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  • 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 terror brilliance 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 bus a 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).

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • "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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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!

  • 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.

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