They laid off half the company with no warning. This included a gentleman who was less than a year from retirement and had been there for 35+ years.

The company was shocked when half the remaining people abandoned ship shortly thereafter.

It got really awkward when they tried calling back the people that they'd laid off to replace the people who had left.

The company consistently outpaced competing firms and found itself emerging as one of the industry leading agencies. This was also a California tech firm, so shorts, flip flops, drinks at lunch, greenery on the roof were all rather common. But we were rapidly growing, and the atmosphere/location made us a hot ticket for talent.

Anyway, CFO and CMO cashed out and the CEO decided to totally remodel the company by making it far more corporate. On top of all of this, they implemented unattainable goals and removed our work-from-home policy. The final straw was they removed our rather generous vacation policy and replaced it with "Unlimited Vacation" which was a facade for "you can take as much vacation as you want if we approve it, which we won't."

Like a quarter of the company quit and immediately landed better jobs. Also profit tanked.

They restructured the way we're paid. What I used to do involved about 40% client interaction, 20% team/coworker interaction, and 40% paperwork and case coordination stuff. Based on what we do that means only 40% of the time is technically billable, and there are really sticky rules for what is and isn't billable. So, logically, we were being paid on a salary model. Cue management saying we can only make money for the time we have that is actually billable.

A quarter of the department quit. Two of us on the same day.

It turned out the owner of our company was keeping the social security money taken from our pay checks.

Yes, he was eventually caught, but apparently you can pull that scam for 4-5 years without getting caught because of lack of communication in the IRS.

The owner died and his idiot son took over and decided that the company didn't make him enough money and started to implement "cost cutting" measures like turning off the A/C in the building.

When I was 16, I worked in the concessions stand at a minor league baseball stadium. Minimum wage at the time was $5.15/hr, this job payed $8, and it was always in the evenings so it was perfect work for a high school student. The only bad thing was our management was TERRIBLE. The main manager would throw toddler tantrums about once a shift over stupid stuff, like not ordering enough of a specific brew (she did the ordering) or running out of pre-cut lemons for tea.

One night the stadium was running a promotion and it was incredibly busy - easily 2-3x the normal volume of customers. We were all working our butts off handling multiple roles each with absolutely no downtime. Although we all cleaned as we worked, nobody had a chance to do thorough cleaning for the whole shift because of the never-ending horde of hungry baseball fans.

The manager showed up 3-4 hours late per usual and threw the biggest tantrum ever over the unswept floor. Finally, she announces, "Listen up you lazy scum! Minimal work gets minimal pay. Everybody is being paid minimum wage tonight because you slobs won't clean up anything."

Both of our bartenders and the bar back quit on the spot, which caused a chain reaction. We all took off our aprons and hats to leave. She blocked the exit and was red in the face from screaming, so one of the cooks climbed out of one of the big serving windows where we served customers. I did the same and most of the staff followed. Bear in mind that this all happened in front of like 200+ customers. Of course, my final paycheck "got lost" so I had to file a wage theft complaint with the Texas Workforce Commission.

The original owners of the diner retired. They were literally the greatest people, both very sweet, but kept the place running like a well oiled machine. They took pretty good care of us and their restaurant.

When they left, they gave the restaurant over the their nephew who at the time was a busboy/waiter, kind of standoffish, didn’t really interact with us too much, a bit lazy at times, but for the most part did his part and went home. He seemed okay. Until he got the power of being the owner.

He fired four people, including two of the four cooks, and two of the three dishwashers, literally that same day, on a Friday night just before the dinner rush, all because he 'didn’t like their attitude.'

He refused to allow people to take vacation that they’d already requested and had confirmed by the original owners, would change the schedule randomly without telling anyone and then scream at people when they missed a shift or came in late because of it. He’d refuse to replenish the kitchen until we were literally already out of things, then take forever to put in the orders. He showed up randomly and would drink at the bar (for free of course) because he was the owner, and then bring in all his buddies to drink with him. Together they’d get way out of hand and grab at women and try to start fights.

Within the first month of him being the owner, over half the staff had quit, usually walking out literally in the middle of their shifts, after being screamed at. They’d basically throw down their aprons and tell everyone else that they were so sorry but they couldn’t do it anymore.

One night the last cook, this big dude who usually kept the kitchen laughing, started crying in the middle of his shift and dropped everything he was doing after the boss came and yelled at him for being to slow and making ‘slop’. He then walked out and the rest of us just bailed along with him.

Four months later the place was closed. His aunt and uncle were absolutely furious and devastated that he’d run the business they’d built up for over 30 years into the ground.

I used to work at a McDonald's, and we had a terrible manager who hated a lot of people working there. Everyone else hated him too, but no one wanted to call him out on his BS and quit.

I was the first to do it, because I requested 2 weeks off in August of that year, about 3 months in advance (my family likes to plan our summer vacations early on). When August came around he had my schedule set up for all of August off except for those specific 2 weeks. There was no way that he could have misinterpreted my request. When I got my schedule, I stormed into the restaurant, called him out on everything, and then quit on the spot.

About 2 weeks after that, I heard from one of my work friends that 5 other people had enough and quit as well. I kind of felt good to be the first.

Oh boy. I worked at Buffalo Wild Wings for a few years as a line cook. Two different stores, same pay. It was the type of work where you ask for a raise and they scoff and say “yeah, I want one too. Get real”

Anyways, I had been pretty dead set on quitting sooner or later. Our kitchen was very small. Most people ended up closing 4-5 days a week with doubles on the weekends, while still attending school full time as it was a college town.

On SUPER BOWL SUNDAY, a useless coworker who ducked out in the bathroom most the shift finally stops showing, and in response the managerial staff delegated closing to my pal J. Dude was a delight to be around, hands down the best coworker ever. J had told them that due to being a full-time student, he no longer wanted to be first in last out (4pm-12am, 1am on the weekends). They basically told him to go screw himself, and that they don’t have any more shifts for him.

Immediately, me and one other cook walked to the office and quit on the spot.

Buffalo wild wings lost 4 cooks on Super Bowl Sunday, leaving them with 7 full-time students on the schedule.

It was a managerial  nightmare.

New management. In a month, four kitchen staff quit, leaving me to be the only original kitchen staff hire from the previous manager. She completely changed the vibe of the work place. No one was happy. No one felt like talking or listening to music or being friendly. It was robotic.

It astounds me how many managers just don't get this or don't care. I've worked at a few places with an extremely high turnover rate and you can diagnose the problem in a day. Allowing your staff to be friendly, have conversations and relax at points throughout the day is a long term investment that usually pays off. While the alternative is having workers that get a lot done in a day but quit by the end of the first week.

I did landscape construction. The cheap owner kept taking bigger and bigger projects while never hiring more help. We were all overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious as could be. One of our foreman quit and I followed suit a few days later. Two more guys quit the next day. He was down to three guys for the obscene amount of work he wanted to do. Of course everything gets way behind schedule but he's convinced it's not his fault at all. He went out of business less than a year later.

They called everyone into a major company meeting and informed us we were all (except for sales and managers) having our jobs outsourced to India and the Philippines. They had a plan for to train our replacements that, strangely, didn't account for the inevitable turnover of people who weren't especially interested in digging their own graves. People started finding jobs literally the next week and the hemorrhaging never stopped.

I’m the manager of a retail store and I had found out a cashier was ‘ ‘stealing’ product by scamming reward card benefits. I came up with a detailed incident report to present to this employee and I was under the assumption it was just her. After I confronted her in a reasonable manner she freaked out and got really angry and quit on the spot. She was using fake accounts instead of using a customer's reward card to get herself points and redeem them for product/gift cards. So the customers weren’t getting the points they are owed which is a headache for me if they notice and complain.

The next day every other cashier called me and quit and after a moment of wondering what just happened, I found out they were all in on it and were using this lady’s fake card on their shifts too. So I’m down four cashiers and I have one left.

This same day, my last remaining cashier disappeared for twenty minutes. Turns out she was in the bathroom with another employee doing the nasty. She quits because her dad is a cop and doesn’t want to find out she got fired for this. The guy also quit because he ‘didn’t care and was moving anyway’ . I was down to literally managers only.

So the first part is the mass exodus and the last part was just for ‘can you believe this nonsense?’

I was working for a very large IT company, before the tech bubble burst. We had a meeting with our "new director and the VP."

They were tired of people complaining about things that should be changed at the job and how they managed people. So they sat around 200 of us down in our auditorium, and the director said she didn't want to hear anymore complaints on how she was running things and if we didn't like then there was the door. There was no way we'd leave such a great job.

Well, there was a mass exodus and probably close to 50 people left within 2 months.

She and the VP were "reassigned" and given no staff to manage. They were gone after a round of layoffs happened shortly after.

I worked at a Wendy’s. One of the regional managers started running a store because they couldn’t/wouldn’t find new managers to replace the old ones.

Well anyways this guy practically ran the place into the ground. Before he started running the store, most everyone liked working there as it was a good environment. A few months after, a couple of people quit because of him. And one day I roll in at 9 to help open the store and he comes out to my car as soon as I park (I was 15 minutes early and usually just sat in my car until 9) and tells me, “Hey I need you to start early because the three openers just quit on me.”

We manage to get the store open and had a number of people from other stores help run the place until the people from the next shift came in.

A couple days later I hear the full story of what happened from a coworker. The regional manager is supposed to be at the store at 7 or so, and the openers 30 minutes later. He didn’t actually show up until 8:30. So when the openers, already angry at being at work really early and not being on the clock, saw the regional manager roll in and knew it was gonna be an awful shift, all decided that they were done with him and just quit right there.

So at least 6 people quit because of him by the time I left the place. Probably more left after me.

Years ago I worked at a chain salon (my last ever, I swear). There were about 14 of us plus my boss. Half of us were really good, very passionate about what we did, all booked with good clientele. Our boss was wonderful, didn’t micromanage, etc. She was a big reason that while it was a chain, it didn’t feel like one.

She got fired. The reason given was that she “cashed a check at work.” She bought product, paid for it with a check, and added an extra $40 so she didn’t have to find an ATM before she went to the bar. She had worked for the company for 5 years, had pulled 3 shops into the highest ranks in the district, consistently had shops exceeding their numbers, etc. And just like that, she was fired, and even worse, when I came to work the next day, we weren’t allowed to talk about it. I texted her and she told me what happened.

We didn’t quit at once exactly, but over the next four months, the top stylists, who brought in~70% of the revenue, left. We took our clientele with us and all of us went to smaller, private salons. This was several years ago now but I still keep up with them. We’ve all found our niches in hair, make way more money, and are way happier for it, including my old boss. She’s about to buy the salon she works at. If it didn’t happen, I don’t know when I would have left, to discover I prefer barbering/men’s styling over women’s. It was a blessing in disguise at the very least.

Several years ago I worked in a mental health center. We worked primarily with kids. It was time for the center to renew their certification, but instead of keeping up with everything that needed to be done over the course of 5 years, the proper procedures were ignored.

In this couple months before recertification, administration made us sit through a ridiculous amount of training on things that would have been covered in training such as HIPAA laws and identifying child abuse.

Then came our paperwork. Our center encouraged us to do things that aren’t exactly covered by Medicaid or approved through certification. For example taking kids to the park isn’t allowed, but guess where they instructed us to take these kids so they didn’t disturb the therapists working? I had to go back and edit 5 months worth of documents to get rid of the evidence.

The kicker was that bathrooms were supposed to have a log recording when it was cleaned. An administrator perfectly forged the signatures of multiple employees. I don’t think they would have gone to that trouble just for a bathroom log. What else were they forging our signatures on?

The potential risk of being charged with Medicaid fraud was too high for me. I quit as did many others. I did report them to the authorities, but shockingly they are still in business.

A well-known colleague took his own life over a weekend. We were informed of this by management via a brief side note in an email about stats at the end of the day. It caused a lot of upset in the office and quite a few people didn't return after that.

A school district where I sometimes sub had a BIG round of hiring. A bunch of building substitutes applied for the jobs, and only about half of them got interviews. Of the subs that got interviews (myself included), the only one who made it past the screening interview was a relative of a current employee. The rest of us subs weren't the "right fit."

The real reason is that there's a substitute shortage and they don't want to lose any of us. Not a single sub (who isn't a relative) was hired for one of over a dozen teaching jobs. Many of the building subs aren't coming back next year.

Canceled all raises and bonuses for everyone except the CEO, his wife (financial and HR), and his son (utterly useless IT) in a year where we have record profits and brought in almost double the clients on top of announcing they aren't looking to hire more people when we were already overwhelmed.

Good part about it was when the majority of us quit they lost almost every single client shortly afterwards to their competitors and the company is now defunct.

Our boss had a meeting and announced new policy that all salaried employees had to work a minimum of 45 billable hours per week because of the increased project load we had. I pointed out to a few co-workers that our employment contracts specified 37.5 hours per week, and that I would be adhering to that policy. Well, about a week later I was "laid off" due to lack of projects. Ha. I was happy to go, and at least 2 others left voluntarily within the week. The job I found next was much better, and wasn't run by someone quite so clueless about how to treat people.

Many years ago in high school I worked at a movie theater. The place was pretty poorly run from the moment I started there. We never got paid on time and management was basically a bunch of lazy jerks who sat in the office talking all day and never actually did any managing. It would have been hard for things to have gotten any worse but after a couple of months they brought in new management who seemed to want to make it their personal mission to run the theater as poorly as possible.

They first decided to implement a new policy requiring all projectionists to wear ties, despite the fact that projectionists are never seen by the public, not to mention that tiny little detail that the projectionists worked around giant, rapidly spinning objects that a tie could get caught in. Management refused to reconsider the policy and every single projectionist quit as a result.

They then decided that the door people (of which I was one), who were always scheduled seven days a week, would now only be scheduled on the weekends, and refused to reassign any of us to concessions on the weekdays so we wouldn't lose hours. As a result, almost every single door person quit, including me.

After that they started imposing impossible cleanliness standards on concessions, things like requiring them to scrape popcorn kernels out of the cracks in the trim behind the popcorn machines. Concessions was there until 5 AM every night trying to meet their standards. Most of the concession people quit as a result.

By my count the theater went from a staff of about fifty to a staff of about twelve in three weeks. I swung by about a month after I quit and found out that entire management staff had been fired and replaced yet again by an entirely new one, people who actually seemed to be running the theater properly. My best guess is that the previous management had been told to whip the theater into shape and they were idiots who had no idea how to effectively do that.

Worked in construction as part of a health and safety team. The chief engineer was furious that the job was taking longer than he wanted because of the health (and especially safety) procedures. We had a couple lost time incidents at this point and just a week beforehand, a guy had almost died. But he was still pretty angry about the delays.

So he gathered everyone in a room and shouted: "You're not here to do your jobs. You're here to do what I tell you to do."

Twenty people asked to quit on the spot.

I was working at a local restaurant that had recently changed owners. Multiple issues came up: difficulty getting time off for important events, hiring people to work in kitchen who were bad at their job but cheap, cheaper ingredients, as well as the owner just kinda sitting around and drinking.

Things were tense and after a few months the staff were really just hanging in there because we liked each other (previous owners were a sweet old couple that set a great vibe). I know some others and I were already looking for a job.

Anyways, there was a young mother who waited tables there and really needed the job. She couldn't afford to be between gigs. One night she got a call that her grandmother had suffered a severe stroke, was unresponsive, and was not expected to make it through the night. She asked for the rest of the night off so she could start her 3-hour drive to Dallas. The manager said of course but the owner said no.

The manager and owner got into a verbal fight in the back. The waitress ended up pleading her case, crying. Manager said that if the owner wouldn't let her go, he was done. Owner ended up firing them both on the spot. Within the next 15 minutes everyone who hadn't been recent hire ended up walking out of the building.

7 of us walked out. The quality and attendance dropped for a year before the owner sold to a different guy with actual restaurant experience. Original couple returned to "reopen" the restaurant, and it is still going today.

The waitress did make it in time to say goodbye before her grandmother passed.

Our company relocated from a small suburb to a large city. Pretty much everyone had to take public transportation to get there. My supervisor was firm in only allowing two work-from-home days a week. I told him I was exhausted and having one more WFH day would make a huge difference, but he wouldn't budge. I told him I would need a raise, because I was spending hundreds of dollars a month on transportation, and it felt like I had been demoted. He refused.

I was offered another job, and I took it. He was shocked that I was leaving. About a month later, all but the worst employee had either left the company or left his department.

This was years ago when I was working as a basic box mover for a courier company. They cut their staff in half and still expected us to do the same amount of work.

It got bad enough that the head office people came down to supervise us at the end of shift. We stopped taking any breaks and worked WELL past our hours without overtime. The second day they were there, the immediate supervisor of our team (about 10 of us) asked if we could have one night off following week. (It was Christmas and most of us had families.) When the bosses refused, we ALL quit.

Their entire workforce quit in less than ten minutes.

There were three people in the office that morning when the other 300 of us walked out. Most of the other workers were pretty disgusted at how they treated us, enough to quit. They called within an hour and offered us all pay raises and actually decided to hire people to help with the workload. It didn't help; they had already screwed themselves trying to save money on wages so they were never going to make their deliveries. A month earlier, it may have made a difference but a week before Christmas?

The only time I ever quit a job and went back to it. But I only ever quit two jobs

I worked at the SPCA. The month I was hired on, there was a lot of stuff changing because a couple managerial and senior staff were moving on to other things. It turned into a disaster when a new manager came in. She and her bosses decided that they needed to try and save money. So we stopped spaying and neutering cats and adopted them out that way (real smart idea).

She was also told by the district manager that the SPCA needed more money, so if we got a good purebred dog in off the streets instead of registering it we should take it home, breed it, care for the pups (on our dime by the way) and then surrender it to the SPCA for some extra income. They also shut down their grooming facilities (which made them roughly 55% of their income).

What made me quit was that I was hired to replace their tech, but I wasn't being trained properly because their current tech kept telling me to go clean dog pens or cat rooms instead of showing me how to work the systems properly. So after a month of not being properly trained and me constantly mentioning it to her, I came in one day and find my name omitted from the schedule.

The manager's reasoning? "Oh, well you struggled a bit the day you were the only tech, so we dropped you from full time to on-call. We're going to hire someone else and train them to take over tech." Good job! I already knew about 90% of the job by this point, so you're going to hire someone else and "train" them like I was being "trained"? Anyways, I quit, and apparently stuff really went south after that.

All in all they lost 11 employees in about 3 weeks because of negligence, stupidity, etc. Me and 7 other employees went to the PetSmart on the other side of town as it was just opening and needed staff, so it wasn't completely terrible. But the complete mismanagement at that location was terrible. It was just a tip of the iceberg too.

I was hired by the new owners to replace the existing manager. I was under the impression that he was moving on to another job somewhere. So after about 4 days I ask him where he's headed and if he's excited. He just looks blankly at me and says, "I'm not going anywhere. I'm just training you as the assistant manager, right?"

The look I gave him must have been a great tip-off because he got up and walked into one of the new owner's offices. After about 30 seconds they were screaming at each other, then he just stormed out of the office, grabbed his stuff, gave me the finger, and left.

Over the next few days I'm trying to calm things with the employees. They're not faulting me, but now have a very bad taste in their mouths about the new ownership. Over about a 7-10 day time period, my team shrank from 15 people down to 3. I hobbled along with that the best I could while we tried to hire new people, but the new owners were offering so little we had trouble finding people.

After 3 months or so of that, I started to get fed up and overwhelmed, and when the owners started to get on me about missed deadlines I had had it. We were still only at 5 people, 2 of whom were brand new and still training. They didn't allow me to refuse work or push deadlines out, they expected the same output as a 15 person team.

So after my third day in a row of being berated for missing a deadline that was impossible to make, I quit.

I once worked at a data company.

The guys in the sales department screwed around all day. They'd literally be in the parking lot drinking and racing RC cars. When it came to handling accounts/clients, they frequently gave away free accounts in order to "retain" customers (and make their own sales numbers look good), and somehow they got away with it.

Meanwhile, there were dozens of programmers and database nerds working tirelessly behind the scenes to integrate a bunch of complicated data and make it easy to access via the website.

Yearly holiday announcements come around, and upper management decided to send the entire sales team to Hawaii for an all-expenses-paid vacation. When the furious developers asked why they were just taking the sales team, the confused CEO literally said, "Well.. I mean... I guess we could ask the sales team to pick one person from each department who helped them the most this year, and take them too..."

The programmers/engineers/database people were livid, and walked out in droves.

Gee, I wonder why the company tanked.

I worked at McDonald's back in high school. I was taking off for college at the end of the summer and put my 2-week notice in so I could get August off and actually enjoy it before I had to move away for school.

The store manager decided to just not put me on the schedule any more, which I discovered on the last weekend I was in to work. So instead of having those two weeks, I was just done. I decided, at lunch rush that day, that if they weren't going to honor the notice, I wasn't going to honor the 8-hour shift.

At about noonish, right after the breakfast crew had left, I decided to bail. The thing was, most of the crew that day were also going off to college and saw what the manager had done. So they walked off with me.

In the middle of lunch rush, the store was down to the super old lady who worked drive-thru, and the manager on duty. That's it.

The rest of us walked out.