The full office being pulled into a meeting and lectured about how disheartening it was to see everyone leaving the office on time at the end of working hours. What we call good time management they apparently saw an laziness and a lack of commitment.
That and the message that discussing pay and bonuses wasn’t allowed (despite being protected by the Equalities Act here in the UK). This of course got us wondering why this would be discouraged and turns out our salaries seemed to have very little to do with length of service or performance.
Worked at a place where we got a company wide ass chewing from the CEO for leaving right at 5:00 PM. Apparently he interpreted this as everyone was slacking off the last few minutes.
The results: instead of walking out the door right at 5:00, all the other departments would stand at the exit and wait for the accounting department to walk out of the building first. CEO favored the accounting department so I guess everyone figured they wouldn’t get in trouble if accounting left first.
I think his little tiff actually resulted in more time being wasted.
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.
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.
Not really an incident but I am amazed at how many groups of senior tech managers and engineers navigate from organization to organization together!
For example, a tech VP joins a new company and within a year many of the senior positions are occupied by the VP’s previous coworkers. They give each other promotions and eventually either get outmaneuvered by another similar group of people or simply choose to move on to the next place to do it all over again.
I had no idea such groups existed, until I was invited into one. Now that I’m aware I’ve seen the same pattern happening at pretty much every place that I’ve worked at since.
There’s some collective bargaining in that, though. “You lose this person, you lose all of these persons”.
