Management was still giving praise, but less frequently, and increasingly I was “walking on eggshells.” There was always a passive-aggressive undertone, fear of anticipated punishment for reasons that were not possible to avoid (because they made no sense), and boundary violation as I felt the need to “confess” and overshare to try to prevent them becoming paranoid. I had never met anyone as paranoid as management, and my adaptive response was to become as transparent as possible. A tendency to over-share to pre-empt anticipated punishment is something I still struggle with today. I was using my own credit card to pay for office equipment (to be clear, I was then reimbursed), as management never quite “got around” to getting me a company card (possibly true, possibly due to trust issues). Management’s value of “radical candour” increasingly seemed more like the controlling confession-mechanism within a cult than a shared value of intellectual honesty. On a later occasion, management smirked while saying something about “creating a cult on purpose” and reacted very badly (as if taking it personally) when I once described an investment target as “cult-like”. I do not really know how to interpret these incidents, but my intuition tells me there is something cult-like about how they used my values against me, and my research into cult psychology also brought up many parallels.
Furthermore, the nature of our one-on-one meeting sessions had changed. Management now used them to try to convince me that my quarterly feedback was wrong, and criticize me personally for what I had said about them. They tried to convince me that my sense of reality around various events was not correct, attacked the examples of patterns of behaviour they asked for, and then told me that “if you are not sure about what happened, ask me so that I can tell you”. They increasingly appeared to want me to over-ride my reality testing and accept whatever version of reality they gave me. There was limited focus on any kind of personal development, and when I tried to raise the topic they would belittle me. For example, I asked to attend some training to help with communicating clearly (context being intermittent deafness as a child) and they told me I did not need that, but then told me they wanted me to “learn to type quicker so that you can write down what I say better”.
Around this time, I went hiking with management and their family member, and management told me directly that they “lack empathy”. But I had observed them recognizing the emotional state of other people, and saw that they had sufficiently strong theory of mind to manipulate the behaviors of myself and others. I wanted to reassure them, and said “I don’t think it’s that” in what I thought was an encouraging tone. Their face went bright red, and they stormed off in what appeared to be suppressed rage. Their family member approached me and told me they “will find a way to get back at you for that.” I was confused by this because I thought I had been supporting them. In retrospect, they must have been referencing affective empathy, rather than cognitive (I was not aware of the difference at the time). Given the overall patterns of behavior I witnessed, their statement was likely accurate.
At some point during the year, management asked me to write a skills development plan. At the time, I was responsible for both operations and investments, and made clear to management that I wanted to focus on the investment side and move away from operations. Five investment roles could make sense: research analyst, risk manager, trader, portfolio manager, CIO. My preference was trader or portfolio manager, in line with my career aims and higher future income potential. However, there was no one else in the company, I was having to do all 5 roles, and given the resource constraints the primary value-add was asset allocation (the CIO function). I communicated accurately that if no other investment staff were hired, it was most well-aligned with the objectives of the company for me to develop an asset allocation rather than portfolio management or trader skillset. Therefore, I should work out what skills the “ideal CIO” had, and then try to develop these. If management hired a CIO at some point, I could move into my (preferred) portfolio manager role. Otherwise, I should grow into a CIO role, and maybe at some point that could be recognized formally if I proved myself (particularly given I was already de facto performing this role, contrary to my career goals). When we discussed this, management seemed to “freeze” in the meeting, abruptly becoming very tense and withdrawn.
After this, management told me out of the blue that they wanted me to see a career coach. While introducing us, they started acting like a victim, including infantile body language and voice tonality, as if I had been mistreating them. I found this disconcerting and bizarre. The things they said came out of nowhere, were inconsistent with reality, and were never discussed with me previously. The coach initially focused on these areas, but quickly appeared to conclude I had “improved” and they were resolved. Despite conflicts of interest, I would say the coach acted with integrity and honorably, threading the needle well in a difficult ethical situation (given a coach’s duty of care to me, as well as to management who was employing them). Over time, most of our sessions involved me discussing the unreasonable and abusive behavior of management, and receiving constructive advice in return. The coach had worked with management in the previous company for a long time, and increasingly revealed to me that the abusive patterns of behaviour I was describing had also been complained about by many people at the prior company. For example, being repeatedly placed in double binds.
I was becoming even more disturbed by the behavior of management, trying to understand it so I could model their psychology to try to predict their behavior and avoid punishment or triggering them. I searched for experiences of people at the prior company, finding a detailed post on Glassdoor. This appeared to have been written by someone (I do not know who) that had worked with management for a long time, at a senior level, naming them directly. The post claimed management was a “classic psychopath” and the author had become sickened by seeing them “tear down person after person.” This obviously concerned me, but I rejected the hypothesis of (primary) psychopathy, due to many observations inconsistent with this. However, based on my own experience and observations, the statement about “tearing down person after person” was likely accurate and seems to confirm a long-standing pattern of the abusive behavior that I also personally experienced and witnessed.
That review supports my belief I have a social duty to warn potential employees about management, because patterns of behavior that are consistent across time, companies, and people will most likely repeat in future. Such knowledge is necessary for informed consent, and to help those that choose to work with management set boundaries and protect themselves. Later, management talked about that review and said they had to “go on the attack,” following which the report was taken down (as well as other online warnings about management by people I do not know). Since all other warnings have been removed, I believe my social duty is even more binding, despite the retaliation I am facing.
Around this time, management changed the nature of their criticism, making it more personal. For example, they told me most people they paid as much were of higher quality or more experienced. There was a shift towards devaluation, compared to what previously had appeared to be only about control and distorting my sense of reality. This occurred despite the objective progress I was making in achieving the company’s objectives, which management did recognize and appeared pleased with.
I was increasingly placed into situations by management that felt uncomfortable. They asked me to end a business relationship with one of their old friends, which had been successful, but they had decided the friend was exploiting them somehow. They asked me to place unreasonable pressure on a vendor to cut their rates to a level that was unrealistic, again because they thought they were being exploited. Most disturbingly, they wanted me to set up a system to “hold to account” their very close elderly family members, in terms of line-by-line spending on a credit card, despite there being no evidence that these family members had been misusing it. I did consider resigning, as I realized none of these people had done anything wrong. It felt like I was being used as a tool to mistreat them at arm’s length, that my sense of duty and good intentions were being corrupted and used to cause harm. However, I decided that I could do more good if I stayed and tried to reason with management, to find fair solutions, and I have convinced myself that "only I coild understand him", that he was "misunderstood", and I still felt he was vulnerable and in some way needed "saving" or "fixing". Nevertheless, I felt increasingly guilty worrying I had not done enough to ensure others were treated well.
Management decided to move to Singapore from Hong Kong after selling their prior company. They told me this was because Hong Kong government had put them into quarantine during Covid (after mentioning they might be given an exemption like Jamie Dimon famously was, as a “senior business leader” and becoming insulted this did not happen). They also told me the move was because “the talent in Hong Kong has dried up” (later I talked to a recruiter that told me they refused to send any staff to management’s prior company, because management specifically was considered too unreasonable and upset people). They also told me it was due to personal matters, but whatever the reason was, they decided to move.
I asked management where we would hire a team, which by that time we had agreed was required to achieve the company mission, and they said Singapore. I was given a choice to move to Singapore or stay in Hong Kong, but it intuitively felt like a “test” and that I had move to Singapore to prove my loyalty. Furthermore, management had finally agreed in principle to my request to hire more staff, given how overworked I was and distracted by operational tasks, and this would only happen in Singapore.
However, once I did arrive in Singapore, the abusive behavior escalated significantly. This was more worrying as I was now isolated from my long-term support network, and vulnerable given my immigration status (in terms of being able to work if I lost my job, due to EP quota issues). Furthermore, management now decided to work full time in the family office, which was far more difficult to deal with than meeting once per week. They told me they now wanted to “do things properly”, while looking at me with a contempt-laden smirk. They appeared to become insecure I had been performing the operational roles they had asked me to do, despite me never wanting to do these, and asked me to hand these over in an aggressive way, as if I had stepped out of place by doing them. They seemed to delight in telling me I was not allowed to do tasks I had been doing previously, even if by not doing so they would not get done, in a complete about-turn from telling me I should be accountable for anything. They also shifted abruptly from wanting complete secrecy to a focus on PR.
This behavior was hurtful given that I had been taking responsibility, with almost no errors, for many things I had no interest in, and working excessive hours, out of a sense of duty and care for to management, and now it felt I was being punished for doing so. However, the real problems started during hiring. Firstly, management devalued me on the basis of insufficient experience hiring people, cutting my feet from under me in trying to hire people with the skills I needed to build an investment function. They failed to hire someone to take over operations, despite trying to do so for a long time. They did agree to hire an accountant to help me as requested, but impulsively fired that person unexpectedly after a few months, causing them to suffer the only mental health breakdown of their life. The reason management gave was “they wrote down an O instead of a 0 in one set of paperwork”. Later I found out management was telling that person in one-on-ones that their time was “worth USD $30k per hour”, implying the accountant should not should not waste their (weirdly precisely quantified) valuable time with questions, despite this being necessary to solve the difficult task (which involved reconstructing transactions that only management knew about) this highly conscientous person had been asked to complete (staying up until midnight trying to do so, and near completion). Management also hired a Singaporean PA they fired after half a day (for setting reasonable boundaries), who then sued them for trauma. The only people they were able to hire were from their prior company, without relevant experience.
At this point, I was able to witness directly how management treated other people at a scale that had not previously been possible. When we had met previously, I was generally isolated one-on-one, and when criticized, I turned inwards to think about whether what they were saying was true. I did not always agree, but the focus became myself, not management's behaviour. However, when I saw them being abusive to other people, the scales started to fall from my eyes, and I could see what they were doing more clearly. Their behaviour towards office managers, vendors, employees, potential investment targets, and others was hostile and aggressive, unfairly critical and paranoid, and when I saw the strategies deployed against me used on other people, it became clear that they were unjustified. I also saw how elated management appeared when or after they were dominating, humiliating, or criticizing someone. It seemed to me their most reliable source of positive emotion was inflicting suffering on other people.
I was also sickened by constant devaluation of third parties behind their backs, increasingly starting to feel guilty and complicit over this treatment of people. I had built almost the entire company network, and was the one that introduced management to the people they were mistreating and devaluing, for reasons that seemed to have no basis in reality. I increasingly tried to push back against their paranoia and inaccurate views of other people, stepping in to defend them, with mixed success. This might have led them to become increasingly paranoid about me over time.
Management’s abusive behavior towards me gradually worsened over the course of the year. Due to being able to focus fully on the investment portfolio, I was able to make a lot of progress. Management seemed to become increasingly insecure that I was deploying their entire portfolio (bringing decisions to them for veto but always taking the initiative). They found it hard to engage with my investment memos in a useful way, telling me that they could not find any flaws with my work, and “wished they could,” saying it bizarrely as if I had done something wrong. Due to feeling uncomfortable, they started to criticize on the basis that my work might not be rigorous enough, without evidence. I worked hard to try to fix this, improving our processes. After this, we received a lot of positive feedback about the quality of our processes from counterparties, but this seemed to make management even more insecure, and they started bullying me about formatting and documentation of the processes.
To complete these more rigorous investment processes, as the only investment person, I was now working all the time, including weekends. I again asked management to hire more staff as we had agreed, but they just devalued the type of people (investment professionals) we needed to hire and said they did not want to manage anyone. I suggested that either myself or one of the people they had hired from their previous company manage them instead, but they bizarrely accused me of “wanting power” and then started devaluing me on this basis. The portfolio made a lot of money, but they claimed they “did not care about the PnL,” before criticizing me for irrelevant things such as formatting of informal meeting notes in appendices of long documents. Overall, management just kept creating double binds that seemed designed to “set me up to fail” and when I found a creative solution that delivered what they said they wanted, management thanked me for doing so, but their body language and emotions appeared frustrated, and they would punish me later somehow.
Up until this point, I had always been able to control my emotions at work. Despite the intensity of the abusive behavior, I had always remained calm, “sucked it up”, and tried to find a way to move forward constructively to progress the objectives of the company. To the extent long term emotional damage was occurring, it was expressed in my personal life, but at work I was always able to remain well regulated and functional. However, at this point I started to finally break down. The worst thing was the double binds, where whatever I did would inevitably lead to some kind of punishment. Management’s responses were so bizarre that I was increasingly in a disorientated state of disbelief, sometimes to the point of dissociation. My strategy of working harder and harder to try to “solve” these no-win situations, as management was setting me up to fail, made things worse as I started suffering burn out. Then, any small emotional reaction that did emerge was jumped on quickly by management, who would immediately act like a victim and devalue me based on the emotion.
Contrary to the accusations by management, my primary emotions were disorientation, confusion, frustration, a strong sense of unjust betrayal, and increasing sadness. I did not feel any anger, and I was not particularly anxious. I just found it difficult to believe, given everything I had successfully built, the sacrifices I had made, the portfolio making money every year, unwavering loyalty, that this was happening. It just made no sense. Why was I being punished for success and giving management what they wanted? Why were they constantly attacking me? Why were they systematically attacking my reality testing? Why were they putting me into double binds and setting me up to fail? How did I get myself into this situation? Why are they hurting other people all the time? Why am I helping them if they treat people this way? I was just incredibly confused, disorientated, and off balance.
Someone from management’s prior company that had worked for them for a long time told me people used to leave his office crying. They told me how frightened they were of being fired, and I started trying to help them by delivering a lot of positive feedback about them to management. As I was isolated in Singapore, this person became my main support network, and we started to mutually discuss our problems with each other over private non-work devices. They attended a Chinese New Year party at my home, at which my 9 months pregnant wife was present. Not long after this I sent them a message saying management was being abusive to me (which was true), and was fired the next working day. Maybe it was a coincidence. But I still am finding it hard to trust people again.
After parting ways, and with time, the disorientation and confusion lifted and I started to see things more clearly. Increasingly I felt that I had been in an abusive situation. There were so many separate “incidents” over the course of employment, and new bizarre and disorientating things were always coming, and I was overworked, so I never really had time to think about and process it all. But the patterns of abuse were clear in retrospect. I had seen them repeating many times targeting myself, as well as others. I wondered how many people management had hurt, thinking about that Glassdoor post mentioning “person after person”. I also felt guilt because after I left, a lot of people came to me complaining about how management was treating them. I also met many people randomly during networking that had gone to interviews with management and had bad experiences. Finally, I knew management were lying about me, after several people in our shared network alluded indirectly to me “wanting power” in one way or another. I decided to post a Glassdoor review to warn others, and go strictly “no contact” with management to limit any potential further damage they could do to me.
In terms of the psychological impact on me, I fell into a state of severe life-threatening depression and despair, from which I have not been able to escape. It has been difficult to rebuild trust in others, and I have become increasingly isolated. My marriage has fallen apart. The double-binds seem to have put me into a state of learned helplessness, as I was conditioned that any action will result in punishment. My motivational system has been broken, as I have entered some kind of prolonged “freeze” response, and I have been unable to look for new employment. This has perpetuated my severe depression, feelings of guilt, and worthlessness. It is astounding that this is my “reward” for the objective success that I delivered at this workplace. Nothing less than outright annihilation. The best outcome at this point is for other people to learn from my mistakes, and protect themselves.
After posting this review, management cold-called me from an unknown number (I had blocked them on WhatsApp). I put the phone down as soon as I heard their voice. They then sent an email with a PDF attached that had a title that looked like important tax information. I deleted the email without opening it, but their “hook” was successful. I worried it was something important and I might break the law by not responding, so I sent an email asking them to tell me what the document was but not say anything abusive or manipulative. They replied saying the PDF was just “for my records” before proceeding to gaslight me about what had happened and accuse me of “trying to hurt them.” In a shameless and sickening display, to devalue me they highlighted the subsequent emotional impact on me of their abuse, using this to backwards rationalise their treatment of me that preceded these mental health symptoms. Then they said *they* want to go no contact, inverting the reality and manufacturing a bogus paper trail.
Despite knowing how manipulative they are, I took down the original Glassdoor post and examined my conscience. I then reposted a new version written in a way that tried to limit any unnecessary distress to management, while focusing strictly on providing accurate information to others. After some time, I took this down as well as I thought this would allow me to fully move on. Many months later, management appeared with their gang in the mall near my house and rammed their way between me and my infant son. I became very distressed seeing management after so long, and posted a new Glassdoor review that was frankly emotionally disordered. I had been suffering severe depression and was not in a good emotional state. Glassdoor asked me to take it down, and I rewrote a calm version that was accurate and informative. Then I received a letter from management saying they are taking legal action against me for “harassment” (for writing a Glassdoor review about their company), and bizarrely accusing me of “planning a murder-suicide.” They followed this up with a defamation case, callously threatening to sue me for multiple times my remaining net worth.
I think it would be wrong to abandon my social duty to warn people about management to try to escape the risk to me. Their strategy seems to be: abuse, create emotional reaction, act like victim due to emotional reaction, make legal threats to silence the victim from warning others. If this keeps working, it will mean more future victims. Someone needs to stand up and take the hit to protect others. If that must be me, then so be it. Better that I suffer than that many others do in future. This reasoning has led me to post this review.
