For a little bit of background, I'm a software developer at a medium sized tech company (about 500 employees).
Recently we had our annual company strategy meeting. The C-level people and the department heads talked about the direction. As a person who does enjoy their job, myself and a bunch of my colleagues really were getting excited over the new plans and techs that we would be getting to work on. It was revealed that our CEO has some lofty expansion goals, a 4x revenue increase for the company by the end of the year.
At the end of the meeting, they had a Q&A session, during which someone asked if we would be hiring more developers to help undertake the extra workload that we would be getting due to these projects – there's no way that we can reasonably handle these new projects with our existing workload. Our CEO responded that we had all of the talent that we need in the call.
Someone else then immediately followed up asking what we can expect to get out of the extra workload that we would all be undertaking. Our CEO stated that we would be gaining some valuable knowledge/learning and career growth, and offered the “advice” that we should think about our current job as more than just a job, but rather as part of our careers, and that this information was something that we could market for ourselves in the future.
Immediately, the previous excitement we all had vanished, and the CEO kept talking like they didn't notice anything had changed. Needless to say, no one on my team got much work done that day, and instead vented and twiddled our thumbs at our keyboards for the majority of the day.
I'm still rather pissed by this meeting a couple of days later, so thanks for listening to my rant.