When i graduated, my manager would often come over to me on a Thursday and say he needed my work done my Monday. Which inevitably meant i would be in the office over the weekend. This happened for 6 weeks straight. That's right, every single day i worked, there were no weekends for naive old me.
On the beginning of the 7th week, i had a twitch in my eye and i could smell death. I broke and handed in my notice, my ceo refused, then accepted after he spoke to the manager. The manager had a word with me, and told me that they were going to fire me anyways. What a nice guy.
I've seen bosses gang up on a 50 year old employee, seemingly to get rid of him. Where I live it's very hard to fire someone unless you give them three written warnings.
This senior 3rd line tech was well on his way with two before he found a better job and quit himself.
Both warnings were completely unfounded, but I only remember the details of one. The last one was due to consultants in another office, in another city, registering an internal certificate on a personal e-mail address. So it wasn't renewed and cost the client some revenue in downtime. Since my senior tech was responsible for operations of the environment he got blamed and got a written warning.
Now that I think back, the first warning might have been about when he replaced disks in a failed disk array and the array crashed as a result of the replacement.
Either way, me and several other younger techs got the impression that they were trying to get rid of old blood and get new blood in. We work for a very large telco concern where employee numbers are regulated from the top. So you can't hire anyone new unless someone old quits. Or unless the mother company approves expansion.
Edit: For some perspective, younger techs have made bigger mistakes and gotten off with verbal warnings.
Sounds like a classic "manage out" process. Staff with long service are more expensive make redundant. The managers concerned will have engaged HR who will have advised on how to build the documentation trail to make an eventual dismissal legally watertight.
I had a job in which the management had no idea how reliable software gets developed, and their MO was to hire the cheapest people possible (H-1Bs, back when you couldn't transfer) and work them to death. Not being on a visa myself I should have quit after a week, but I was young and naive. They were perennially going to go public "in six months or so". Every Friday my boss would walk through the cube farm and we had the same discussion:
Boss: "We're not meeting our schedule, so the team decided we need to come in tomorrow for a half day.
Me: "The... team?"
Boss: "Don't worry, I'll throw in lunch."
Me: "I really need a day off. I had to buy underwear yesterday because I haven't had time to do laundry."
Boss: "It's just until we get version 1.3.7 out. After that we'll all have a chance to catch our breath."
So we'd come in on Saturday, and of course after a half day nothing was working, so he'd extend, and then ask everyone to come in Sunday "so we can catch up and not have to do this any more."
It got so bad people started taking Fridays off under the theory that a single day of vacation plus some mumbling about being out of town was good for three days off, and you could always tell when someone got his green card, because that would be his last day.
This is the company that sent a team to a customer site "for a few weeks", and that team was still there working around the clock months later. So the wives of the employees in question got together and somehow found them new jobs. The entire team quit on the same day and flew home, leaving the company scrambling to explain (by which I mean "lying their asses off") what was going on and trying to pull people in from related projects to salvage that install.
> They were perennially going to go public "in six months or so".
Heh... I once worked somewhere that they promised to get us healthcare in 6 months, every 6 months. Their refrain was, "soon we will be the Google of Healthcare!" (I quit 2 years ago, they still don't offer health insurance, but according to my poor schmuck friends who still work there they still claim it is just around the corner).
This company also had friends of the owners come in and fake sit at the desks and pretend they were working when potential clients would walk through so it looked like we were full staffed at 50 people when in reality there were only 20 of us.
I am using a throwaway account and withholding some tech info as this may uniquely identify people involved.
I joined a high-profile machine learning research team within Amazon. On my first day, I knew something was off immediately -- the manager literally gave me a laundry list of micro-tasks to do with an exceptionally strict timeline. Of course, the list was unrealistically ambitious to make him look good. This is a research team -- most research attempts simply aren't successful at first tries. But he wanted to push with his "perfect" schedule. I frequently stayed after midnight to meet the schedule. When this schedule wasn't met, I was publicly humiliated in front of other team members.
He loved to micro-manage, and he insisted on literally sitting behind me for hours to see each word I am typing into the terminal. I worked at several companies before this, but this level of micromanagement was not something I had seen before. This certainly was not a pair programming session (which I normally enjoy actually), as he was not actively contributing to the problem at hand. It was just...watching me work for hours in a small room.
One time, a friendly team member saw the difficulties and kindly offered to give some technical tips. This manager came to us and started to raise his voice how ignorant people should shut up [his words]. This was in the middle of large office. I got dragged into a small room after that, and I was verbally abused for an hour because he thought I made him look bad (technically incompetent) by talking another team member for technical tips. He was so upset that he was red and almost crying.
After surviving this environment for a while, I decided to leave. I told the manager and the senior manager politely that it was not a good fit. Of course, they can't just let me leave voluntarily -- they have to "fire" me or reject me otherwise so that it would be them finding a fault in me, not me in them.
The sad thing is, as I was told, how this is normal at Amazon.
I am experiencing this now at Capital One. Routinely berated, intimidated into better performance, arbitrary judgements, a lot of belittling(e.g. you're no rocket scientist), and threats (eg you are screwing your reviews, I will hold you liable, etc.).
Yeah, not too surprising Capital One has a poor internal culture, they do a ton of creative accounting, to the point that they were able to outmanuver American Express on the Costco relationship.
That being said, I really hate my Costco Cap One card, anything over $300 gets flagged & SMS approval doesn't ever work (despite getting a confirmation back saying it will go thru).
I've heard some pretty bad stories from the people over at EMC, they share a joint office here in Seattle with Capital One.
The CEO/founder was into "The Game" and the Red Pill and he made all the male engineers go out in SOMA to try seduction techniques, as well as go to strip clubs. Our married and ltr engineers hated it but still had to show up and participate in this nonsense in order to fall in line and stay a "culture fit."
As you can guess, we routinely lost admins and female engineers who were generally solely hired on attractiveness and not talent, knowledge or skill.
I worked at a place where the CEO/founder would openly talk about 'young guys' as a hiring practice to enable him to pay as low as possible.
This same place also expressed a significant preference for hiring H1B workers because 'they get locked in for 5+ years while waiting for their residency'.
At one place I worked, programmers weren't allowed to print anything and creative accounting was used to calculate our wages, something I didn't realise until I left as there were no payslips. One time, the CEO came storming into the programming room, extremely upset that someone had called the company and asked to leave a message for a programmer. "At my next company" he yelled, "there will be no phone system!" Another time, he waltzed into the room and proudly announced that he had taken a whole year to pay a bill.
In the mid-90s, I was 16 and had just started my very first job at a local ISP after having dropped out of high school (his needing a job with some urgency). It was right around the time that everyone and their mother started to check out this information superhighway thing, and mom and pop ISPs were sprouting up everywhere.
When I interviewed for a job, the owner, who we'll call Frank, seemed like a pretty decent guy. He was definitely quite smart, and knew what he was doing on the telco side. I got the job after like 5 minutes of interview and started the next day.
What Frank failed to tell me in the interview was that he was a completely batshit crazy sociopath. Within a couple of days, there was a fair bit of yelling and swearing about my mistakes, then progressively more and more, followed by genuine emotional abuse and even flipping lit cigarettes at us and throwing other things when we screwed something up.
I'm only 16 and an idiotic 16 year old at that, so I actually stay there like 6 months before I start to realize this isn't normal. One day, a few of us just get up and walk out. About a month later, I heard (and saw evidence as I was walking by) from a friend who was still there, that after hours, someone had shot up the back windows of the office (4th story office in Chicago, so it's pretty unlikely it was random).
Anyway, I manage to forget about it and move on with my life. 20 years later, I look him up to find he had served 3 years in the federal pokey for threatening a judge who had ruled against him in a tax case. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Pro tip: you don't get a warning when you threaten to kill a federal judge via email. You go straight to prison. Do. To pass go; do not collect $200.
I worked in a ~10 person dev office about 30 minutes away from the company headquarters. We pretty much had free reign down there to do as we please. But with that meant that our boss had free reign to do as he pleased.
I saw him berate a coworker whose mom lost her job at the main office because she "wasn't doing her job." I personally have no opinion on whether it was an acceptable firing, just that an unrelated divisions boss shouldn't have that conversation and much less in front of his coworkers. Who would argue with him?
We had a full-time keg in the office which of course we all enjoyed in copious amounts. But you couldn't quit drinking there if you tried. He would constantly pressure employees into drinking with him at 11am when he showed up with bloody mary mixes.
He was more than happy to tell you about why we shouldn't let immigrants into this country because they are fundamentally flawed compared to US citizens. His argument was that bribery was an innate part of them and their culture. Once again, who would argue with their boss over this?
He would brag about the loaded gun he keeps in his desk drawer at the office. This may have been part of the culture, there were at least 4 people with concealed carries at a 10 person office.
Once, while discussing the hire of a female intern (we were an all male office) he "joked" that it didn't work out and that we would find some diversity someday. He followed that up with maybe we could even hire a nr.
On a business trip he disclosed medications that a coworker was taking in an effort to discredit him with me. He also claimed to be reading that employee's text messages on a company phone. I still don't know if this was true or not, only that he wanted me to believe it was true so that I would trust what he was saying.
We were encouraged by our boss to look up the new hires (international women doing an internship for free) on Facebook and other social networks to see if they were hot before hiring them and we did have veto decision based on looks. Later my boss wasn't so happy that I didn't show my excitement about this even though I'm a straight young male (my other coworker wasn't so happy as well).
It was my first job, then something similar happened in my second job, but there I told my bosses that it'd be better idea to hire someone based on their knowledge and not on looks. I got scolded but stood my ground on this (even though in this job my coworkers were supportive on only hiring hot women). Now I've decided never to work again in this shitty country and I'm a freelancer earning 10x more money.
Some rude behavior is widely seen as acceptable in the US: snubbing, status slaps, insult delivery through jokes/sarcasm, interruptions, slouching during presentations.
That is the textbook behavior of a jerk. Anyone behaving consistently like that is a cultural liability that needs firing immediately.
"Anyone behaving consistently like that is a cultural
liability that needs firing immediately."
Some behaviors are jarring because of mismatch of personal styles, not because the person intends to be disrespectful.
First the person needs to made accountable for their actions. This is the first cop out of incompetent managers - rather than hold a person accountable by pointing out their lapses - and giving them the opportunity to improve - they just fire them.
There is a possibility that the reprimandee will apologize and improve, thus leaving everyone feeling better. On the other hand, he might not.
We had 3 guys on internship placement. Working hours for them were more strict than for others. One day on Friday everyone left the office before 5.30pm. At 5.27pm we had a call from important international customer. Boss got really angry that no one answered the call, while interns should be there, two most disliked got written warning, everyone got an email with a lot of vulgar words from boss and he threatened to fire people.
I was wondering, what could interns even say if they have answered the phone... They didn't even know about the project we had with that customer.
I was wondering, what could interns even say if they have answered the phone...
Adulate the customer, make empty promises and lie about the whereabouts of the responsible people, implying they're busy working to fulfill their specific requests. And generally avoid passing the impression that people leave early (read: "are slackers", from the customer's perspective).
Not that the reaction was appropriate, mind you. It's hardly reasonable to expect interns to know how to "service the account", as Carlin put it. I've been answering clients for a few years and I'm still quite junior at it.
A few years back the company I worked for had an office where we shared a floor with a recruitment company - they were too cheap to have a meeting room for their own use so they used to do their staff reviews in the shared kitchen area.
It was a regular occurrence to see people, both male and female, in tears being berated by one of their managers (one of their managers was termed "The Terminator" by one of my colleagues due to his warm and friendly manner).
I got fired out of the blue from my first job for much vague reasons. My boss never approached to me to talk about anything, so I was super surprised. Everything seemed to be okay just 15 min before I got laid off. Oh, and he was super micromanaging, avoided one on one meetings, thought it was okay to have me illegally employed and passively bash me for everything I didn't know.
It was back in the 90's in Texas, but I had a manager that used the word "nigger" casually in conversation. I saw this same guy sit a pair of shoes on a desk in front of a woman and ask her to get them shined.
Sharing experience with others, realize that what you're going through didn't work for others, or is not commonly viewed as acceptable. Humans have very strong abilities to build justifications for what they are going through, in an effort to cope with bad things. However, sometimes, acceptance is detrimental.
Sharing such stories and discussing with people out of the company is an efficient way to prevent toxic cultures from emerging or continuing.
[+] [-] steedsofwar|9 years ago|reply
On the beginning of the 7th week, i had a twitch in my eye and i could smell death. I broke and handed in my notice, my ceo refused, then accepted after he spoke to the manager. The manager had a word with me, and told me that they were going to fire me anyways. What a nice guy.
[+] [-] trome|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcgudeman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] INTPenis|9 years ago|reply
I've seen bosses gang up on a 50 year old employee, seemingly to get rid of him. Where I live it's very hard to fire someone unless you give them three written warnings.
This senior 3rd line tech was well on his way with two before he found a better job and quit himself.
Both warnings were completely unfounded, but I only remember the details of one. The last one was due to consultants in another office, in another city, registering an internal certificate on a personal e-mail address. So it wasn't renewed and cost the client some revenue in downtime. Since my senior tech was responsible for operations of the environment he got blamed and got a written warning.
Now that I think back, the first warning might have been about when he replaced disks in a failed disk array and the array crashed as a result of the replacement.
Either way, me and several other younger techs got the impression that they were trying to get rid of old blood and get new blood in. We work for a very large telco concern where employee numbers are regulated from the top. So you can't hire anyone new unless someone old quits. Or unless the mother company approves expansion.
Edit: For some perspective, younger techs have made bigger mistakes and gotten off with verbal warnings.
[+] [-] osullivj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gozur88|9 years ago|reply
Boss: "We're not meeting our schedule, so the team decided we need to come in tomorrow for a half day.
Me: "The... team?"
Boss: "Don't worry, I'll throw in lunch."
Me: "I really need a day off. I had to buy underwear yesterday because I haven't had time to do laundry."
Boss: "It's just until we get version 1.3.7 out. After that we'll all have a chance to catch our breath."
So we'd come in on Saturday, and of course after a half day nothing was working, so he'd extend, and then ask everyone to come in Sunday "so we can catch up and not have to do this any more."
It got so bad people started taking Fridays off under the theory that a single day of vacation plus some mumbling about being out of town was good for three days off, and you could always tell when someone got his green card, because that would be his last day.
This is the company that sent a team to a customer site "for a few weeks", and that team was still there working around the clock months later. So the wives of the employees in question got together and somehow found them new jobs. The entire team quit on the same day and flew home, leaving the company scrambling to explain (by which I mean "lying their asses off") what was going on and trying to pull people in from related projects to salvage that install.
[+] [-] randycupertino|9 years ago|reply
Heh... I once worked somewhere that they promised to get us healthcare in 6 months, every 6 months. Their refrain was, "soon we will be the Google of Healthcare!" (I quit 2 years ago, they still don't offer health insurance, but according to my poor schmuck friends who still work there they still claim it is just around the corner).
This company also had friends of the owners come in and fake sit at the desks and pretend they were working when potential clients would walk through so it looked like we were full staffed at 50 people when in reality there were only 20 of us.
[+] [-] romanovcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway126126|9 years ago|reply
I am using a throwaway account and withholding some tech info as this may uniquely identify people involved.
I joined a high-profile machine learning research team within Amazon. On my first day, I knew something was off immediately -- the manager literally gave me a laundry list of micro-tasks to do with an exceptionally strict timeline. Of course, the list was unrealistically ambitious to make him look good. This is a research team -- most research attempts simply aren't successful at first tries. But he wanted to push with his "perfect" schedule. I frequently stayed after midnight to meet the schedule. When this schedule wasn't met, I was publicly humiliated in front of other team members.
He loved to micro-manage, and he insisted on literally sitting behind me for hours to see each word I am typing into the terminal. I worked at several companies before this, but this level of micromanagement was not something I had seen before. This certainly was not a pair programming session (which I normally enjoy actually), as he was not actively contributing to the problem at hand. It was just...watching me work for hours in a small room.
One time, a friendly team member saw the difficulties and kindly offered to give some technical tips. This manager came to us and started to raise his voice how ignorant people should shut up [his words]. This was in the middle of large office. I got dragged into a small room after that, and I was verbally abused for an hour because he thought I made him look bad (technically incompetent) by talking another team member for technical tips. He was so upset that he was red and almost crying.
After surviving this environment for a while, I decided to leave. I told the manager and the senior manager politely that it was not a good fit. Of course, they can't just let me leave voluntarily -- they have to "fire" me or reject me otherwise so that it would be them finding a fault in me, not me in them.
The sad thing is, as I was told, how this is normal at Amazon.
[+] [-] akerro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IndianAstronaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trome|9 years ago|reply
That being said, I really hate my Costco Cap One card, anything over $300 gets flagged & SMS approval doesn't ever work (despite getting a confirmation back saying it will go thru).
I've heard some pretty bad stories from the people over at EMC, they share a joint office here in Seattle with Capital One.
[+] [-] _mythrowaway|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randycupertino|9 years ago|reply
As you can guess, we routinely lost admins and female engineers who were generally solely hired on attractiveness and not talent, knowledge or skill.
[+] [-] moonshinefe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsloth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thiht|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abawany|9 years ago|reply
This same place also expressed a significant preference for hiring H1B workers because 'they get locked in for 5+ years while waiting for their residency'.
[+] [-] stevoo|9 years ago|reply
Hiring you people or people that are married with children so he can pay less and they wont leave as easily.
It was very disappointing when i heard that.
[+] [-] mrlyc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killbrad|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidmr|9 years ago|reply
When I interviewed for a job, the owner, who we'll call Frank, seemed like a pretty decent guy. He was definitely quite smart, and knew what he was doing on the telco side. I got the job after like 5 minutes of interview and started the next day.
What Frank failed to tell me in the interview was that he was a completely batshit crazy sociopath. Within a couple of days, there was a fair bit of yelling and swearing about my mistakes, then progressively more and more, followed by genuine emotional abuse and even flipping lit cigarettes at us and throwing other things when we screwed something up.
I'm only 16 and an idiotic 16 year old at that, so I actually stay there like 6 months before I start to realize this isn't normal. One day, a few of us just get up and walk out. About a month later, I heard (and saw evidence as I was walking by) from a friend who was still there, that after hours, someone had shot up the back windows of the office (4th story office in Chicago, so it's pretty unlikely it was random).
Anyway, I manage to forget about it and move on with my life. 20 years later, I look him up to find he had served 3 years in the federal pokey for threatening a judge who had ruled against him in a tax case. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Pro tip: you don't get a warning when you threaten to kill a federal judge via email. You go straight to prison. Do. To pass go; do not collect $200.
[+] [-] iknowhow2pickem|9 years ago|reply
I saw him berate a coworker whose mom lost her job at the main office because she "wasn't doing her job." I personally have no opinion on whether it was an acceptable firing, just that an unrelated divisions boss shouldn't have that conversation and much less in front of his coworkers. Who would argue with him?
We had a full-time keg in the office which of course we all enjoyed in copious amounts. But you couldn't quit drinking there if you tried. He would constantly pressure employees into drinking with him at 11am when he showed up with bloody mary mixes.
He was more than happy to tell you about why we shouldn't let immigrants into this country because they are fundamentally flawed compared to US citizens. His argument was that bribery was an innate part of them and their culture. Once again, who would argue with their boss over this?
He would brag about the loaded gun he keeps in his desk drawer at the office. This may have been part of the culture, there were at least 4 people with concealed carries at a 10 person office.
Once, while discussing the hire of a female intern (we were an all male office) he "joked" that it didn't work out and that we would find some diversity someday. He followed that up with maybe we could even hire a nr.
On a business trip he disclosed medications that a coworker was taking in an effort to discredit him with me. He also claimed to be reading that employee's text messages on a company phone. I still don't know if this was true or not, only that he wanted me to believe it was true so that I would trust what he was saying.
[+] [-] bsvalley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] convolvatron|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petermcnister25|9 years ago|reply
It was my first job, then something similar happened in my second job, but there I told my bosses that it'd be better idea to hire someone based on their knowledge and not on looks. I got scolded but stood my ground on this (even though in this job my coworkers were supportive on only hiring hot women). Now I've decided never to work again in this shitty country and I'm a freelancer earning 10x more money.
[+] [-] mboto|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partycoder|9 years ago|reply
That is the textbook behavior of a jerk. Anyone behaving consistently like that is a cultural liability that needs firing immediately.
[+] [-] Bootvis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsloth|9 years ago|reply
Some behaviors are jarring because of mismatch of personal styles, not because the person intends to be disrespectful.
First the person needs to made accountable for their actions. This is the first cop out of incompetent managers - rather than hold a person accountable by pointing out their lapses - and giving them the opportunity to improve - they just fire them.
There is a possibility that the reprimandee will apologize and improve, thus leaving everyone feeling better. On the other hand, he might not.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akerro|9 years ago|reply
I was wondering, what could interns even say if they have answered the phone... They didn't even know about the project we had with that customer.
Can I name and shame?
[+] [-] icebraining|9 years ago|reply
Adulate the customer, make empty promises and lie about the whereabouts of the responsible people, implying they're busy working to fulfill their specific requests. And generally avoid passing the impression that people leave early (read: "are slackers", from the customer's perspective).
Not that the reaction was appropriate, mind you. It's hardly reasonable to expect interns to know how to "service the account", as Carlin put it. I've been answering clients for a few years and I'm still quite junior at it.
[+] [-] orf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|9 years ago|reply
It was a regular occurrence to see people, both male and female, in tears being berated by one of their managers (one of their managers was termed "The Terminator" by one of my colleagues due to his warm and friendly manner).
Almost made me feel sympathetic for recruiters.
[+] [-] sophie_around|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] youdontknowtho|9 years ago|reply
That happened.
[+] [-] orless|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrale|9 years ago|reply
Sharing experience with others, realize that what you're going through didn't work for others, or is not commonly viewed as acceptable. Humans have very strong abilities to build justifications for what they are going through, in an effort to cope with bad things. However, sometimes, acceptance is detrimental.
Sharing such stories and discussing with people out of the company is an efficient way to prevent toxic cultures from emerging or continuing.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|9 years ago|reply
Workplace harassment in any form is bullying, and needs to be stamped out.
[+] [-] cylinder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gil|9 years ago|reply