I received an email from a friend this morning that said "Look, look I used to work here".
My friend also knew that I didn't have a very good experience myself some years back in a similar situation: a British company taken over by an American company.
I'm generally a nice guy and I would like to say something nice about people but I cannot say something pleasant about those people.
Not so much on a personal level (I'm sure they were lovely with their families and friends) but the way they behaved in the workplace.
They introduced the philosophy of "we are in charge and you know nothing".
They were also very paranoid about people meeting and talking, worried about what emails were sent and received, hinting that people should not have left London on weekends and Bank Holidays "in case the company needs you". They were also very abrupt in a way we were not used to. Generally they were stressed and tense, it was like everything was a matter or life and death, everything was so important.
They cut down staff to the point that we were all doing an average of ten hours a day but they got annoyed when you mentioned that you wanted to take some annual leave. The thing we did not work harder, in actual fact as the amount of meeting sort of tripled we did less work. Meetings were not a democratic process as they used to be but more like presentations where you could ask questions at the end. As people were always in a hurry to leave, nobody asked any questions so it was always a one-way process. So I left...

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