My job is pretty good benefits and pay wise, and the work has been really interesting and pretty doable. I work in some business development stuff. But as our team started getting better, other departments started asking for more and more “help”. And our managers, eager to look good, kept accepting the work and piling it all down to the team. Still, our team was pretty good at saying no and maintaining a fair workload.
But the last year there's been a change. There's a new senior of the company and he's an ex military drill instructor, and you can fucking tell. The problem now, is that if you say you can't do something or if something goes wrong (even accidentally) and it's “your fault”, you'll be met by being screamed at by the new boss for 15 minutes of a meeting. I mean SCREAM, man can get red in the face from rage, he'll cuss you out, he'll ask rhetorical questions and tell you to shut up if you try to answer. He's so cruel, he has literally called people idiots, pathetic, cowards, pigheaded, babies, etc. And this could literally be over not replying to emails within 24 hours which might have caused a miscommunication. And there always has to be someone at fault. I remember a manager in a different team once refusing to name which employee put in an entry wrong and instead the manager got rinsed even harder. My managers do not do the same, and they've caved so hard to the new boss and keeps promising increasingly unrealistic goals without any level of guidance.
Recently there's been a suggestion that a few of us day jobbers (obvs never the managers or anyone senior ffs) should go oversee a night shift to better understand how it actually works (our job is partially to improve their systems too). I'm honestly not against it, but then it was discovered that they expected us to do our normal job, then do an entire night shift, then go back to work 9am the next day. So they want us to work effectively non-stop for almost 36 hours. I spoke up and said thats quite literally illegal in my country, and you guessed it – I got told off by managers for “not being proactive” and screamed at by the new boss for being “weak” and “egotistical”. I still stressed I would do the night shift and not come in the following day, and I just told how I'm a “disappointment” and how it “won't reflect well during the pay review”.
This attitude has trickled down through the department and it's started to become the way coworkers treat each other, which sucks so bad. Coworkers are scared of being the one targeted so they dob each other in. People are scared to ask questions because theres a decent chance you'll be told youre stupid or “should already know that”. And some asshole coworkers have I guess been emboldened and now start speaking like the new senior too. Just today a coworker asked me a question, I asked him to just clarify what he meant, and he huffed and went “fuck off then I'll figure it out myself”. I told him that was unfair and THEN the manager told ME to be professional and stick “on topic”.
This is my first job and I'm really thinking of leaving. It's difficult as my right to stay in the country is tied to my job, and I'm currently applying for residency, so I can't quit just yet. I'm just flabbergasted that so many people caved like tissue just because of one bad senior member. But a part of me (and every elder I have) tells me this is normal and a silly reason to leave. Should I just buck up and deal with it?