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Yea for sure! We were organizing around performance metrics, quotas, discipline, etc for quite a while. My work is in QA, where quotas are actually really bad for software development. We had been trying to get management to research and implement modern QA practices that would reduce/eliminate quotas, without much success. We also wanted progressive discipline with real guidance, because if you don't meet metrics then the performance improvement plan (pip) was really just a do-or-die meet the metrics for 10 days or get fired.

In the previous meeting, it wasn't a take over but coworkers and I relentlessly asked about pips, metrics, etc. We were very clearly getting under their skin, to the point where he asked me how I felt pips should work. He was probably thinking I never planned that far ahead and would discredit myself, but I had done significant research on modern QA management techniques and gave an overview of my minimum for a 3 step pip. Right before he ended the meeting, he essentially "confirmed" that we do it exactly like that, no sword of Damocles or anything.

Of course having done the legwork to actually talk to employees that had gone through the process, we knew that it was total horseshit. Just to be sure, we talked to a few more people to confirm that pips were still being used to cut people for cause instead of improving their metrics before planning the takeover. To open the meeting, I asked this to the COO:

I'd like to preface my question by saying thank you for hosting these sessions again, and preemptively note that a lot of us are here to discuss PIPs. In the last Q&A session I attended, I was told by you that PIPs follow a progressive discipline model. However, we're aware that most if not all employees that fail a PIP are terminated immediately, and multiple employees have been fired shortly after passing a PIP for failing to meet productivity expectations. Why did you lie to me?

His face went beet red and you could see the anger build in his eyes. After about a minute, he responds with "I don't appreciate being called a liar. You're hostility isn't welcome and I reject the question". After that, you could cut the tension with a knife. I reiterated my question that pips don't work the way he said they do, but he continued to refuse it until I moved on to the many other "hostile" questions I had.

For the aftermath, he lied to us again in that meeting when someone uninvolved with the take over asked about remote work, and said there's no plans to change anything for the foreseeable future, before RTO was announced a week later. There was another meeting about RTO with him that I attended, and he made a vague threat about "respectability" and ending the meeting if he felt disrespected after looking at the attendees. I wanted to ask a legit question over mic, and he ignored me until it was becoming obvious to others in the meeting. He stopped doing all q&a stuff after this for some reason.