zlacker

>>dale_h+(OP)
Pointy-haired boss: "According to the anonymous online employee survey, you don't trust management. What's up with that?"

<Dilbert looks back with a blank stare>

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Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.

>>CSMast+hf
I actually had this happen back in high school. The teacher gave us “anonymous” surveys to gauge her performance. She analyzed the handwriting to determine which one was mine. I actively tried to change my handwriting as well, but I guess not well enough. I’ve never trusted a survey was actually anonymous after that.

>>al_bor+Dh
I worked at a startup (that is still a startup going nowhere 12 years later) where the ceo and cto made a big show of the town hall and in particular the “open questions” part. Anyone could go on a little internal app, ask an “anonymous” question, and they’d answer all of this week’s questions each week.

In reality, they cherry picked the questions that they wanted to talk about and ignored the hard ones. We could tell because all asked questions were publicly visible in the app. But not all answered “ah we’re out of time”

So I once posted a question about why were the interns unpaid while writing code we shipped in production. I posted this question just after the previous town hall so that it would stay visible in the app for the longest time until the next town hall and would also be top of the list of pending questions.

For a couple weeks they said they wanted to answer it but needed to ask clarification questions to make sure they understood correctly, so could please the asker reveal themselves as it’s only fair. I never said it was me and nobody said it was them either. They couldn’t just delete the question like they usually did with unanswered questions before as this had stirred quite a little storm between employees. And it would clash with the “we’re open and fair” koolaid they were serving us.

Eventually, they deleted the question without annswering it “since the asker doesn’t have the courage to reveal themselves” and I was laid off which was “totally unrelated to the question you asked”.

Before leaving I dumped the database for that app out of curiosity. You bet that every single question also had an entry of who asked which question. They knew all along.