There is only one right way to assemble a well-functioning mechanism - and thousands of ways to break it. The situation is exactly the same with almost any company - after all, incompetent management will always find a way to lose not only the work momentum, but also key employees - sometimes even all of them.

There are some cases when management, for one reason or another, is left with just two options - either back off or start bankruptcy proceedings. We must admit neither option is among the most pleasant, but the second one, in any case, looks much worse.

We recently told how a company's new bosses massively fired employees, hoping they would return for a lower salary - but they all refused. There is also a popular Reddit thread where people talk about a wide variety of reasons which caused mass employee quitting. Over 59.2K upvotes and around 13.5K comments prove the topic is really burning.

Bored Panda put together a curated list with the weirdest and most popular reasons why people resign en masse. Now feel free to read to the very end, watch, comment - and we do hope you'll never have to face any of the reasons listed below.

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#1 Half Of The Company Got Laid Off With No Warning

They laid off half the company with no warning. This included a gentleman who was less than a year from retirement and had been there for 35+ years. The company was shocked when half the remaining people abandoned ship shortly thereafter.

#2 Owner Canceled Raises And Bonuses For Everyone Except His Relatives

Canceled all raises and bonuses for everyone except the CEO, his wife (financial and HR), and his son (utterly useless IT) in a year where we have record profits and brought in almost double the clients on top of announcing they aren't looking to hire more people when we were already overwhelmed. Good part about it was when the majority of us quit they lost almost every single client shortly afterwards to their competitors and the company is now defunct.

#3 Workers Were Overwhelmed And The Owner Did Not Want To Hire More Help

I did landscape construction. The cheap a*s owner kept taking bigger and bigger projects while never hiring more help. We were all overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious as h**l. One of our foreman quit and I followed suit a few days later. Two more guys quit the next day. He was down to three guys for the obscene amount of work he wanted to do. Of course everything gets way behind schedule but he's convinced it's not his fault at all. He went out of business less than a year later.

#4 Owner Was Keeping The Social Security Money Taken From Employees' Paychecks

Turned out our owner was keeping the social security money taken from our paychecks. And yes, he was caught.

#5 Bosses Framed A Manager Which Caused A Domino Effect For The Whole Staff

I was hired by the new owners to replace the existing manager. I was under the impression that he was moving on to another job somewhere. So after about 4 days I ask him where he's headed and if he's excited. He just looks blankly at me and says "I'm not going anywhere. I'm just training you as the assistant manager, right?". The look I gave him must have been a great tip off because he got up and walked into one of the new owners offices. After about 30 seconds they were screaming at each other, then he just storms out of the office, grabs his stuff, give me the finger, and leaves. Over the next few days I'm trying to calm things with the employees. They're not faulting me, but now have a very bad taste in their mouths about the new ownership. Over about a 7-10 day time period my team shrank from 15 people down to 3. I hobbled along with that the best I could while we tried to hire new people, but the new owners were offering so little we had trouble finding people. After 3 months or so of that I started to get fed up and overwhelmed and when the owners started to get on me about missed deadlines I had had it. We were still only at 5 people, 2 of which were brand new and still training. They didn't allow me to refuse work or push deadlines out, they expected the same output as a 15 person team. So after my third day in a row of being berated for missing a deadline that was impossible to make, I quit.

#6 Bosses Awarded Sales Team With A Paid Vacation, Neglecting Other Departments

Worked at a data-company. The guys in the sales department f**ked around all day. They'd literally be in the parking lot drinking beer and racing RC cars. When it came to handling accounts/clients, they frequently gave away free accounts in order to "retain" customers (and make their own sales numbers look good), and somehow they got away with it. Meanwhile, there were dozens of programmers and database nerds working tirelessly behind the scenes to integrate a bunch of complicated data and make it easy to access via the website. Yearly holiday announcements come around, and upper management decides to send the entire sales team to Hawaii for an all-expense-paid vacation. When the furious developers asked why they were just taking the sales team, the confused CEO literally said "Well.. I mean... I guess we could ask the sales team to pick one person from each department who helped them the most this year, and take them too..." The programmers/engineers/database people were livid, and walked out in droves. Gee, I wonder why the company tanked.

#7 Bosses Had A Plan For Employees Training Their Own Replacements

They called everyone into a major company meeting and informed us we were all (except for sales and managers) being offshored to India and the Philippines. They had a plan for us training our replacements that, strangely, didn't account for pre-schedule turnover. People started finding jobs literally the next week and the hemorrhaging never stopped.

#8 The New Owner Started To Implement Cost Cutting Measures

The owner died and his idiot son took over and decided that the company didn't make him enough money and started to implement "cost cutting" measures like turning off the A/C in the building.

#9 CEO Hired His Wife For A Very High Salary

I worked for a company that had gone through a restructure, we put so much work into salvaging our company (and jobs). After announcing the "restructure complete!" (Think GWB on an aircraft carrier deck) the CEO hired his wife as the second highest paid person in the company. She had previously been a nursing assistant and was a complete loser. She was having people with PhD and MBA degrees reporting in to her saying things like "This is what a budget looks like." and my all-time favorite "no, marketing does not necessarily mean TV commercials." Like, what the f***? At the time she was making ten times what I was making and I was doing work she didn't even remotely understand. It was such a farce. Half the engineering team and a huge portion of sales simply quit. She was trying to explain why not getting a bonus was, in and of itself, a bonus. The top 3 salespeople simply walked out of the meeting, cleaned their desks and left. I knew then we were screwed and quit a couple of weeks later.

#10 Boss Called An Employee An "Expendable Piece"

The boss went off on a tirade on me for something that wasn’t my fault and I got him to scream “people like you are expendable pieces in this company and I can replace you tomorrow if I wanted to”. 80% of the engineers quit the next day. Simply didn’t show up. Including me. From what I know, the entire project folded because my now ex boss couldn’t find people to replace us because no one wanted to do the kind of work he was looking for at the salary he was paying.

#11 Restaurant Lost 4 Cooks On Super Bowl Sunday Due To Managerial Fault

Oh f*****g boy I worked at Buffalo Wild Wings for a few years as a line cook. Two different stores, same f*****g pay. It was the type of work where you ask for a raise and they scoff and say “yeah, me too.” Anyways, I had been pretty dead set on quitting sooner or later, our kitchen was very small. Most people ended up closing 4-5 days a week with doubles on the weekends, while still attending school full time as it was a college town. On SUPER BOWL f*****g SUNDAY, a useless coworker who ducked out in the bathroom most the shift finally stops showing, and in response the managerial staff delegated closing to my pal J. Dude was a f*****g delight to be around, hands down the best coworker ever. J had told them that due to being a full time student, he no longer wanted to be first in last out (4pm-12am, 1am on the weekends). They basically told him to go f*** himself, and that they don’t have any more shifts for him. Immediately, me and one other cook walked to the office and quit on the spot. Buffalo wild wings lost 4 cooks on Super Bowl Sunday, leaving them with 7 full time students on the schedule. It was a managerial s**t show.

#12 Restructuring Of The Way Employees Were Paid

Restructure of the way we're paid. What I used to do involved about 40% client interaction, 20% team/coworker interaction, and 40% paperwork and case coordination stuff. Based on what we do that means only 40% of the time is technically billable, and there are really sticky rules for what is and isn't billable. So, logically, we were being paid on a salary model. Cue management saying we can only make money for the time we have that is actually billable. 1/4th of the department quit. Two of us on the same day.

#13 Store Manager Didn't Honor The Two Week Notice

I worked at McDonald's back in high school. I was taking off for college at the end of the summer and put my 2 week notice in so I could get August off and actually enjoy it before I had to move away for school. The Store Manager decided to just not put me on the schedule any more, which I discovered on the last weekend I was in to work. So instead of having those two weeks, I was just done. I decided, at lunch rush that day, that if they weren't going to honor the notice, I wasn't going to honor the 8 hour shift. At about noonish, right after the breakfast crew had left, I was done. The thing was, most of the crew that day were also going off to college and saw what the manager had done. So they f**ked off with me. In the middle of lunch rush, the store was down to the old-a*s lady who worked drive-thru, and the manager on duty. That's it. The rest of us walked out. 2 cashiers, 3 grill workers.

#14 New Director Made Complaining Staff Quit

I was working for a very large IT company, before the tech bubble burst we had a meeting with our "new director and the VP" They were tired of people complaining about things that should be changed at the job and how they managed people. So they sat around 200 of us down in our auditorium, and the director said she didn't want to hear anymore complaints on how she was running things and if we didn't like then there was the door and that there was no way we'd leave such a great job. Well there was a mass exodus and probably close to 50 people left within 2 months. She and the VP were "re-orged" and given 0 reports, they were gone after a round of layoffs happened shortly after.

#15 Chief Engineer Wanted People To Neglect Safety Rules To Speed Up Work Process

Worked in construction as part of a HSE team. The chief engineer was p***ed that the job was taking slower because of the HSE (especially safety) procedures. We had a couple lost time incidents at this point and just a week before a guy almost died, but he was still pretty p***ed about the delays so he got everyone in a room to say: You're not here to do your jobs. You're here to do what I tell you to do. 20 people asked to quit on the spot. f*****g c**t.

#16 Manager Refused To Give Time Off An Employee Had Requested Beforehand

I used to work at a McDonald's, and we had a terrible manager who hated a lot of people working there. Everyone else hated him too, but no one wanted to call him out on his s**t and quit. I was the first to do it, because I requested 2 weeks off in August of that year, about 3 months in advance (my family likes to plan our summer vacations early-on). When August came around he had my schedule set up for all of August off except for those specific 2 weeks. There was no way that he could have misinterpreted my request. When I got my schedule, I stormed into the restaurant, called him out on everything, and then quit on the spot. About 2 weeks after that, I heard from one of my work friends that 5 other people had enough and quit as well. I kind of felt good to be the first.

#17 New Manager Created A Toxic Work Environment

Worked at a Wendy’s and one of the regional managers started running a store because they couldn’t/wouldn’t find new managers to replace the old ones. Well anyways this guy practically ran the place into the ground. Before he started running the store most everyone liked working there as it was a good environment. A few months after, a couple of people quit because of him. And one day I roll in at 9 to help open the store and he comes out to my car as soon as I park (I was 15 minutes early and usually just sat in my car until 9) and tells me, “hey I need to to start early because the three openers just quit on me”. We manage to get the store open and had a number of people from other stores help run the place until the people from the next shift came in. A couple days later I hear the full story of what happened from a coworker. The regional manager is supposed to be at the store at 7 or so, and the openers 30 minutes later. He didn’t actually show up until 8:30. So when the openers, already [angry] at being at work really early and not being on the clock, saw the regional manager roll in and knew it was gonna be an awful shift all decided that they were done with him and just quit right there. So at least 6 people quit because of him by the time I left the place. Probably more left after me.

#18 Administrator Used To Forge Employees' Signatures

Several years ago I worked in a mental health center. We worked primarily with kids. It was time for the center to renew their certification. Instead of keeping up with everything that needed to be done over the course of 5 years, the proper procedures were ignored. In this couple months before recertification, administration made us sit through a ridiculous amount of training on Things that would have been covered in training such as HIPAA laws and identifying child abuse. Then came our paperwork. Our center encouraged us to do things that aren’t exactly covered by Medicaid or approved through certification. For example taking kids to the park isn’t allowed, but guess where they instructed us to take these kids so they didn’t disturb the therapists working? I had to go back and edit 5 months worth of documents to get rid of the evidence. The kicker was that bathrooms were supposed to have a log of when it was cleaned. An administrator perfectly forged the signatures of multiple employees. I don’t think they would have went through that trouble just for a bathroom log. What else were they forging our signatures on? The potential risk of being charged with Medicaid fraud was too high for me. I quit as did many others. Editing to ad: I did report them to the authorities. Shockingly they are still in business. I did what I had to to cover my a*s.

#19 Manager Found Themselves Out Of Cashiers After Firing A Scamming One

I’m the manager of a retail store and I had found out a cashier was ‘ ‘stealing’ product by scamming reward card benefits. I came up with a detailed incident report to present to this employee and I was under the assumption it was just her. After I confronted her in a reasonable manner she freaked out and got really angry and quit on the spot. She was using fake accounts instead of using a customers reward card to get herself points and redeem them for product/gift cards. So the customers weren’t getting the points they are owed which is a headache for me if they notice and complain. The next day every other cashier called me and quit and after thinking [why?] just happened I found out they were all in on it and were using this lady’s fake card on their shifts too. So I’m down four cashiers and I have one left. This same day my last remaining cashier disappeared for twenty minutes. Turns out she was in the bathroom with another employee doing the nasty. She quits because her dad is a cop and doesn’t want to find out she got fired for this and she also asked me if she should go to urgent care because she didn’t take her tampon out before they did it and she couldn’t find it. The guy also quit because he ‘didn’t care and was moving anyway’ . I was down to literally managers only. So the first part is the mass exodus and the last part was just for ‘can you believe this s**t?’

#20 Management Stopped Providing Free Coffee For The Staff

We stopped providing free coffee, and we're so cheap that we sold our coffee maker. This was in Seattle, so a couple of people bought their own coffee makers to put in their cubes. That tripped the breakers several times so it was very disruptive since our computers would shut down. Management then said no coffee allowed in the office at all. We lost four very good engineers.

#21 Boss Tried To Make Employees Work Overtime Unpaid

Our boss had a meeting and announced new policy that all salaried employees had to work a minimum of 45 billable hours per week because of the increased project load we had. I pointed out to a few co-workers that our employment contracts specified 37.5 hours per week, and that I would be adhering to that policy. Well, about a week later I was "laid off" due to lack of projects. Ha. I was happy to go, and at least 2 others left voluntarily within the week. The job I found next was much better, and wasn't run by someone quite so clueless about how to treat people.

#22 Managers Did Not Offer Condolences After Their Colleague Passed Away

A well known colleague committed suicide and we were told by management via a brief side note in an email about stats at the end of the day. It caused a lot of upset in the office and quite a few people didn't return after this.

#23 New Management Changed The Vibe Of The Workplace

New management. In a month, four kitchen staff quit, leaving me to be the only original kitchen staff hire from the previous manager. She completely changed the vibe of the work place. No one was happy. No one felt like talking or listening to music or being friendly. It was robotic.

#24 Bosses Bought Air Mattresses To Make Employees Stay In The Office At Night

They bought air mattresses so employees wouldn’t have to leave to go home during a classically busy season. Mass exodus after that.

#25 Company Changed From 5 Or 8-Hour Shifts To A 12-Hour Shift Rotation

company changed from 5-8 hour shifts to a 12 hour shift rotation. edit: most of the people that quit were the ones that were on straight day shift and didn't want to or couldn't work night shifts.

#26 Chiefs Only Wanted To Hire Their Employees' Relatives

School district I sometimes sub in had a BIG round of hiring. A bunch of building substitutes applied for the jobs, and only about half of them got interviews. Of the subs that got interviews (myself included), the only one who made it past the screening interview was a relative of a current employee. The rest of us subs weren't the "right fit." The real reason is that there's a substitute shortage and they don't want to lose any of us. Not a single sub (who isn't a relative) was hired for one of over a dozen teaching jobs. Many of the building subs aren't coming back next year.

#27 Company Used To Hire Illegal Workers

ICE contacted the in-house temp service, questioning them about illegal workers. Over 20 people mysteriously disappeared at lunch time. A couple months later most of them were back, with different names.

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