Had a CEO at a startup who pulled a team I was loosely associated with together in January and said that, confidentially, we had received regulatory feedback that would make it impossible to ship the company's product without huge and borderline insane design changes. He wanted everyone in the room to be part of the "tiger team" responsible for secretly doing the new design while they figured out how much of the company could be salvaged. Drowned out the objections to the new requirements by telling people that they could not work at it and lose their job now or not get it done and everyone would lose their jobs, but either way not pulling nights and weekends to make this design happen would mean losing our jobs.

We lose some people then and there and I eventually wiggled my way out since I wasn't really a part of that group. But a bunch of people stay on it and work their asses off getting it done, full on sleeping in the office all weekend crunch time shit.

They announce the new design to the company on April 1. People are furious; investors are brought in, more employees quit, the works.

On April 3 they announce that the whole thing had been a fucking April fool's joke. The whole remaining team quits, and the CEO calls it an "understandable misunderstanding".

Worst job I ever had.