“Remember those 3 years of 100% remote work during the COVID pandemic, where we broke record renevue 3 years in a row? Yeah, we need you back at the office twice a week. Why? Because we said so.”

Sure, boss.

I’ve seen it 3 times. So now if a company I work at sells to another company, I quit.

When this happens, senior staff get layed off. The hard workers finally get the promotion they’ve been slaving for and never getting!*

*The hard workers are now middle management. Big company is trying to leverage their social standing in the company to deliver their morale killing new standards.

Hard workers will ‘underperform,’ even if they don’t. They’ll be replaced by someone the new parent company hires. (likely the wayward son of one of their VCs)

Nobody will like this person. They don’t know anything about how the company used to work, and they’re going to tell you how all the changes are gonna be great.

This will widen the divide between senior management and the ‘boots on the ground.’ The remaining talent that didn’t get promoted and fired or played off will find new work. Soon your company will be a few dozen 20-somethings making $18/hr to do a job that you used to get paid $75k/yr to do.

All for the shareholders.

Edit: if this is your current situation, just bail. You’re not being setup for a career. You’re being set up to be taken advantage of.

Docked an hour of our pay because, after we’d caught up on all of our tasks and had no chores or customers to handle, we played a bit of cards in the gift shop office to kill a bit of time. Corporate didn’t like that we weren’t doing stuff, despite the fact that we had literally nothing else to do, so they retroactively took away an hour of our pay.

I’ve already emailed the labor board about this since, looking into it, pay can only be docked before the time is worked, not after.

When I worked in the convention industry, my boss quit a few weeks before an event and I had to absorb his workload. I worked 6am-11pm 3 days in a row and on the 4th morning I passed out on the floor and was taken to the hospital.

HR accused me of being hungover despite not even having time to get drunk the night before. They banned alcohol at work events.

I’m not a big drinker so…whatever. But of course the rumor spread and everyone silently blamed me.

Then a year later a new coworker forcibly kissed me several times at an event. I was planning on quitting anyway so I didn’t report it but a different coworker did on my behalf after I asked her not to. HR told me it was my fault (“If you knew she was a messy drunk, why were you with her?”) and signed me up for a sexual harassment seminar because “clearly [you] don’t know what sexual assault is.”

I regret not suing for the second one but I just wanted to put that job behind me.

We were looking to replatform our aging e-commerce site.

With management approval, we spent weeks researching and narrowed it down to two possibilities - Magento 2 and Sylius.

We then divided our team in half. Half of us took one possible platform, the rest took the other. Each team was given an identical list of tasks, and the goal was to implement as much of the list as we could in two weeks.

At the end of the period, the Sylius team had not only completed every single item on the list, but had so much extra time they were able to implement some cool “nice to have” features we’d always wanted on the site but never had time for.

The Magento2 team didn’t even get the software fully installed and working much less even start chipping away at the list.

We all met and stacked hands - Sylius was the way we were gonna go. We were a big enough fish that we even got the company that made the software to commit to flying one of their developers out to our office and working alongside us.

Then the company put us all into a room and told us the decision would be Magento2 - now come to that agreement.

3/4 of our team left within 2 months.

Former employer Introduced a bonus system that reduced the amount of the bonus for everyone for each costly mistake. Each bonus check came with a slip of paper that named the department, the mistake, and the amount deducted.

Boss couldn’t understand that attaching an arbitrary name, shame, and punishment scheme took away all of the bonus’s power to make everyone happier.

Promoted several top performers. To fill the vacancy left from this, they then hired several incompetent, inexperienced people to fill the leftover roles, who unsurprisingly underperformed.

Well then wouldn’t you know it, our profitability went down.

So then they start several rounds of layoffs where they fired all of the top performers who had been promoted accusing them of, ironically enough, poor performance for the first time in their entire career at the company.

Throughout the entire process the same people who were eventually fired were reassured they were safe.

The underperforming idiots still work here, they just shifted some of their responsibilities on to other people like me in other departments so they have less room to fuck up.

The cherry on top of that which most of the company doesn’t know is that they considered firing the under-performers and demoting the people who were promoted instead of firing them, but they thought it would make us look poorly run in front of our clients.

Oh and they froze our yearly raises and bonuses, meanwhile our CEO got a raise even while making more than double the average for a CEO of a company our size (8 figures).

They fired the social butterfly of the group. He was always good company. Most of us in the office were pretty quiet people but he knew how to bring us out of our shell. He would often organize lunch so we can all hang out together but there was a lot less of that when they got rid of him.

All hands meeting … “show of hands, who’s been here less than a year?”…”you’re all top notch, the best candidates from the best schools… we couldn’t get that caliber employee years ago!” [suggesting those who built the business to that level were what, inferior - including the VP that just said it?]

It was meant as a compliment to the new folks…but it fell FLAT.

They hired full time the contractor who brought down prod 3 times in his 6 month contract. I updated my resume that very day. Edit:spelling

When the former boss had to quit due to health reasons, we got a two-faced lying PITA instead. He was an overall unpleasant employer in the first place, but the final nail in the coffin for the cashiers was that he demanded from them that they have to make sure customers stay 6 feet apart from each other during Covid.

• If we didn’t pester everyone in line to keep their distance, we got shouted at in front of the customers for “not doing our job”. Customers that didn’t want to obey the rules after being asked nicely were automatically our fault.

• If we DID try to enforce the policy, a lot of customers went to the front desk to complain about it, he did a 180° turn every time, apologized to the customers and handed out coupons. The more drama they caused, the bigger they were rewarded for it, and the cashier was chewed out for doing what HE wanted them to do.

If you have the choice between “wrong” and “worse” and you WILL get shouted at for both, there is no room left for morale.

Upper management told us to stop clocking in a minute early, then accused us all of time theft.

I can tell you something that brought up our morale. Our director was removed. Everyone’s morale and attitudes improved immediately. The in-fighting and pain-in-the-assery dissolved.

About a year before, a committee was formed to try and figure out ways to improve morale in our areas. Lots of good ideas were brought up, some were implemented. Morale stayed the same.

Had anyone known that removing of our director was on the table, every single person would have voted for that.

And the week before that, my inept foreman quit. That was the best Friday to Friday I ever had.

This happened a few years ago at my old workplace. We had gotten more docs to process and as a result ended up getting behind the normal timeframe to process them. We have a meeting where management basically told us that we couldn’t talk to our coworkers about non-work stuff while on the clock/not on break. Basically they were blaming socializing as the reason why we were behind. This did not go over well with anyone. This was also the same meeting where management lectured us about keeping our desks cleaned, which made it even worse.

Last year we got a new GM. The first thing she said was “everyone is coming into work 5 days a week”. We lost every one of our senior staff in under a year and the rule was never enforced anyway. We’re back 2 and 3 office and home again now.