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.

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 :/

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.