In 2022, the company was not performing well. In North America, they proceeded to hire a new suite of completely unqualified self-important narcisists to extremely bloated salaries under the auspices of an "investment" by Wipro. That new leadership regime made the quick assessment that the vast majority of the talent was no good and that the best way forward was to micro-manage and minimize anything that was ever uttered by that talent on the ground. They deployed a poorly-thought-through, but self-protecting action plan:
First, they expected their mere presence would turnaround the business -- which of course it did not through a series of bold LinkedIn announcements.
Second, they proceeded to blame the talent and began the first of many waves of layoffs.
Third, they shamelessly updated the PTO policy to give themselves ("leaders") unlimted PTO (which they enjoy lavishly), and reduce the PTO of the remainder of team members from 20-25 days/yr to 16. The strategy boils down to -- we will only be successful with competitive top leadership talent, so we need to reward and retain them, but we have to admit we are a body shop and don't actually need to retain our workers.
Several years later, the existing "leaders" still enjoy their fat paychecks (in the 200-300k+ range) and fancy titles. Nearly all top talent has left, completing the self-fulfilling prophecy of "we have bad people so we should treat them like incompetent goons they are".
