At the tail end of a massive maintenance shutdown (16 hr days for everyone, for 2 weeks) the mill leadership started a site-wide meeting with pictures and stories of their recent trip to Japan. How they went golfing, the great meals they had, their trip to the mountain, etc. They finally wrapped that up and proceeded to tell us that cost of living raises were going to be small that year due to them being “unsure about next year’s profit margins”.
There was a pretty steady wave of resignation letters for the 6 months following that meeting.
Jesus, some people just have no awareness whatsoever.
It’s almost always better for a company to have resignations than layoffs.
So it’s kind of always been a thing for them to “encourage” resignations with shit like this, then hire back new people later for drastically lower salaries.
It’s what a lot of places are doing now mandating return to the office.
That sounds good in theory but with layoffs you tend to at least aim to let the worst employees go. With resignations you have literally the opposite. The best people are the ones that will go and the best ones will go first as they can and will find a new job more easily.
Not saying that they don’t do it for that reason but sometimes (and I’d say most times) people are just incompetent and do stupid shit like this.
I’ve seen the induced attrition, but with control. So let’s say the company on a ‘healthy’ year gives out a 14% bonus to everyone (and the salary is calibrated with the expectation of that large bonus). So they decide they want attrition, sorry, they can’t afford the bonus that year, everyone just has to learn to do without. Ok, disastrous, except they also identify some key folks and give them like 30% bonus in stock that vests over two years and/or a cash bonus with a clause that they are entitled for that to be paid back if the employee quits. So those people manage to get the same money (or more), though with strings attached, so they aren’t inclined to quite unless they have an amazing competitive offer.
I’ve also seen a new executive come along and admit the strategy was being used, called it BS, and announced bonus was going to be significant but they were laying off folks.
Someone laid off is out and angry. Maybe talking smack about them, sue, might come back and cause a scene. Someone resigning already got what they wanted, to never see the employer again. It’s like when you have a mentally unstable ex and make her feel like she broke up with you so you don’t come out to find your tires slashed.
The added olive on the shit pizza here is that skilled maintenance personnel, at least where I am, are a fairly small trade, and word gets around. I’ve never heard of “official” blackballing, but we ticketed folks gossip pretty readily about industry employers, and are in high demand.
Moves like that will guarantee that they can’t get experienced tradies, and even if they do, the ones that are willing to go to their next shutdown will be keeping an eye out for trouble, and at the slightest sign of bullshit and will probably cackle with glee while screwing with this employer.
Beware the phrase “I can retire anytime.”
Quiet firings.
Quiet hirings are a thing now too…
Companies are putting up postings for positions they don’t have any intention of filling any time soon.
This way when they are ready to hire, they finally look at resumes and can start scheduling interviews ASAP. It’s shifting all the wait time of the process to applicants.
Combine the two, and you end up with companies being able to maintain bare minimum staffing regardless of workload without having to ever pay severance packages.
It’s actually really smart, as long as you don’t have the tiniest shred of empathy and think of workers as machines and not people.
Really explaibs how I got an answer to my application 14 month later. But they were consulting work companies. So you were hired when they needed a consultant with your profile.
I interviewed with one company I wanted to work at, but no answer after 2 months, so I interviewed elsewhere. That place had me start within a month. 6 months into working at my job, the first company said “ok, we are ready to schedule your start date”. I took that as a sign that it probably wouldn’t have been a great place to work.
That’s messed up.
That’s capitalism.
It only works when the government backs citizens over companies. Because a public company is required to put profits over everything else.
So there needs to be regulations getting passed to keep blocking whatever new bullshit someone set up.
All it would take would be requiring companies to have a start/end date on applications and only be able to hire from applications received in that window.
It’s already how the federal government does hirings. The government gets a lot of shit, but they’ve got one of the best unions around.
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Be careful
This exact thing happened at one place I worked years ago: the old plant manager retired so they sent out an interim manager from their home location states away from our facility.
Obviously she wanted to get back home so they made hiring a new plant manager a top priority. Eventually they found this guy who’d been like an assistant plant manager at some place that had closed down (maybe a red flag?!). So he got started and immediately, like within a month, started hiring on a bunch of his friends who’d lost their jobs at the old place when it shut down.
At first it was great because he was filling vacancies which made everyone’s load lighter. Then all the vacancies were filled but he still had more friends to bring in, so he started creating positions to bring in more people. Suddenly they were “coordinator” positions who basically only served as middlemen between other management, people who used to do their own work now had a staff of 2 or 3 people, etc.
Eventually even that bloated staff ran out of room for his old friends…and then all that staff started talking a toll on the budget…
…so over a few months they started mass layoffs of anyone who wasn’t part of the new plant manager’s circle of friends. Basically if you didn’t work with him before at the old place, weren’t part of the union, and weren’t part of his Thursday golf crew, you were sent packing. Over one week he got rid of like 30 people.
After I got it, I heard from friends that within a month they were mandating that any employee with specialized skills (read: I didn’t have any friends with that skill so we couldn’t get rid of you) had to take at least one weekend shift and pick up 8 extra hours through the week, every week, for minimum 56 hour weeks… because they no longer had the staffing to get it all done.
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Well, that’s nothing new, it’s at least been a thing for the last 20 years I’ve been working.
Best use of that I’ve seen was a manager that always pushed to get new headcount, and then never wanted to fill it. Because the company counted cancelling unfilled positions toward a departments required layoff requirements, so several layoff rounds spared every actual employee in his department.
That works until the company re-evaluates how many people that team needs…
It probably contributed to them kicking him out of management one day.
That’s utterly diabolical if that was the intention
The devil himself is afraid of the machinations in the mind of the average human resources manager.
Not to mention that the company doesn’t have to pay unemployment for those that resign but do for those that are laid off.
i struggle to understand that even from a sociopathic viewpoint here, productivity drop would far exceed any wage savings
Or they don’t care because they feel they deserve it and we peons don’t.
Similar thing happened at my first job out of college. It was a year into COVID and we’d been WFH since the spring before this annual June meeting. They had just gotten done announcing that our productivity had exceeded targets, when they added two more announcements:
-
WFH was ending, and we’d all have to go back to an office that didn’t have enough desks for everyone to be there all at once but that was okay because we could all just coordinate amongst ourselves as to who gets to sit where and when and when we had in person all-hands meetings some people could just sit on the floor and work.
-
Due to a lawsuit filed against an entirely different OU we shouldn’t expect much in the way of bonuses this year.
We saw the stress the company was under between the lawsuit and the move, so over the next couple months we helped by cutting about a million dollars a year from their annual salary budget.
some people could just sit on the floor and work.
i hope you have a workplace safety agency where you are, because damn…
Where I was. I noped tf out of there, and a few weeks after they started enforcing RTO America set it’s records for daily new COVID cases and daily deaths. We really did do COVID the way we did Vietnam: it got too expensive so we gave up, declared victory and threw a bunch of people away.
-
It’s amazing how often I see executives talking about their cool trip, their new plane, or other rich person bullshit during the same presentation where they are telling their employees to suck up some furlough, reneg on bonus, or similar financial hardship.
Super mega sons of bitches Super mega…sons of bitches
tons of upvotes and comments for this one. definitely a frequent flop by management.
I thought I made people mad by ordering a curry chicken sandwich in a student-ran shop in college, but I hadn’t paid attention to an announcement that was made at the end of the class and I accidentally interrupted the minute of silence for a terrorist attack that had happened a few days before
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I got called “chicken curry” for years
I remember a pause for a minute’s silence announced in the upper concourse of a train station (UK) last year. It was disconcertingly comedic as the people walking in either on the phone or with a friend were very confused at why everyone inside was standing motionless and glaring at them.
I think I was working in that station on that day, because I have a very similar anecdote. Actually someone came to buy a ticket, and was annoyed because they thought they might miss their train having to wait for the minute’s silence to end. Not even the most callous passenger I’ve come across either.
Where did you see that? I’m in the UK, can’t remember exactly which station but pretty sure it was a London station with underground
In the north! Probably not the same station then.
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It was an announcement in class by the teachers
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Similar situation, I was at an antiques shop with my parents, on November 11th, which here in the UK is a day of remembrance for people who died during WW1 and WW2. We’re observing the moment of silence, when an American guy walks in, notices the silence and loudly exclaims “Wow, who died? It’s like a mausoleum in here!” Someone, thankfully, took him to the side and quietly explained what was happening. He did apologise afterwards. I found the whole situation very funny.
At least there’s a concrete answer to his question!
Ooooof. This sounds like something I would do. Ugh. I want to hide right now just thinking about it. Glad you made it through to the other side. :)
Went to a cousin’s wedding, her parents split when she was little so I’d not seen my Uncle Mal for decades. Tbh everyone was expecting him not to show because he’s a selfish twat and knows nobody likes him.
Surprise, Mal is here. He had an inexplicably-attractive, younger date (Mal was a disgusting, horrid-breathed, lumpy old man and his date was a pretty, well-spoken woman in her 30s so we all assumed she was an escort, as Mal has no redeeming qualities).
The whole time everyone is desperately avoiding being stuck alone with him, and everyone is talking about having the same conversation… Mal has written a book, he’s a writer now, and he’s written a poem he wants to read.
He was given many hints, subtle and not-so-subtle that his poem wasn’t wanted and he agreed not to read it. Unfortunately whether due to ego or wine, he loudly interrupted someone elses toast to announce he had a poem to read. Our collective hearts sank.
It was worse than we expected, at one point including cringe-inducing references to his daughter having large breasts. It went on and on for at least 5 minutes of everyone silently looking at the floor, sneaking the occasional “No way he just said that?!” glances at each other. He eventually finished, and just stood there awkwardly for about 10 secs, I assume waiting for applause, which obviously was not forthcoming.
Read the fucking room Mal, no-one wants to hear your shitty poem and no-one cares that you’re (allegedly) a published writer now. And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
That sounds horrible but in good news this was probably the funniest story I’ve heard on Lemmy so far
The last sentence I will admit is a shameless ripoff of a line from It’s Always Sunny, rest is my writing so I’m glad you enjoyed it. At least some good came from suffering his presence!
It reminds me of Malcom in the Middle where Hal thinks he’s supposed to speak at every funeral. No one wants him to speak so they all look over at him to see if he’s going to anyway. He always takes it as a sign they they want him to speak. 😂
And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
My sides
Honesty compels me to inform you that this ending sentence was shamelessly stolen from It’s Always Sunny. Highly recommend it, first season is a bit ropey as they are literally filming, writing, scripting themselves with no experience and at the start of their acting careers. An incredible show though imo!
I swear this feels like a plot point from a Righteous Gemstones episode. Sounds like you have a real life Uncle Baby Billy
I’ve been meaning to watch this show but I was put off by the evangelical-ness of it… worth watching then? This happened in the UK about 8 yrs ago!
I was the same way. Especially as someone who lives in Texas and is surrounded by those types. Not to give anything away but it is closer to mobster than evangelicals.
Always looking for new funny shows to watch so I’ll give it a go, thanks for the rec.
“Read the fucking room Mal” deserves to become a thing.
If I ever see an unkind comment and someone replies with “Read the fucking room Mal” I think I’d lose my shit with delight
I could just hear the tone in your voice when reading this. Great storytelling.
“Don’t you all have phones!?”
I was an interpreter for this event, and I was the one covering this part of the panel. As an ex-Blizz fan, this moment is seared in my memory for many reasons. The shame of having to interpret this not the least.
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Fair question. It was a dick move from Blizzard when they were called out for not releasing their next Diablo game in anything but mobile. When the crowd booed, the game dev was all, “Do you guys not have phones?”
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Nobody should be downvoting you. Not everyone pays attention to, iunno, that crapfest that is/was E3 or the like
Yup, I was there as well. The bride moment of dead silence followed by booing after they announced it will forever be etched into my brain. To be fair though, poor Wyatt was set up and was never going to land that pitch in that setting.
Thing is, the guy wasn’t wrong. Everyone in that room most certainly had a phone capable of playing the game.
But Blizzard was teasing Diablo 4 all but without actually saying it. I feel that a simple black screen, a voice over, and a flaming “IV” would have been all that was needed since they obviously was balls deep in development of it at the time.
And Blizzcon is a PC gaming centric event and we all know how PC gamers feel about mobile games. He didn’t just read the room wrong, he was in the wrong room entirely. The mobile game should have been announced as a Twitter post
In comparison Bethesda was smart about announcing Fallout Shelter by talking about Fallout 4 first, then going “oh btw some of us been doing this phone game on the side…”
Plus it was developed by a shitty mobile game apps company that was known for ripping off assets from other games. Sure, Blizzard licensed the assets to them, but the problem wasn’t really the stealing of the assets itself, it was that only shitty fly by the night companies are ripping off assets to put into a game that hopes to trick people into spending money on microtransactions before they realize how bad the game was.
I was going to mention this one.
My first job out of university.
Company is going through financial hardship. Boss cancels our collective insurance without telling us. Then the president of the company does a meeting in a shady motel reception room to announce to everyone the company isn’t going well and we all need to take a 10% pay cut. Ends the PowerPoint presentation with a photo from our major client’s ads with a lady on a beach with a laptop. President says “oh that’s going to be me in a few weeks. I’ll be going to Greece!”
The whole room just say there silent.
Fuck the rich.
Former CEO gathers 20-30 of us in the board room, talks about the difficult economy, proceeds to fire everyone.
The silence was deafening.
The meeting ends, he stands at the door expecting us to shake his hand as we leave.
Not a single person shook his hand.
At least he didn’t publicly share what his bonus was going to be for improving the bottom line.
Never forget that the year Lehman Brothers “collapsed” it paid the CEO 700 million dollars for one years worth of work.
Back in the day I worked in a restaurant that closed down, and the owner tried to steal all of our last two weeks’ pay.
It had been announced ahead of time that the place was going to close at the end of the month, and we were actually a very popular place, so the last two weeks were completely sold out, crazy busy, and there should have been lots of tips. After we closed, they kept dragging out the date we could get out last paychecks, then finally just tried saying, “there won’t be any last paychecks.”
All of us employees got together with a lawyer and they sent a letter saying that they needed to give us our last paychecks or we would file a class action lawsuit for all the tips they’d been stealing out of the tip pool. He then relented and agreed to pay us our last checks, but refused to mail them. When I went to pick up the check, dude really had the balls to try to shake my hand and say, “Hey Turtle Joe, how’s the summer going? Take any vacations or anything?”
I left him hanging and said, “No I’ve been out of work for months now. I’m not here to talk to you, I just need my check.”
P.S. we sued him for wage theft anyway and ended up taking him for almost $200k.
Former, you say?
Yeah, a real incompetent sociopath.
Not a specifically bad instance, but everywhere I’ve worked has always had that guy who has a hundred irrelevant questions at the end of a meeting, holding up 10 or so people from actually getting on with work.
After a couple of bad questions, I’ll either excuse myself, suggest we carry on separately, or (ideally) ask to be sent a list, for me to ignore at my leisure.
Sorry Greg, we’re not here to answer your dumbass questions, or indulge your hypothetical edge cases.
It’s always hypothetical rabbit holes 🙄
They think they’re like Doctor Strange trying to map out every conceivable future
… which somehow prepares you for EVERYTHING that doesn’t happen, and nothing that actually does.
Oh wow, thank you. For some reason this statement hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve got bad anxiety/worry issues and I tend to think about all the worst case scenarios. Everything feels like the end of the world to me, thanks persistent depression. But this put a lot into perspective for me. I’m going to use this statement as a tool when I feel myself spiraling with worry. Much appreciated!
I feel that overthinking due to anxiety is like running on a treadmill. You expend a ton of energy but you’ve not actually moved forward. Better to apply that energy to preventative measures or solutions. And if it is outside of your control? Well then just like the weather, you need to accept it.
Training classes in the military was the bane of my existence when I was in. Always people asking the dumbest questions ever.
I sit in business requirements meetings for enhancements to some software we use at work, and there’s a guy who feels the need to repeat everything everyone says in his own words (at least twice as many). The meetings used to be 30 mins but they had to extend them to an hour. And we have 2 a week.
Thanks to WFH it means I have 2 hours a week of guaranteed PlayStation time though, so I shouldn’t complain.
I’m the guy that needs to understand shit to move forward, so it’s like 25% dumb questions, 25% insightful questions, 25% pretentious sounding questions and 25% jokes that give white collar people heart attacks.
Don’t you think most people need to understand shit to move on? If you just ask urgent questions, then take time to digest the meeting and ask those insightful followups in a team chat, it filters out the 75% of the crap you were going to say.
Having a reputation as the guy who prolongs meetings with 25% dumb questions and 25% jokes is not a good thing.
I mean a lot of people in meetings have a good idea of what they want the scope of their involvement to be. My curiosity swamps any semblance of scope I might have. I’ve never actually gotten a reply in team chat. I don’t think most people even know it exists. I did get used to sorting out who I needed to be talking to and just hit them up after the meeting, though.
The only time I prolong shit is when I really, really disagree with something. Typically that’s an ethics issue.
Fair enough, I’ve been in those situations, that can be tough
Yep. That woman in the case where I work. And you can’t roll your eyes in a meeting, even a Zoom meeting.
But Zoom meetings mean I can - and do - get to message coworkers and shit talk the offender while it’s happening.
Pro tip: Make it a common practice after doing this to always make sure the last message sent at least starts with something innocuous in case you need to share your screen later so the preview in Teams shows doesn’t say “Jesus Christ, Carla is such a…”
Eh, I just ignore her and switch to another window.
Great question Robert. Let’s go ahead and parking lot that for the right time. Make sure you send that to us in your reply to the meeting notes. I don’t want to lose track of it.
We’ll circle back to that.
Celebrities singing Imagine
I completely forgot this happened. 😂 Wow, that was wild.
Our brains suppress extreme cringe memories.
New hire, brought on board comes to a Monday meeting.
The company Quality of Worklife Balance survey has been returned, and it’s awful. It’s just after the 2008 crash, and we’re barely treading water, but the company held on. The CIO brought everyone into the largest conference room, meant for hundreds (there’s a couple dozen of us standing around, the chairs weren’t setup) and we stand around her as she procedes to tell us “Why is your QWL so low, you should be talking to your managers about this! I don’t wanna see another QWL survey this bad ever!” In a very yelly tone.
One of the managers raised their hand, and asked, “Folks feel like they’re not being listened to and that they’re not getting enough leeway to make decisions.”
CIO: “Well they need to get over that.”
And that was the first meeting a bunch of developers and IT folks got to see at that company.
Many other shenanigans occurred there, but my personal favorite was the quarter million dollar genset system all setup and tested multiple times – fueled and ready to go, failed in a major power outage because someone left the key in the “test” position on the generator.
– That CIO thought they led people, they did nothing of the sort.
The first all hands meeting (within three days of being hired) I had at my new job was the CEO talking about legal allegations and indicating he’s going to be much less involved in the day-to-day. Apparently he was pretty well known for being a massive dick and berating employees.
On the bright side, I’ve not had to deal with him once! In the last year-plus I’ve seen him comment on two tickets regarding bugs, but that’s about it. We’ve not had a single all-hands since then. I just started at an unlucky time, haha
Plant manager sending out a site wide email saying that we’re doing awesome, and we’re desperately hiring so refer all your friends. One month after layoffs were announced, and those to be layed off still had a month to go.
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Give you one guess… you won’t need it.
Something something “at will employement”? Gotta love most US states…
seen it happen before but what they do is ‘abolish’ the role, and introduce a new role with a new name, oddly similar job description (they change it enough to count as a new role) and rehire people on contract where the previous roles were permanent
As an autistic person with ADHD I am going to leave this one alone. 😬
As an ADHD person I have so many stories.
But I can’t remember a goddamn one of them.
Lady at work told our office one day at lunch that her chihuahua died because it poked its head thru the fence and the neighbours rottweiler bit its head clean off. I could not stop laughing for the rest of the day. Even now its hard not to laugh. I know Im disgusting for thinking it funny, I love animals and would never hurt one, but it was the way she said it, “clean off, i went to take him away from the fence and his collar fell off, his head was completely gone. Neighbours dog at it.”
I know in real life it must have been gory and tragic, and I would normally never laugh about someone losing a pet, but the first mental image that comes to mind for me is cartoony and ridiculous so I’m with you on this one
Something about that story loops around from horrible into laughter. Its just so horrible the brain’s error handling is like “I dunno try laughing about it”
Holy shit haha!
I don’t know the specifics and I love animals as well, but I think as a porcelain rat dog™️ owner with a rottweiler neighbour, you should anticipate some risk and act accordingly. Big dogs killing the shit out of rat sized dogs by little more than a growl is very common after all.
No, that’s funny. You were right
You know what they say: it’s how you tell em.
I just read that as a chihuahua walked into the cafe :0
Joke way to tell people, “As an autistic/ADHD person, if you want me to be able to read the room you better write it down. Preferably with bold text an bright colors.”
Lol same. Just me all the time…
I worked a night shift at a lobby of some residential building, with another guy patrolling the building.
Some mentally unstable person wound up sitting at the lobby while the guy was on patrol (long story), so I sent him a message explaining the situation as I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the person.
The patrol guy comes back, looks at the person, looks at me and says “so, who’s the psycho?”
Good lord, what an inconsiderate asshole
We had a big mandatory meeting where an executive came in to tell us all to be happy we weren’t getting our bonuses or pay raises, and used a weird analogy about poor people being perfectly happy, because they have realistic expectations and that’s all you need to be happy.
He then had to leave early, as he quipped he was sharing a ride with a fellow executive on the private jet, and if he didn’t leave right then, he’d have to suffer flying commercial.
If you’re still there, organise your workplace. Unionise. Join the IWW - they can help you to accomplish this.
This was like a decade ago, I’m elsewhere now. Still not union, but I personally have no room to complain (reasonable hours and conditions and quite well paid).
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It’s funny when summarized, but sitting there for over an hour to set up the punchline drained all enjoyment from life.
If someone bothered to record it, I’ve no idea. Nowadays (different company) all such meetings are recorded and made available, but haven’t seen an executive say something quite so boneheaded in general.
Unity - “hold my beer”
This was the main example I had in my head when making this post.
“Don’t you guys have phones?”
Biggest physical room I’ve witnessed a misread happen in
“Is this some out of season April fools joke?”
And yet after everything that happened with Diablo Immortal, Diablo 4 was apparently Blizzard’s best selling game ever.
If the customers don’t care why should the company?
I think Blizzard not taking any real damage from their anti-consumer BS is why I don’t respect people who identify as Gamers™. I still play games, mainly from indie devs, but identifying as a gamer just means you’re a mark for scummy companies.
That’s a weird blanket to throw. I can think of a few people I know including myself who don’t fit that description but still would consider ourselves as gamers if someone asked.
I’ve been to enough LAN parties and various conventions. The most obnoxious gamers have always been the ones that make it part of their identity, which in the year 2023, is mainstream and just another form of consumerism. There’s a difference between “I play video games after work” and being a Gamer™.
Some of us have completely dumped ActiBliz permanently. The existence of Overwatch 2 was my final straw as it turned out Bungie was the bad guy behind the Activision mask all along with Destiny 2’s bullshit. Never even looked at Diablo Immortal or 4, and never will. Blizzard joined the shambling horde of zombie companies that effectively died years ago. Damned AAA necromancers just out to pump and dump any remaining customers.
God, I was right to stay clear away from Destiny. When that was announced, I couldn’t even tell what the genre was even suppose to be. It sounded more like they were selling me a life style then a game.
It’s so bizarre. I play a lot of indie fps games from small team or solo devs and they don’t have the fraction of the bugs that AAA studios do. Goes to show the difference between passionless corporations and individuals with a single game design vision can be.
There it is.
Thousands of people from all over the world. Primarily PC gamers. Paying thousands in flights and accommodation. All to see a predatory phone game get revealed.
Should have saved that shit for the quarterly shareholder report.
I came to this thread to say this one too.
