Trade unionism springs to mind. If the hierarchy is broken, you've got to organise against it. Yes you can quit and join somewhere else, but if the behaviour is actually spreading then eventually you're going to run out of good employers to work for.

The only other thing is the company pushing an anti-bullying drive from the very top level with a shakeup of the management structure to break up any structures which keep the behaviour in place, but that's unlikely if the company believes that management bullying is either a non-issue or actively condones it (perhaps because they believe that the bullying behaviour keeps workers in line).

Get a new job, unfortunately.

I worked at a place where the CTO churned the entire staff twice in two years.

He was a pathetic asshole, came from a wealthy background and waltzed into the executive class. He got hired and fired me so he could hire his friends. ( Which was honestly a good call, they needed a senior angular developer and I was a DevOps / Back-end engineer making it work. ) But what he said when he fired me has stuck with me ever since: "We have a different definition of what quality is. You no longer work here."

I have excelled at most of the jobs I have held. This dude's rudeness absolutely blew my mind.

He still works there. I'm sure he is doing well. The executive class never pay for their mistakes, only us lowly workers.

All true. The only winning move is not to play (quit)

Bullying in most cases is a business strategy.

See also Amazon. I’ve heard too many stories and seen it first hand (it didn’t work on me, but they sure tried).

I’m pretty worried about the future of software in Seattle. So many new grads learning bad habits and then moving on to other companies. It’s a lot to unlearn.

My college friend told me about his terrible experience working in Amazon AWS. This was not a developer position and he has degrees from major universities and solid prior experiences. The experience was so degrading he quit after a few months and took some time off to recoup. He is now much happier working somewhere out of tech industry.

I wish Amazon had a better way for teams or projects to fail gracefully. Part of the companies strategy/competitive advantage is the ability to quickly spin up new projects/teams in a decentralized way. However, that also means lots will fail -- which is fine. But then for the individual managers on those teams, they often become stressed, toxic, and bully their subordinates.

Yeah I meant to point out that the form of bullying seems to be shame based rather than intimidation. But I count them both as bullying.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words hurt the worst.

They must run through a lot of people? I get several recruiting e-mails from them a week.

Can you provide more details about how it didn’t work for you? Just want to learn how you handled it

You keep a file with all the bullying (dates, emails, anyone else in the room, etc). Collect all that then plan your exit. During your exit interview explain the bullying and give them a copy of the file. Be polite and professional.

You’ll be burning bridges, but you don’t wanna go back.

Let’s be frank, quite often not only do HR know, they’ve been actively protecting these people for years.

I realize that. What they may not know is how many people have left directly because of that bad manager.

>During your exit interview explain the bullying and give them a copy of the file.

If it gets to the point where I'm quitting because of it, why would I bother giving them the record of evidence? Why would I want to improve the organization that I am leaving?

Put explicitly, if the work culture is such that I don't have reasonable avenues to improve the situation without quitting (e.g. via HR and skip level), then I really don't care to help them out when I've given up hope for them. If they want to improve, they should set it up such that the only way to improve is by employees quitting. People usually don't quit capriciously. It's a tough decision, and a lot of work to find a desirable alternative job. I don't want to give them charity on my way out, especially if they've wasted a significant amount of my off-work time looking for a job.

Maybe you like some of your co-workers, or maybe you just want to leave a better situation for the next person. Some folks just don't like entropy.

Frankly, I don't think it would do any good at all anyway. HR will just ignore it, and some damn fool might decide to call you a troublemaker later on. HR does love its status quo.

I think this is only worth doing if you plan to stay and you are willing to make an effort to get the person fired. If you have already moved on it smacks of taking revenge and can have career downsides.

>> can have career downsides.

Not really. If they are indeed a psychopath - you'll definitely find support from other people who understand their dysfunction. They'll be happy to support you next time as you were the one to call them up on that.

I suppose you could leave a review somewhere like GlassDoor? You're not allowed to single out bosses, but detailing the culture could help someone else from making the same mistake, and can force the company to change their ways if it's preventing them from hiring good people.

Leak video evidence. This is only going to keep getting worse unless we make examples out of them.

Two party audio recording laws need to be repealed. Especially in the #metoo era. People need to be able to document abusive or illegal behavior without breaking the law.

How does a company prevent it? Don't promote bullies to management. If it's true that it hurts performance, then it's irrational even from a self-interested business perspective, and you are just shooting yourself in the foot.