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.
Most satisfying comment in the thread. A true “fuck around and find out” story
It sounds to me like you weren’t the only person the company was screwing with. Once everybody started comparing notes, that company was dead in the water.
I’m not sure if they were already being screwed or just thought they were next in line. This was my first real delve into corporate fuckery though.
Leave a note: Your free trial of ‘Dubz the forklift driver’ has expired. Insert coin to continue
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.
As an IT guy, that whole situation is terrifying.
As a non IT guy, I can say the same. Feels like the ship is sinking.
Still haven’t found another job without a massive pay cut…
And yet, extremely common.
Wow even ransomware didn’t teach a lesson… I’d be worried about personal data being indexed on some onion site…
The full office being pulled into a meeting and lectured about how disheartening it was to see everyone leaving the office on time at the end of working hours. What we call good time management they apparently saw an laziness and a lack of commitment.
That and the message that discussing pay and bonuses wasn’t allowed (despite being protected by the Equalities Act here in the UK). This of course got us wondering why this would be discouraged and turns out our salaries seemed to have very little to do with length of service or performance.
Worked at a place where we got a company wide ass chewing from the CEO for leaving right at 5:00 PM. Apparently he interpreted this as everyone was slacking off the last few minutes.
The results: instead of walking out the door right at 5:00, all the other departments would stand at the exit and wait for the accounting department to walk out of the building first. CEO favored the accounting department so I guess everyone figured they wouldn’t get in trouble if accounting left first.
I think his little tiff actually resulted in more time being wasted.
It’s always ‘fun’ when a US company tries opening an office in Europe - and even more so when they try to close one!
Someone asked a question about work-life balance during an all-hands meeting and the CEO laughed at him.
A couple weeks later my entire location started eating lunch together and discussing our job searches.
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.
Moral of the story: don’t just quit a shitty job- stop working hard and start applying elsewhere.
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.
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Large turds are used to making a big splash
Not really an incident but I am amazed at how many groups of senior tech managers and engineers navigate from organization to organization together!
For example, a tech VP joins a new company and within a year many of the senior positions are occupied by the VP’s previous coworkers. They give each other promotions and eventually either get outmaneuvered by another similar group of people or simply choose to move on to the next place to do it all over again.
I had no idea such groups existed, until I was invited into one. Now that I’m aware I’ve seen the same pattern happening at pretty much every place that I’ve worked at since.
There’s some collective bargaining in that, though. “You lose this person, you lose all of these persons”.
I’m someone in that group. My last 2 jobs have been following a former manager. Now about 70% of the engineering department are from previous companies
As long as the abuse unethical companies, I truly don’t care. Good for them. Just don’t do this at places that make a difference
It shouldn’t work unless they’re not keeping up with wage increases. Jumping from place to place is only profitable if your current work is banking on you not expecting col increases.
No matter how good hearted your workplace is, they shouldn’t be stealing labour.
Student in engineering, this is 100% the Departement i work at. You are an out liner if you have not worked at that one other company before. Also, more are on the way from the vorher company to us.
A couple executive-types gathered the more senior developers for an “open” discussion about recruitment and retention. They suggest multiple ideas that would destroy morale (like non-compete clauses, poorly designed work-role pipelines, etc), and all of us suggest against them, and provided alternatives instead (like a shift in direction of certain efforts, more autonomy and less micromanaging, etc). They end up accusing us of not supporting our company’s mission and tell us that if we don’t agree then they don’t want us there and we should just quit. I think after that meeting, only 2 people stayed out of about 30, and hiring numbers have significantly declined.
And I’m sure the owners tell their family and friends about how lazy the workforce is. Probably spend hours talking about how Americans don’t know how to work hard any longer.
I have a couple of these.
First one, I worked for a small engineering consulting firm. Maybe 8 people tops, including the President, who owns the company and our building.
We were renovating the second floor, and I overheard him tell his contractor that he shouldn’t put women’s restroom signs up, because only engineers will work on the second floor and therefore no women. I had an offer within 6 weeks, but disappointingly this did not slow the success of the company.
More recently, I left a position as the facility manager for a biotech manufacturer. My workload was immense, despite a <1yo child, and I was on call for emergencies 24/7.
Around September, I heard rumor that we were planning a plant shutdown over the Christmas to New Year holidays - this would give all manufacturing personnel a guaranteed 2 week paid vacation, while the facilities team of 20 people would be on vacation blackout and have the busiest two weeks of the year.
I brought up the rumor to my boss and begged him to advocate against it. He said he’d try, and within 24 hours told me that he decided to advocate in favor of the shutdown during that period because he doesn’t celebrate the holidays anyway and it’s a great time to get stuff done.
So I got to tell my team, who had family around the world and always agreed amongst themselves who got to travel and who stayed local, that nobody gets to travel for the holidays and we all get to work.
I got a new job very quickly, but unfortunately had to see the shutdown through and worked through Christmas. However, I took one tech with me and heard that the team dropped to under 8 people before we lost touch with current emoyees. They took my departure as writing on the wall and opted to get out before there was a repeat.
Wow, that second one really takes the cake. The self-centredness to just go with the I don’t care, so nobody should is really appalling.
I have been a machinist by trade for just over 20 years. We had a lathe accident. One bad enough that everyone on the shop floor walked out.
For some of these I’m like “more info pls” but I am glad you left it at “lathe accident.”
I’m not. How bad was it?
Lathes are brutal, uncaring machines. Not only can they kill you, it’s going to be miserable the whole time as your body is torn apart.
Well I can’t really imagine being happy about it
There are plenty of lathe accident videos out there to see some pink mist if you’re really interested
If you’re unfamiliar, a lathe machine is a spinning rod or clamp, powered by a big motor.
When functioning, it will spin with such a torque (regardless of fast or slow operation) that most things won’t stop it, including your arms, legs and head against the base if you get caught. You don’t want to mess around with it.
I’ve been in the presence of lathes for a few months during my apprenticeship and I am entirely comfortable leaving it at that.
You haven’t seen a lathe accident video before, have you?
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.
The story of every “outsourcing your core work” ever - and every time they are certain that the expected result won’t happen to someone as smart as them.
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.
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).
Safeway, a part of Albertsons, takes its market position for granted near its own HQ. I hate to see what will happen with the merger.
I’m hoping a lot of stores are spun off and thrive. Albertsons is good at shenanigans with that and the government needs to pay attention.
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.
The told us to return to the office. By that time people had built whole lives far from the office.
Yep. That was the organization exodus for my last job. Without any warning or planning, a state government agency, demanded everyone come back first week June 2021 when not a single other state office was even considering it. It was way out of left field and threatened to completely fuck up many people’s lives and there was a mass exodus. Staff left agency wide. I think it was somewhere around 300 employees of a several thousand. Which may not seem like that much, but when 300 people quit in one agency over the course of two weeks, it’s extremely noticable lol. The leadership at the top got berated publicly by the governor and they had to reverse course to stop people from leaving. But hey, I got a promotion, a huge raise, and got to demand my telework schedule because I instantly became more important hahaha.
The next exodus was my specific division. The deputy director we all liked and the media relations manager we all liked were fired out of nowhere by the same agency leadership that fucked up in the telework debacle. They placed their own drones in the two spots and it absolutely decimated morale. Not to mention the stool pigeons they selected are two of the most incompetent people I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. I took a high-paying job with a federal contractor and bounced. Four people left in the few months following. They hired new people, two of which left within three months. I still talk to the social media manager who’s still there and she fills me in on all the bullshit they’re continuing with. Out of a public affairs division of 14 people, there’s only six still there that were there when I left last September.
Yeah, it’s when they install their bozo friends, who in turn hire more bozos. No quicker way to fuck up a business.
Yup, mine too. We had developers in two different cities, with a few other roles in a third city. We had actually had some significant improvements in how collaborative we could be thanks to going remote-first over the pandemic.
Then a new company buys us out and decides that collaboration can’t happen without being in a physical room together. Never mind that we’re still not in the same room because…different cities. That, plus pay “rises” that came in at a maximum of 3% at a time when inflation is like 7.6%, and came in 6 months late. Plus multiple rounds of layoffs.
Over the 12 months before I left the company, more than 50% of the software development team’s years of experience had already left. And more have gone since I did.
Probably the impetus for the mass exodus at my old job was the “We’ll Miss You” Zoom call we had for a beloved senior developer. The company had recently added a new manager role that hadnt existed before and things were fine. The new guy started micromanaging like crazy. The SD who was leaving basically went off during the call about how the company didn’t need NG’s role and how it was burning people out.
I stuck around for another year-ish, and NG managed to make a group of about 20 developers dwindle to 5-ish. Saw the writing on the wall after getting shafted, changed jobs and am now making double that salary along with far less stress.
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.
Yeesh talk about a massive red flag. Guy wanted serfs more than employees.
I don’t think “unicorn” means what he think it means…
