“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 have a few complaints about my employer but I’m glad this isn’t one of them. Someone actually asked if we were planning to do an RTO during the quarterly town hall yesterday. Our CEO basically said, “We know there’s value to working in person, and that’s what I prefer to do, but here’s the thing: we have offices in 5 states and employees in 46 states. We’ve been able to recruit the best talent in the country because of our willingness to recruit outside our footprint. Companies that have mandated an RTO are not doing well. We’re not in that position and we have no plans to change our work policy.”
Try four days a week.
This just happened:
- Wife was promoted to a managment position in the company 1 year ago.
- Was given a list of things they wanted her to accomplish.
- She not only checked off ever item on the list, but exceeded the expectations, sometimes by 10,000% and way faster then they expected.
- Told weekly by her boss how impressed they are, and how great she is doing, and how much of an asset she is.
- A meeting with the management team was held a month ago (mid August). Wife was not invited, despite being part of that team.
- Merit raises are given out every year, between 3% and 10% depending on performance, wife finds out yesterday (9/21/23) that she is only getting the 3%.
I’m more pissed then she is, and I don’t want to fight with her about it, but if it was me, I’d have quit on the spot.
Sounds like a bunch of stuff that should be added to her resume.
Either they’re giving bad evaluations to save on raises, or management is toxic and has unrealistic performance standards.
I agree on both points. Every time I’ve tried to talk to her about how mistreated she is at her job, we end up in a fight, so I’ve stopped trying. We don’t argue much at all, have been together 25 years, and next to no issues. But she feels that it’s just normal to be treated like crap at a job, and you just have to deal with it as it won’t be any better anywhere else, and may be much worse. The only job she ever had where she was treated well, and paid great got shut down for some tax fraud stuff no-one who worked there knew about. That doesn’t help her confidence in finding something decent.
You should* update her resume, shop around her resume, look at some job postings, and get her to talk to some recruiters.
Update her Linkedin too.
It’s one thing to talk about a theoretical possible new job that might be better. It’s another to present her with: “These companies will hire you at X% higher and their Glassdoor reviews are better than your company”
I was like that (comfy in my old job) and it wasn’t till I was confronted with job postings that were 50% higher pay that I was qualified for and at a better company that I realized I was underpaid and needed to switch jobs.
Edit:
* offer to or encourage her to. Maybe it’s a bad idea to go behind her back and update her LinkedIn and resume though you could still check out job postings and glass door reviews.
She needs to start acting her wage. Minimum raise, minimum effort.
A year into COVID they had an all hands where they congratulated us on exceeding our productivity goals after a year of WFH. Then they announced that everyone was gonna have to come back to the office, and that because a different OU screwed up and got their dicks sued off there wasn’t any money in the incentives budget and not to expect much in the way of bonuses that year.
Edit: ooh forgot to mention that a bunch of us pushed back because we didn’t think it was safe yet, we got overridden by upper management, then after we came back in our state set a record for daily new COVID cases and daily deaths. It swept through the office, a bunch of my coworkers got really sick and one lady’s husband died.
Nobody wants to work anymore.
Oof thats really bad. Was there at least pizza?
They offered to cater lunch and then didn’t buy enough burgers for all of us. It was an all-hands meeting and they know how many people worked there, but they somehow thought that only about half of us would show up to the meeting we were all required to attend in person.
Goddamn dude, can you tell us 1 thing they did right?
They paid me really well for my first job out of college when I didn’t know anything about anything.
I’m not OP but I’m sure they generated significant value for their stockholders.
I wonder if she can sue them… like they forced everyone into the office and so everyone got COVID and that lady’s husband literally died… that’s pretty fucking horrible. There should be a way to “get back” at them (so to speak) for being so fucking negligent that someone literally fucking died.
I agree that there should be a way, but there absolutely is not.
There should be. Could get creative. Eventually the law recognized take home exposure duty for asbestos product sellers. The problem with going after the employer is that any action for injuries derivative from an employee-employer relationship is limited to the exclusive jurisdiction of workers’ comp., which absolutely does not cover take-home exposure.
There is always negligence, though. Everyone is liable for the foreseeable, actual harms of their conduct, or said another way, every person owes a duty to all other persons to use reasonable care to avoid causing injury. I guess that claim would get hung up on the medical proof of causation; how could a doctor say the work exposure was the one that caused the disease when the whole state was setting records. Maybe on the right facts, as is always the case for new precedent.
A few months after our company got acquired the new HR rep came to our city for a pep talk. The highlights of which included:
- We’re trying to jack up the value of this company as fast as possible at the expense of all of you
- If you like the idea of job security this isn’t the company for you
Those weren’t her exact words, of course, but that’s what everyone took away from it. I had already given notice at this point.
deleted by creator
They kept up the friendly talk like “we love the culture your company has and we want to replicate it across the org” until our original CEO left, then the straight talk started happening. It became very clear to me and others that they just wanted to pump revenue until they could sell us off for a 10x (or higher) multiple.
The somewhat heartening news is that the new CEO and all his ahole underlings all got fired by the board after the dumpster fire they created was fully ablaze. That was about a year after the HR talk I mentioned.
They’re learning we already see through that BS
Lol I work for Unity
(sorry lol)
This is more accurate than I’d like
Oh boy, what can you tell us about how things are going there?
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.
This is one of the reasons I don’t leave my job even though I don’t love it. I have job security out my ass, it’s a huge company that has almost no chance of being bought (I think we’re the biggest company in our field but maybe 2nd), the pay is good enough and there’s no asshole middle management. I’m absolutely willing to do boring work for the rest of my life and not have to worry about that kind of stuff.
lol I’m a web dev in a union. I pay less than $1000/yr for healthcare.
I’ll leave for, maybe, a 100% pay raise.
Maybe.
I have suspected for a while now that the only way I will leave my current company is when it’s bought out and I am made redundant or downsized. Good to know the symptoms.
Feeling this hard right now. I’m gonna stick it out and see it until the end though while keeping my options open.
Start looking for work while you still have a job. You’ll be in a stronger negotiating position and employers know that
They routinely held an end of year meeting at the start of December that was a bit of a Christmas party. The meeting was always a show of appreciation that ended with the boss handing out bonus pay.
One year the boss finished thanking us for contributing to the busiest and most profitable year in company history. He then announced that all that big profit would be used to open up a new location! And for that reason nobody would be getting Christmas bonuses because the new location was really expensive. The next year he sold to a corporation who immediately fired most of the senior staff due to their high salaries, myself included.
Not even a Pudding of the Month Club subscription?!
Merry Christmas Clark.
Jelly not Pudding, you cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-assed, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed, sack of monkey shit.
Told everyone that they needed to be in the office a minimum of three days a week. Everyone lost their shit and now they’re grumpy and combative all the time. Used to be a chill place to work.
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.
You were also being “engaged to wait” if you had nothing to do.
You weren’t free to go home, so you were on the clock.
Can playing a game of cards that you can drop in a second be reasonably said to not be “engaged to wait”? I mean, they were literally waiting with cards in their hands for something to happen but nothing did. It’s not like they had left the premises, were unreasonably distracted or negligent.
I think you misunderstood.
“Engaged to wait” simply means that you aren’t free to leave and must be paid. If you’re required to be at work, you need to be paid - even if you’re killing time playing cards.
I see, but the other commenter didn’t say that anybody left, that they were only playing cards.
Yes. I’m arguing that denying their pay is illegal.
I’m still confused, then
I think you’re agreeing with me.
I’m saying it’s illegal to deny them their pay because they were required to be at work. “Engaged to wait” basically means “Having nothing to do, but still on the clock.”
If they showed up to work 20 minutes early to play cards or we’re playing cards during their lunch break, then they’d be “waiting to be engaged” which wouldn’t require payment because they’re free to leave.
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.
Yeah… umm… that lady sexually assaulted you.
HR is clearly bad at their job, and honestly, if it hasn’t been too long, you should gather sworn statements from people who were there and take it to a lawyer.
I’m not going to tell you that the case is a good one to pursue; obligatory: I’m not a lawyer, but to my understanding sexual harassment has a very long statute of limitations… bonus if you can get any paperwork from that HR meeting to corroborate what they said to you, or any evidence you were told to, or did, attend any seminars about it…
IMO: talk to someone about it, maybe you’ll get a payday. If the lawyer doesn’t think the case will stand up, then you will only waste a few hours talking to coworkers and the lawyer… if they do think it will stand up in court, then you could be looking at many thousands of (insert currency here). I mean, for a few hours of work to find out… why not? They sound terrible and I can’t imagine suing anyone nicer.
Yeah, no question she did.
This was almost a decade ago and while I’m sure I could pursue it, I wouldn’t feel good about it if I did.
The HR director is long gone and she’s really the one I had a problem with. And I know this is going to sound really dumb but I don’t want to fuck up the girl’s life now but bringing her back into what, to me, is a clear moneygrab attempt
As for the seminar, I did the most Hollywood thing of my life and slowly slid the paper back in front of her before standing up and saying “if you think I’M going to take a sexual harassment seminar, you are out of your goddamn mind” and walking out
That sounds like a legendary response. Nice work.
I won’t tell you what to do and if you don’t want to pursue it, then that’s the end of it.
I hope you’re in a better workplace and living your best life.
Well the CEO just had a massive panic attack yesterday and said there’s no way we’re going to finish this major project in time and the company is now ruined. The company is only one person. It’s me.
… Do you need help?
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).
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.
I used to work in an animation studio, and one day the boss came down and said he had a zoom meeting booked with some LA producer who wanted to hear a pitch from us, and he needed ideas. So the whole room of animators all started pitching up ideas and it went super well, and after about an hour we had this idea that had us rolling on the floor that we all loved and the boss seemed really happy. So he went upstairs and got on zoom, but didn’t close the door so we could all hear him talking from our desks. He didn’t mention our idea at all, just pulled something out of his ass that sounded awful, which if it had been accepted we’d have to work on for the next year or so. Luckily they weren’t interested, but yeah we didn’t really pitch ideas with much gusto (is at all) after that.
Alright, bucko, let’s hear that pitch!
Haha I was being vague 'cause I still hope one of us will do it one day, but whatever! So we had this recurring main character who was like a big doofus type, and our idea was to have an alien invasion thing where the aliens come to try and steal Earth’s resources, but the twist was that they really needed carbon dioxide for whatever alien reason, so their plan was just to remove all the CO2 from our atmosphere and then be on their way. Our idiot hero would set out to stop them, while everyone else in the world was like “no!”
There was some other character-specific stuff that wouldn’t really make sense out of context, but that was the broad idea. Maybe he thinks that everyone trying to stop him is an X-files type conspiracy, that kind of stuff.
Removing all the CO2 would be catastrophic
Good God, the conspiracy has even reached Lemmy!
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.
Yeah but Magento was like 10% cheaper so think of the profits! That or it’s some backdoor crap like the CEOs are cousin or whatever.
Actually, it was CONSIDERABLY more expensive. Like, multiple times the entire price of Sylius for a single year of the Magento enterprise agreement.
We budgeted $600K for the replatform. The project went massively over budget and three years after I left, they STILL hadn’t moved to the new platform.
Then they dropped Magento 2, started a replatform to Shopify, and last I heard they let the entire remaining dev team go.
We told them in no uncertain words that Magento2 wasn’t right. But they chose to ignore the people that knew what they were talking about and push their own choice forward because we had previously used Magento1. Moron management would not listen to us when we told them the platforms were not compatible and that we got absolutely zero benefit from running Magento1.
But you know what, fuck then. I got a better job, a promotion, 30% more pay, and I’m 100% work from home now.
Someone was getting kickbacks.
