30 Bosses Who Made Bad Decisions That Made Everyone Quit

1.

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, me too.”

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 real 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 (expletive) 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.

2.

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.

3.

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.

4.

Word slipped out that the whole accounting department was being replaced so they all resigned all at once.

5.

Turned out our owner was keeping the social security money taken from our paychecks.And yes, he was caught.

6.

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 owners offices. After about 30 seconds they were screaming at each other, then he just storms out of the office, grabs his stuff, give me the finger, and leaves.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 which 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.

7.

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, beers at lunch, getting high 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."Like 1/4th of the company quit and immediately landed at better jobs. Also profit tanked.

8.

They called everyone into a major company meeting and informed us we were all (except for sales and managers) being offshored to India and the Philippines. They had a plan for us training our replacements that, strangely, didn't account for pre-schedule turnover. People started finding jobs literally the next week and the hemorrhaging never stopped.

9.

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 can 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.

10.

Worked at a data-company.The guys in the sales department f**ked around all day. They'd literally be in the parking lot drinking beer 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 decides to send the entire sales team to Hawaii for an all-expense-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.

11.

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.

12.

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.

13.

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.

14.

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 and that 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 "re-orged" and given 0 reports, they were gone after a round of layoffs happened shortly after.

15.

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 was done. The thing was, most of the crew that day were also going off to college and saw what the manager had done. So they f**ked off with me.In the middle of lunch rush, the store was down to the old-a*s lady who worked drive-thru, and the manager on duty. That's it.The rest of us walked out. 2 cashiers, 3 grill workers.

16.

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 s**t 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.

17.

Restructure of 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.1/4th of the department quit. Two of us on the same day.

18.

A well known colleague committed suicide and we were told 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 this.

19.

Worked at a Wendy’s and 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 to 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 mad 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.

20.

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. 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 of when it was cleaned. An administrator perfectly forged the signatures of multiple employees. I don’t think they would have went through 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.Editing to ad: I did report them to the authorities. Shockingly they are still in business. I did what I had to to cover my a*s.

21.

The boss went off on a tirade on me for something that wasn’t my fault and I got him to scream “people like you are expendable pieces in this company and I can replace you tomorrow if I wanted to”.80% of the engineers quit the next day. Simply didn’t show up. Including me.From what I know, the entire project folded because my now ex boss couldn’t find people to replace us because no one wanted to do the kind of work he was looking for at the salary he was paying.

22.

I worked for a company that had gone through a restructure, we put so much work into salvaging our company (and jobs). After announcing the "restructure complete!" (Think GWB on an aircraft carrier deck) the CEO hired his wife as the second highest paid person in the company. She had previously been a nursing assistant and was a complete loser. She was having people with PhD and MBA degrees reporting in to her saying things like "This is what a budget looks like." and my all-time favorite "no, marketing does not necessarily mean TV commercials." Like, what? At the time she was making ten times what I was making and I was doing work she didn't even remotely understand. It was such a farce.

Half the engineering team and a huge portion of sales simply quit. She was trying to explain why not getting a bonus was, in and of itself, a bonus. The top 3 salespeople simply walked out of the meeting, cleaned their desks and left. I knew then we were screwed and quit a couple of weeks later.

23.

We stopped providing free coffee, and we're so cheap that we sold our coffee maker. This was in Seattle, so a couple of people bought their own coffee makers to put in their cubes. That tripped the breakers several times so it was very disruptive since our computers would shut down. Management then said no coffee allowed in the office at all. We lost four very good engineers.

24.

Worked in construction as part of a HSE team. The chief engineer was p***ed that the job was taking slower because of the HSE (especially safety) procedures. We had a couple lost time incidents at this point and just a week before a guy almost died, but he was still pretty p***ed about the delays so he got everyone in a room to say:You're not here to do your jobs. You're here to do what I tell you to do.20 people asked to quit on the spot. F**king c**t.

25.

Years ago I worked at a chain salon (my last ever I swear). There was about 14 of us plus my boss. Half of us were really good, very passionate about what we do, 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 ranking ones 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’s 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.

26.

ICE contacted the in-house temp service, questioning them about illegal workers. Over 20 people mysteriously disappeared at lunch time. A couple months later most of them were back, with different names.

27.

School district I sometimes sub in 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.

28.

company changed from 5-8 hour shifts to a 12 hour shift rotation.edit: most of the people that quit were the ones that were on straight day shift and didn't want to or couldn't work night shifts.

29.

I had worked at a grocery store for about 3 years before moving from Courtesy Clerk (basically bagger + custodian) to Helper Clerk (stocker). The grocery department wanted to save costs on personnel, but couldn't fire anyone or lay anyone off due to the union. So they started cutting back hours and literally told us "when someone quits, everyone else will get more hours."We were supposed to be 40-hour employees and they had us at 32 hours. 2 people quit and we were down to 24 hours. A third person quit, down to 16 hours. I don't know what their plan was, but they didn't give us more hours as people left.

30.

They tried to make us do a third straight 16 hour shift while telling us off we were taking too long.This was years ago as a basic box mover in a courier company. They cut their staff in half and still expected us to do the same amount of work. It got bad enough 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, our immediate supervisor of our team (about 10 of us) asked for the night off next week (christmas eve and most of us had family) and 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 in how they treated us, enough to pack in their jobs. They called within an hour and offered us all pay rises and actually hiring people to help with the workload. It didn't help, they 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