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!

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.

“We {company owners/founders} are excited to announce that {company} is partnering with {venture capital firm} to take {company to the next level}. {company owners/founders} will be moving to the board of directors and a new CEO is coming aboard. It’s a very exciting time for {company}.”

Received a few of those emails in my time… it’s always bad news and might as well get your resume together right then.

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

Poo Gate

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.

Many years ago - many jobs ago, we got a new CEO, and she wanted to make a big splash, so she started firing people. And this is a public, non-profit job, so most people were working in less than stellar conditions simply because they were passionate about public service.

I was two days away from putting in my 2 weeks’ notice because I had landed another job, but they fired me and gave me two months’ severage. So instead of having to work another 2 weeks, I didn’t have to go another day. I said “Sorry it didn’t work out.” and held my smile till I got out the door.

A couple executive-types gathered the more senior developers for an “open” discussion about recruitment and retention. They suggest multiple ideas that would destroy morale (like non-compete clauses, poorly designed work-role pipelines, etc), and all of us suggest against them, and provided alternatives instead (like a shift in direction of certain efforts, more autonomy and less micromanaging, etc). They end up accusing us of not supporting our company’s mission and tell us that if we don’t agree then they don’t want us there and we should just quit. I think after that meeting, only 2 people stayed out of about 30, and hiring numbers have significantly declined.

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 work a union job, most people never leave. Usually the old guys retire in waves though. They’ve all known each other for decades and don’t want to have to train the next generation.

My town changed our insurance from a decent PPO to a HSA and didn’t grandfather in the current membership. So everyone eligible to retire retired so they can keep their PPO. We had over 15 people leave. It was great for Overtime not great for personal life. I am a firefighter.

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 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.

It’s happening to my place right now. CEO lied about raise and bonus amounts. Additionally, both were lower than two years ago (last time we got a raise) especially factoring in inflation.

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.