The told us that remote work was being ended and we needed to to return to the office. By that time people had built whole lives far from the office.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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It's quite funny how my employer got a swift kick in the rear regarding WFH during the pandemic. Before it was a near absolute no go. Unless your idea of WFH taking work to bed or the hospital you could pretty much forget about it.
Then covid came and they were forced to do it. After a few months they sent out a survey asking about our experiences with it. Turns out that most absolutely loved it (or at the very least loved not having 20 other folks on the phone in the same room) and ever since part time WFH became the standard (and was recently expanded)
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.
Leave a note: Your free trial of 'Dubz the forklift driver' has expired. Insert coin to continue
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.
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 ยฃ80 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".
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 VPโs 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 Iโm aware Iโve seen the same pattern happening at pretty much every place that Iโve worked at since.
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.
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