I'm a Software Engineer and I take on contract gigs usually. So the story starts with a random company where I was on a contract, been there for a few months, few more months left on my contract, and things are generally smooth sailing, well until Karen decided to institute “time tracking” for everyone.
Karen at this company is the head of some nebulous department in the forest of upper management and oversees our department. She was there before the company brought in a tech department and generally sees us as the IT guys who don't contribute to the business (even though our dept helped bring in like $10M+/yr in business).
One day we get notified that the company is instituting “detailed time tracking”, basically a piece of software that runs on your machine and lets management know if you're at your desk. Most apps will just see if you're generally active but this app only tracked your time when you had certain applications open, namely Outlook and Excel (since that's what most of the “business side” ran on).
I immediately brought this up to Karen, letting her know that developers don't use Excel or Outlook in our workflows so our time on those apps would be very low and misleading. Her response was one of the dumbest professional responses I've ever gotten in corporate: “well tough luck, guess you guys are going to actually have to start working now”. This was all around the time where 'NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE' was all the rage in the culture war.
Well it didn't take long for things to go to complete shit. Within a week our entire team was getting pulled into meetings about our “excess PTO and lack or work ethic”. Somehow Karen gaslit everyone into thinking we were slacking even though I recall being on a phone call with one of the people there (“oh he must have gotten on just for that call” is what Karen had to say about it).
I knew the writing was on the wall and I started talking to recruiters to secure another contract. Ended up finding a tech company that needed to hire an entire team to build something that was very similar to what we were currently building. With coordination from other co-workers, we all left that company and collectively gutted their tech department as well as people who knew how that stuff worked.
The last talk I had with Karen was her threatening to sue all of us for leaving in the middle of our contracts. And IIRC the last thing I said to her is: “hmmm, I thought
PS: Linkedin shows she was canned soon thereafter, though they seemed to have salvaged their tech.