“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’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.
Just watched this same thing happen at another company. 30% of the work force got laid off as soon as the new C-unt suite executive showed up, and everyone else is scrambling to get out as quickly as possible.
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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.
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.
Most satisfying comment in the thread. A true “fuck around and find out” story
Leave a note: Your free trial of ‘Dubz the forklift driver’ has expired. Insert coin to continue
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 didn’t think judges were unionized! Good for y’all!
That strike authorisation is very interesting, I don’t even know if we have that here. Great idea!
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.
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”.
Man… same thing happening at a company I contract part-time with. People really do fulfill the lamest archetypes.
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?
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…
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.
Large turds are used to making a big splash
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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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.
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.
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.
Framework IT?
I was going to guess another MSP that I worked for also in the midwest. They basically did the same thing and lost a good amount of quality people. We went thru a VC coming on board, 3 mergers in less than a year. Company grew in clients, employees stayed about the same. It was hell
You mean this?
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.
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.
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…
It’s like they were using Voldemort’s definition of a unicorn.
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.
