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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/YouMessedUp12 on 2024-03-21 04:45:20.
Buckle up. This is a long one. Obligatory on mobile, English is my first language so all typos are my fault. No TLDR because fuck that. I spent the time to write all this out so you can read it or move on.
I worked for this tech company for almost 7 years. It was my first job out of college. Great company, huge growth, great benefits and most importantly an incredible boss.
The Boss was super helpful and responsive, always had the team’s back, goes out of his way to not micromanage, didn’t care as long as the work got done, borderline forced people to take PTO (we have unlimited and I averaged 30-40 days off a year) and believed in giving good workers big raises and promotions (last 3 years I got 9%, 13% and a promotion and 7% raises).
We worked remote through Covid and I asked to change my contract to fully remote so I could leave the HCOL city where the office was based to go back to my hometown. Boss approved the change and when HR tried to do a COL adjustment to my salary, boss told them no because I’ll be doing the same work in my new location.
The boss was so good that on our team of 16 people the lowest tenured was 3.5 years. I’d been offered several other jobs with salary increases throughout the years but could never bring myself to leave.
Myself and one other person on my team had specialized into working on very complex and involved projects. These were significantly different than the team’s normal day to day work. We’d been doing the complex projects for 4+ years and were the knowledge base for the company in that area. Boss left that area completely to us to manage. As the volume picked up we added and trained 2 more people to our little sub-team to help out. None of these projects went out to the customers without one of us 4 being involved. Super complex ($100ks to millions lost if a mistake was made) And since it was the fastest growing part of the business by far, we were super busy.
Now around 2 years ago. Boss’s boss gets promoted from his VP role up to an SVP spot. And hires a new VP. This new VP comes in and tries to change a lot very quickly. Tries to make everything a trackable metric…. Even where it really doesn’t make sense. I.E tracking the number of “projects” each person on my team did every month. Counted as 1 even if it was super complex and took 2 weeks or if it was very simple with an existing customer and took an hour. Wanted each project to go out faster (even if they weren’t due for a week we were supposed to get them out in under 3 days). Tried to force my boss to assign work to the team instead of us all picking up from a central queue as we could. Ect ect.
Boss pushed back as much as possible but was getting shit on constantly by new VP because the useless metrics VP wanted us tracked by did not meet his super unrealistic expectations. Despite my Boss’s team being the most experienced and efficient in the company and doing significantly more volume and more complex work than any other team.
About 9 months ago Boss had enough of just getting consistently shit on by VP and took a new job and left. (Boss had been with the company for 13 years and was one of the first few 100 employees) My whole team was devastated. We all instantly started lobbying for the most tenured person on our team to get promoted into that roll as she would have the same philosophy as the Boss that just left.
VP interviews most tenured, and a bunch of external candidates. And goes with someone from his previous company. Now this lady will be referred to as Bitch Boss from here on out for soon to be obvious reasons.
She came in and completely destroyed the team from top to bottom. Changed processes that had been perfected for years, did not listen or care about what anyone else had to say. Started micromanaging to the extreme. Team morale dropped like a rock. It took less than a month for the team’s output to crater due to all of her changes. The team from the best in the company to the worst.
It took Bitch Boss about 2 months to get to my smaller sub-team and try to rework our processes. Bitch Boss started micromanaging projects (having no idea what she’s doing) and causing all kinds of issues and delays. She started getting on us 4 about our “metrics” being the worst on the team. Despite us working on the super complex projects that took 10-100 times longer on average than most of the work the rest of the team did.
Bitch Boss told us that if we didn’t meet the expected Metrics we would be put on PIPs. So we decided to comply and focused all of our efforts on simple projects to meet the metric (X number of projects completed per month per person) and left the complex ones sitting in the queue.
This caused CHAOS as my small sub-team suddenly stopped picking up complex projects And just focused on completing simple projects to get our metrics up. Very quickly the sales team is freaking out because deals are getting delayed and their huge commission checks from the complex projects are being put in jeopardy.
When they came to us to ask when we were going to complete the complex projects we all gave the same response, “Bitch Boss has told us we have to focus all of our efforts on meeting Metric X so we will only be doing that. Unfortunately that means we can no longer complete the complex projects. Please contact Bitch Boss for help getting them completed” This did not go over well with her or VP as he started to get complaints as well.
They called a meeting and told us we had to go back to doing the complex projects. We refused as that made it impossible to meet the metrics they created to measure our performance. They refused to drop the metric but still insisted we work on the complex ones as we were the only ones with the knowledge. We still refused. This resulted in a lot more complaints from sales until the SVP got involved. The SVP was the one who created the complex sub-team to begin with and sided with us against the VP and Bitch Boss. He said we were not to be measured by the metrics and can go back to managing the complex stuff without fear of being put on a PIP. So we did.
At this point the other 3 people on the sub-team had seen the writing on the wall and were all actively applying and trying to leave ASAP. They were all office based in the HCOL area still. Bitch Boss changed the team from come in 1-2 days a week as needed to mandatory 3 days in the office (most company policy would let her). So they got a lot more of her BS than I did remote.
I had not been applying because I was distracted, my old boss had approved 2 weeks of vacation for my wedding/honeymoon before he left. This happened to occur about 3 months after bitch boss started. And about a month after the whole PIP blowup. Bitch Boss was PISSED at how we showed her up in front of the SVP and was doing everything she could to make our life miserable.
In that month, the other super experienced guy and my best friend on the sub-team got a new job and left (no notice) and one of the other guys on the sub-team has put in his notice and only had a week left. We were already slammed and still behind from the PIP fiasco so losing half the sub-team just made that worse. Plus with morale so low we didn’t bother to put in any extra effort anymore. In fact the whole team was significantly behind as 6 of the 16 people had left or were on their notice periods at that point.
So Bitch Boss decided that she was canceling my already approved wedding leave because of how far the team was behind. She told me over Zoom. I told her there was no chance I’m missing my wedding and honeymoon for work and I’m taking the full leave and it’s up to her if she wants to lose another person from the sub-team for 2 weeks or permanently. She BSed, yelled and threatened until I just left the zoom call.
She followed up with an email officially notifying me my leave was canceled and if I didn’t show up it would be considered job abandonment. I called her bluff and replied CCing VP and SVP and some other sales VPs who I worked with regularly, explaining the situation (it’s my wedding honeymoon) and that I appreciated the opportunity but was quitting immediately with no notice due to the disrespect from Bitch Boss.
I got slack messages from SVP and several of the sales VPs almost immediately asking me not to quit. The email chain itself blew up with complaints about how my team was mismanaged by Bitch Boss and how now more complex deals were going to get lost because I wouldn’t be there at all to work on them ect.. SVP eventually shut it down but it was a fun read.
I didn’t reply to the slack messages or do any work the rest of that day. Just turned everything off and went to a bar and had a good time. I woke up the next day late in the morning, and very hungover, to a few voicemails on my phone from SVP asking me to call him.
I called back in the early afternoon and talked to the SVP. He was very understanding, asked me to come back. Listened to all my complaints and eventually made an offer. Basically if I came back and worked the rest of the week and tried to train a few team members to work on complex stuff to cover while I was gone, he would give me a $3000 wedding bonus, I would get my full PTO, and when I got back Bitch Boss would leave me alone and let me manage the complex stuff and pick 2 more people to permanently train back onto the sub-team to back-fill what we had lost.
I accep...
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