'They're freezing all raises and promotions': Upper management causes mass exodus during company meeting after announcing a hiring freeze

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Sep 10, 2025 8:00 AM EDT

Imagine logging into a company meeting and hearing that everything's going great, only to then hear that upper management is now freezing all pending raises and promotions for the next two quarters. Something about that duality does not exactly make any sense. 

For starters, if targets have been met and overall performance across the team has exceeded expectations, then why can't any of the hard-working employees who are responsible for that performance be properly rewarded for all that effort and achievement? It sounds like upper management is benefiting from everyone else's hard work, so why can't the people who are actually responsible for that success enjoys the fruits of their labor?

It's upsetting when bosses looking to be more frugal within the business choose to let employee validation be on the chopping block. You can't expect to keep your employees happy by dangling the prospects of pizza parties and happy hours for the rest of the year. In this day and age, the vast majority of people I know would happily say no to all those perks if it meant that they could get a well-deserved raise instead. 

It seems that many of these employees were in the process of advocating for those raises, so it's not as if these promotions didn't happen because people weren't fighting for their worth. It just so happened that upper management vastly underestimated how frustrated these employees were with their salaries. So when that announcement was made in that company-wide meeting, plenty of those employees were already prepared to leave their jobs in the dust. 

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  • "So they announced a freeze on all raises and promotions..."

    A young employee uses a laptop to talk to colleagues over Zoom while lying on a couch at home.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • You have to hand it to the iconic individual who boldly stood up for both himself and all the other employees on his team in the Q&A section of the Zoom meeting. He may not have had any legs to stand on at that point, but he didn't care. He knew what he was giving up and was prepared for the consequences. That's the energy all of us under-appreciated employees need to take with us into the final quarter of the year.

  • My buddy, a data scientist at one of those massive tech services firms, was just telling me about the all-hands call he had to sit through a couple weeks ago.
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  • They apparently went on and on about how the company is crushing it, posting record earnings and exceeding all targets. Then, in the next breath,
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  • the execs announced they're freezing all raises and promotions for at least the next two quarters.
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  • He said the Zoom Q&A section just exploded. It was a total dumpster fire of people calling them out. He was feeling pretty deflated about the whole thing.
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  • And then, some absolute legend typed: "What is the strategy for scaling the exit interview pipeline?"
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  • I told him he needs to find that person and buy them a drink. An icon.
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  • A young employee uses his laptop to talk to colleagues while working from home.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • googleflont • Personally, I think... From the top down, everyone is imagining how Al is going to eliminate the tier below them. And they just don't know what to do about it. Ultimately, they think they're going to wind
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  • up making a lot more money with a lot less people, but they don't know how to implement it and they don't know when it's coming. But no one imagines that their tier of management will be targeted.
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  • What we can imagine will happen, because we know how this happens, is a period of data collection while they model the behaviors of successful
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  • quarters. Then they'll think they can just put it in a can and cruise into the sunset... Which is the fundamental flaw of dealing with Al.
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  • McRachael23 22h ago • The exact opposite thing happened at my company. We are currently crushing it. Sales are through the roof. We were just told our yearly raises and Christmas bonus should be much higher than usual. Woohoo!
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  • RandomCoffeeTh... • 21h ago My company implemented a new system for our department, going on two years now, and the Al was supposed to streamline our jobs and maximize results.
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  • It's a separate function within the system. They talked it up so hard that it was going to do all of our easy work, and we'll be able to dig in on the stuff Al can't do. LOL... So far, every time
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  • they turn it on, it creates so much chaos that it sets us back by several months. I am hoping I can retire before they figure it out, because I see the writing on the wall. Once they figure it out, they are going to start cutting staff.
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  • AllyLB 19h ago • Al is going to be one of those things that will contribute to the downfall of society until people learn to use it as a tool for a human to use instead of a replacement for the whole human. In 2023, National Eating Disorders Association
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  • (NEDA) replaced its human- run helpline and switched to an Al chatbot. After just a few days, the Al was shut down due to widespread reports that it was providing
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  • harmful weight-loss and calorie-counting advice to users struggling with eating disorders. All of that, just to save some money and people ended up hurt.
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employment issues workplace-stories employee work stories toxic-workplace job work talesfromthejob overworked-employees company employment toxic-work-environment
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