Yep. That was the organization exodus for my last job. Without any warning or planning, a state government agency, demanded everyone come back first week June 2021 when not a single other state office was even considering it. It was way out of left field and threatened to completely fuck up many people's lives and there was a mass exodus. Staff left agency wide. I think it was somewhere around 300 employees of a several thousand. Which may not seem like that much, but when 300 people quit in one agency over the course of two weeks, it's extremely noticable lol. The leadership at the top got berated publicly by the governor and they had to reverse course to stop people from leaving. But hey, I got a promotion, a huge raise, and got to demand my telework schedule because I instantly became more important hahaha.

The next exodus was my specific division. The deputy director we all liked and the media relations manager we all liked were fired out of nowhere by the same agency leadership that fucked up in the telework debacle. They placed their own drones in the two spots and it absolutely decimated morale. Not to mention the stool pigeons they selected are two of the most incompetent people I've ever had the displeasure of working with. I took a high-paying job with a federal contractor and bounced. Four people left in the few months following. They hired new people, two of which left within three months. I still talk to the social media manager who's still there and she fills me in on all the bullshit they're continuing with. Out of a public affairs division of 14 people, there's only six still there that were there when I left last September.

Yup, mine too. We had developers in two different cities, with a few other roles in a third city. We had actually had some significant improvements in how collaborative we could be thanks to going remote-first over the pandemic.

Then a new company buys us out and decides that collaboration can't happen without being in a physical room together. Never mind that we're still not in the same room because...different cities. That, plus pay "rises" that came in at a maximum of 3% at a time when inflation is like 7.6%, and came in 6 months late. Plus multiple rounds of layoffs.

Over the 12 months before I left the company, more than 50% of the software development team's years of experience had already left. And more have gone since I did.