Double-bind, abusive supervision/workplace bullying, and intermittent reinforcement framework - Sr. Engineer ROSS VIDEO Employee Review

There is so much to say that it is difficult to know where to begin. I joined this company believing that an organization with such a long history would have strong processes, sound management, and a well-established structure. My experience was the opposite. Before my final role, I had already been selected twice for other roles in different teams and departments. I declined those offers for personal reasons. Later, I received a third offer, and that opportunity came through a recommendation from upper management. I also completed the background check without any issue. I mention this because it is important context: the problem was not my qualifications, my background, being a good fit, or my ability to be hired by the company. I had previously written a review describing a toxic culture and poor management, and it received a public response from company leadership. I then contacted the CEO directly and explained, briefly, politely, and professionally, what had happened. I received a reply and removed my earlier review, because my goal was not simply to criticize the company, but to point to a serious problem in the hope that it would actually be addressed. I am writing this review now because, from what I experienced afterward, nothing was resolved. On the contrary, I found the same issues across different teams and under different managers. That made me feel a moral obligation to revisit my decision to remove the earlier review and to write a stronger one now, because the same patterns appeared in multiple places rather than in just one isolated team. It also gave the impression that the company culture problem is systemic. When the same behaviours appear across teams and management layers, it no longer feels like a matter of one difficult manager or one dysfunctional group. Another concern is the way the company presents itself publicly. If you set aside the very short 5-star reviews, many of which appear to come from co-op students, the overall rating would likely look much lower. If you spend time in the office, you also notice a visible pattern: there seem to be many co-op students and many very long-term employees, but much less of a middle layer in between. To me, that suggested a churn-based environment, where constant hiring and firing creates the appearance of growth rather than healthy long-term retention. The concerns other reviewers described were the same ones I personally experienced: - hostile, stressful, and psychologically unsafe management practices - extreme micromanagement and constant scrutiny, - tense, frustrated, and unprofessional communication, syncs that felt like interrogations and required overly elementary explanations, bullying, - employees who wanted to do their work properly, while management acted as the main bottleneck, - unrealistic performance expectations, - company values that did not match day-to-day reality, These were the patterns I noticed across teams. Within teams, I also noticed repeated employee behaviours that seemed less like isolated personality issues and more like learned or top-down responses to a toxic environment. In my experience, the toxicity did not feel accidental. It felt structured, reinforced, and managed. It is also true that work and behaviour were heavily tracked and micromanaged. To be fair, I did not notice HR problems during the initial hiring process itself. What I did notice later was that management and HR sometimes presented narratives about employees and decision-making that did not align with the actual timeline of events, furthermore, management was fabricating facts about employees. For example, HR referred to my departure as a difficult decision they had to make, even though that decision had apparently been made while HR was on vacation and by the manager alone. Experiences like that made it feel as though people were being given explanations that were inaccurate and insulting to their intelligence. If the AI was used to micromanage, it probably hallucinated. In my view, the reason Ross products are sometimes seen as lower quality or unnecessarily sloppy is not because the company lacks capable people or talent. It is because the organization does not seem capable of sustaining and retaining that talent in a healthy way.