Re: Hummmm sounds familiar...
> " I refused to sign, and after much back and forth they decided to just declare that I had clearly read and understood the policies and had therefore signed them."
In a past life, I worked for a company where the head of the IT department was long on charisma and short on everything else - and as an added bonus, he'd brought several of his preferred cronies with him.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the next Big Project was something of a disaster; virtaully the entire department was pulled in, and there was crunch for the best part of a year all the way up to the final "you shall not pass" deadline, at which point something was deployed which vaguely looked like the intended result if you squinted a lot.
Some people did quite well out of this, since the crunch involved a lot of paid overtime. However, quite a few others were burnt out by the whole experience and decided that it was time to move on before the next debacle landed.
So in the face of this brain-drain, the head of the department decided that the best thing to do was not to improve things like pay or working conditions, but to instead increase the mandatory notice period to three months.
This was positioned as a way of giving people more job security, but it was pretty obviously aimed at making it harder for people to find new roles - a lot of new employers aren't going to want a three-month lag between interview and hire!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the brain drain drastically increased during the consultation period for this change of terms.
Entertainingly, while they handed out the new contracts to everyone, they never actually checked to confirm whether people signed them or not. Which does make me wonder what'd happen if anyone ever chose to challenge it.
(Equally, I have to ask: if someone wants to leave, is it really a good idea to make it harder for them to leave and/or make them stick around for longer? It's not like they're going to be enthusastic about their job...)
Oddly, the department head got unceremoniously booted a short time after this, as not even Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field would have been sufficient to cover up how much of a mess things had become. And his cronies all made some hasty calls and vanished nearly as quickly!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
