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.
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
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.
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).
