The company's headed for an external audit, so my manager asked everyone to clean up slack and discord history. Risque memes, dirty jokes, etc all had to go. This already left a bad taste in my mouth, because it feels like we're just sanitizing everything for inspection without actually addressing any underlying issues. Which is supposedly the point of getting audited.
Then one of my coworkers asked if text chains needed to be deleted as well. I think he was trying to be sarcastic, as in do you really want us to go through this shit instead of doing our jobs.
Manager calls his bluff. Says yes, anything from the past three years has to be vetted. He then asked us to give him our phones- he would go through them to delete red flag conversations while we cleaned up chat history on other platforms.
Here's the thing, we don't have work phones. So my boss just asked me to hand over my personal cell phone so he could go through all my texts.
I'm like 'this ain't happening'. You want to pay me to censor slack? Sure, I don't use that outside of work, nuke it for all I care. But my phone stays on me.
Manager goes red. Starts ranting about how he's trying to pull all our asses out the fire. He sees nobody's really making eye contact with him. So he points at me, says that if I want to risk all of our jobs, that's on me. Walks away in a huff.
The other guys in my department grumble a bit, but then everyone ultimately agrees we should delete everything off their phone, slack, etc.
I'm honestly just sad that management pissed away this company. I thought it was a pretty cool gig when I started, more creative freedom even though I'm getting paid a lot less than if I was working at AMD or some shit. But it looks like the end of the line. The CEO supposedly walked out of a meeting saying 'I can't be here for this' when the talking heads wanted to launch an 'internal investigation' ahead of the external audit. Turns out this means we're supposed to internally 'inspect' our own texts and chat. Welp, writings on the wall. Time to dust off my resume.