In Dec 2021, the company (Sorenson/CaptionCall) was sold to a "cashout firm." The first thing they did was to change the quarterly bonus to annual with a 25% cut. Then they gutted the company by laying off well over 50% of the employees (it was something like 70% in total, but I'm unsure) over three layoffs in the same year. We lost a lot of great people. In the engineering group, we lost half of the programmers and most of QA. Then, they eliminated the bonuses.
Managers that should never have been promoted because of incompetence were kept; whereas, managers who were proven successes were booted because they were not DEI counts.
The teams were forced into tools that were popular but buggy at the time (Jira -- highly configurable, but buggy), and IT was almost completely gutted and replaced with one cloud after another. It was insane. We went from Surround to a local Git to Bitbucket to Github. More of IT quit.
What made it worse was that we used to work together, but "everyone" wanted to continue to work remotely. We used to "pal around" and lean over cubical walls to collaborate or shoot Nerf pellets. Then, we went from email to chat to groups and Zoom to Teams. No one turned on their cameras; no one saw each others' faces. A voice pipe -- that's all. So very easy to get up in arms over something small when communications are minimized.
It was disheartening. Last I heard, some of our management were demoted, and morale is down lower than when I left. They are good people but in a bad state in fear of more layoffs.
You'll note that I rated "diversity and inclusion" with 5 stars. *That's not good* -- especially when competence takes second or third chair.
