Asklemmy

IBM rocked up.

Don’t believe that IT guys have safe jobs. An IBM sales guy can promise to replace any developer or project with a better version. Happened twice to me now.

Bought out by a PE leveraged shitshow. Disaster was inevitable.

Someone incompetent was promoted to manager, they became drunk with power and a complete micromanaging piece of shit. Half the team quit within a couple of months.

(Hello to my current boss who may be here, no it wasn't at our job).

Previous company decided that not only would they make people redundant but they'd also gut the benefits of those who stayed and worsen working conditions all whilst trying to transition their entire manufacturing process to entirely different equipment.

Unsurprisingly all the experienced and skilled workers took their generous payouts or bailed as soon as the new process and working conditions went to shit.

Literally 10s of millions invested in machinery and a few million in redundancy all to end up making less and worse product at a higher cost than before. Combined with the few that stayed having zero morale and it was cluster fuck that's irreparably damaged a 140 year old company.

I bounced once I'd got enough experience to be of value elsewhere.

First the boss throws a hissy fit and starts handing out "verbal writeups" for things that were his fault. Then he imposes 7:30am demos every day to prove we were actually working and not... I guess slacking?

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!

Worked for a F500 company in their data science department. Given the global footprint of the company and the nature of my work, all I did was sit in front of the computer (meetings, coding, etc). The pandemic struck and we went remote. Afterwards, they insisted on 100% return to office. Said I would quit if they did that. They pushed for it so I quit. So did most of the team. Apparently, interns were left picking up the pieces, and the dept has never fully recovered since

Poo Gate

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 senior engineers from three teams left.

I worked for a dollar store in the ghetto, and we got held up repeatedly at gun point.

Corporate wouldn't do anything for our safety.

Store manager lined up a better gig, and all but two employees decided to quit, because he spent his free time up there, not working but guarding us. More people at the front, bigger deterence - plus him being an MMA fighter helped.

It was timed for black Friday for maximum impact. Finding another minim wage job wasn't too hard at time, we just had all worked together in the past and liked each other, so we stuck around each other.

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.