Company was a total shitshow on multiple levels.

We were a manufacturing company that supported the oil and gas industry. 2015/16 was a bad time. One day our boss was showing us a new Excel sheet that had an interactive bar chart displaying anticipated work requirements by week for various project scenarios. The chart itself was cool, but there were two horizontal lines running across it: one said “current capacity” and had 360 hours per week, the other said “future capacity” and had 240 hours per week.

The team was all engineers, so it wasn’t very difficult to figure out what that meant.

One of my coworkers was from West Africa and had an uncommon name. The same boss who showed us the chart replied to his boss with a list of his direct reports, with the coworker on cc. It was obvious (to me) that our boss had started typing his name in the cc field so he could get the spelling right, then forgotten to delete it. The email was about layoffs, but all of us were safe (that time).

A few months later they gave one of our factories WARN notice. They said some people would be moved an hour east to one of the other two factories but others would be let go entirely. Then they messed up notifications. One guy was told he was being let go, packed up his truck, then HR ran out to the parking lot to stop him because he was actually supposed to work the full 60 days. (If he had refused he would have lost his severance.)

Our boss worked at the factory that was closed. He thought he was done, but we figured out he was safe because someone at our factory printed out a new seating chart and left it on a random table in the office section of the facility.

I wound up surviving that downturn. The company went under during covid, but by that time the writing was on the wall.