has dropped over 30%.

And no, I’m not mediocre at my job. At one Major Internet Monopoly I wrote a script to refactor several million lines of code, to remove redundancy in some autogenerated structs, with only one major outage that I fixed in a few hours. I than proceeded to modify a data display and write a coefficient calculation engine for an inhouse experiment that ended up saving them tens of thousands of dollars. After the experiment I leveraged the ML platform to generate reports for the data scientists in hours, where they were prepared to take weeks. My evaluation for that period? One step below Meets Expectations.

At another Major Internet Monopoly I basically implemented a major feature to the mobile app, while still in my 90 day onboarding period. Under extreme schedule pressure. And while the other engineers “helpfully” redesigned my code in code review. Once I missed a release cycle because a reviewer blocked my submission because I forgot to add a period at the end of a comment. I’m still burned out from that one.

I’m at a much better company now, at $10k below the Major Internet Monopoly above. In 2 years I got one 5k bonus, but still no raise. And we’re a startup struggling with the current economy fuckery, so no real point asking for a raise.

Sorry, that was 3 things.

Pitting colleagues against each other in a game of metrics

Furlough team for one week

Last year we got a new GM. The first thing she said was “everyone is coming into work 5 days a week”. We lost every one of our senior staff in under a year and the rule was never enforced anyway. We’re back 2 and 3 office and home again now.

This happened a few years ago at my old workplace. We had gotten more docs to process and as a result ended up getting behind the normal timeframe to process them. We have a meeting where management basically told us that we couldn’t talk to our coworkers about non-work stuff while on the clock/not on break. Basically they were blaming socializing as the reason why we were behind. This did not go over well with anyone. This was also the same meeting where management lectured us about keeping our desks cleaned, which made it even worse.

Installed tracker on our phones, trucks and Verizon dashcam tattlers

A few months after our company got acquired the new HR rep came to our city for a pep talk. The highlights of which included:

• We’re trying to jack up the value of this company as fast as possible at the expense of all of you
• If you like the idea of job security this isn’t the company for you

Those weren’t her exact words, of course, but that’s what everyone took away from it. I had already given notice at this point.

Promoted several top performers. To fill the vacancy left from this, they then hired several incompetent, inexperienced people to fill the leftover roles, who unsurprisingly underperformed.

Well then wouldn’t you know it, our profitability went down.

So then they start several rounds of layoffs where they fired all of the top performers who had been promoted accusing them of, ironically enough, poor performance for the first time in their entire career at the company.

Throughout the entire process the same people who were eventually fired were reassured they were safe.

The underperforming idiots still work here, they just shifted some of their responsibilities on to other people like me in other departments so they have less room to fuck up.

The cherry on top of that which most of the company doesn’t know is that they considered firing the under-performers and demoting the people who were promoted instead of firing them, but they thought it would make us look poorly run in front of our clients.

Oh and they froze our yearly raises and bonuses, meanwhile our CEO got a raise even while making more than double the average for a CEO of a company our size (8 figures).

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Hired a contractor to lead the IT department. Months later, said contractor outsourced us to another company and promptly left.

They didn’t even have the guts to do it themselves.

I can tell you something that brought up our morale. Our director was removed. Everyone’s morale and attitudes improved immediately. The in-fighting and pain-in-the-assery dissolved.

About a year before, a committee was formed to try and figure out ways to improve morale in our areas. Lots of good ideas were brought up, some were implemented. Morale stayed the same.

Had anyone known that removing of our director was on the table, every single person would have voted for that.

And the week before that, my inept foreman quit. That was the best Friday to Friday I ever had.

I’ll never forget the day they wheeled the beer fridge out of the office.