I just sent my resignation letter, which was rather short and template like, I wanted to mention in that letter so many things, but at the end I kept it simple and come here to went the rest.
After working nearly 20 years for many multinational corporations (IT field) I never experienced so rude and soulless behavior towards employees as my current (US) Employer do.
For comparison: I worked 9 years for a German then 6 years for a Japanese corporation, and the past two years for this American corp. I was the regional head of three offshore (software) production offices in south east Asia.
The first red flags popped up on my first day in this job when my line manager (COO) started with a rant about my predecessor who was “too soft”, and put employee above corp. interests. And this comes with a light threat of “He got fired, and I will make sure he not going to get other executive jobs ever” It was weird, but large corporations usually full with narcissist people so I moved on.
Since that day I fired 235 people with “re-structure” or similar BS as a reason, but the real reasons was:
– Employee maxed out the regional salary cap after X years, so let’s fire them and hire a fresh graduate for peanuts.
– Employee used all paid holidays, because real dedicated people not going on holidays.
– Employee refused to do unpaid OT (at least once a week until 1-2am) or refused to join daily stand-up zoom call 4-5AM with managers in California. (in Job Description the working hours: 9AM to 5PM)
– The rest is the annual “end year cleanup” fire the bottom 5% of employees by evaluation scores, and hire better people.
As I mentioned above, I worked for Germans and Japanese before, so I got use to high expectations and pressure. But both those employers had respect for the human beings working for them even in their south east Asian sweatshops. My former Japanese manager once said: “It so cheap to be generous in South East Asia, so let’s keep them happy”
The American corp. finished last year with over USD400 million profit, after they fired every production roles from the US offices and moving all production to offshore. But we are an IPO, so we have to beat last year numbers this year, so I got 2 things from upper management: they give me a 30% raise and a fat bonus and an order to reduce average operational expenses from USD2300/head to 1800, because “these are hard times”.
For clarification: the 2300 not the average salary of the employees, it’s the total cost/head include: Salary, office rent, benefits, bonuses, utilities…
The budget cut was almost my breaking point to resign, but the real trigger was yesterday when they asked me to find legal ways with our local law firm to terminate a pregnant employee in our Vietnamese office so “we can eliminate this ridiculous 6 months maternity leave once and for all”.
I’m full of regrets, playing along with them for two years, and being the overpaid execute. I’m not trying to wash myself from that, I just wanted to give you a snapshot how those well desired American corporations think about you the worker.