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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
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.
Big manager decided that our dept had been not using enough holiday days, so kinda forced all of us to take holiday. Then he got really angry with us that work wasn't being done and he slashed our budget, meaning we couldn't afford department essentials, meaning we couldn't do our basic tasks, so big boss yelled at us even more.
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.
"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.
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 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.
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.
I was a teacher at a small rural school. Five people in my department. Our department head was the worst possible choice for the position - she wasn't the most senior, wasn't the best equipped, wasn't the most innovative, wasn't the best peacemaker. She bullied and belittled, her lessons were the same for years, her scores weren't even particularly strong. We frequently went to professional development as a team which she didn't attend. Couple this with an admin who was incompetent and constantly double talking and it was a giant pain.
The final straw was when one of our colleagues found a better job (department head at a neighboring school) and they needed to reshuffle classes to find a replacement. Despite being more qualified and more experienced, they refused to give any honors or AP courses to me or my colleagues, instead hiring a first year teacher with only a BA and shutting the rest of the department out of the entire hiring project. We were literally in the building running summer school and planning for the following year while they did every interview with no input, promised to talk to us, then made their offers and class decisions. We were told that we'd all meet to discuss it, then they reversed course and said they didn't want input and we'd instead have a meeting at the start of the following school year to essentially admonish us for not blindly following our department head.
We finally decided we'd dealt with it enough. Three of the five of us left that summer, the fourth left the next year. They had to hire an entirely new department because of that one person. I'm in a better school with a better team now, one of my colleagues was poached by the same one who was originally leaving, and another sold her house and is touring the country in her RV home. The superintendent fired the admin the following year as well.
It's happening to my place right now. CEO lied about raise and bonus amounts. Additionally, both were lower than two years ago (last time we got a raise) especially factoring in inflation.
They drastically altered the shift patterns from a relatively simple 2 day, 2 night, 4 off to a pretty complicated 5 on 3 off with 7 start times that you would cycle through each week. (5 straight 2100-0700 shifts suuuucked.) They also made us bid for team assignments. The real wtf moment was when they didn’t bother posting enough vacancies for everyone to bid on because of the anticipated attrition.
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.
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.
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.
I work a union job, most people never leave. Usually the old guys retire in waves though. They've all known each other for decades and don't want to have to train the next generation.
Company hired a new recruiter who complained it was too hard for him to find Perl devs. Announced we were going to transition to java, resulting in all our perl devs exiting and no further work being done. Last I heard they bought a shitty asp.net code base from a random guy and that became the new platform for whatever’s left of the company.
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.
Living it right now, my sister department was caught up in the Jeffery Epstien situation. It came to light a few weeks ago after our company settled for 290 million.
I'm abandoning my success in this field to go back to school as a Nurse. Fuuuuuuck my company, and my field. Hoping i can be a benefit to humanity for a change.
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.
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.
IBM rocked up.
Don’t believe that IT guys have safe jobs. An IBM sales guy can promise to replace any developer or project with a better version. Happened twice to me now.
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.
First the boss throws a hissy fit and starts handing out "verbal writeups" for things that were his fault. Then he imposes 7:30am demos every day to prove we were actually working and not... I guess slacking?
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!
Someone incompetent was promoted to manager, they became drunk with power and a complete micromanaging piece of shit. Half the team quit within a couple of months.
(Hello to my current boss who may be here, no it wasn't at our job).
Worked for a F500 company in their data science department. Given the global footprint of the company and the nature of my work, all I did was sit in front of the computer (meetings, coding, etc). The pandemic struck and we went remote. Afterwards, they insisted on 100% return to office. Said I would quit if they did that. They pushed for it so I quit. So did most of the team. Apparently, interns were left picking up the pieces, and the dept has never fully recovered since
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.
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.
