I'll never forget the moment I stopped caring and started looking for another job. I worked in software engineering, I had been working there fewer than 3 months.
The director of our department was in town, apparently on his yearly visit to instill fear in the hoi polloi. I'll call him Wallace Zuckerberg -- or Cyborg Wallace -- due to his strong resemblance to the beloved claymation character from Wallace and Grommit combined with the disturbing android features of Mark Zuckerberg.
First Cyborg Wallace took everyone out to lunch in small groups, where he interrogated us individually about our ideas for how we could improve things within the department. I'm convinced he was less interested in hearing our input versus putting finishing touches on his personal list of who to lay off vs who to give "meets expectations" ratings. The conversation was stilted and he had all the charm of a coin operated co---m machine in a gas station bathroom.
The moment I completely lost interest was during a department wide staff meeting. The BNY lifers and bootlickers made sure to sit at the head of the table near Cyborg Wallace so his optic units could clearly register their due adoration. I made sure to sit near the back, a reasonable precaution against radiation poisoning from any possibly leaky fission power units.
The primary topic of this meeting was, unsurprisingly, firings and layoffs. Making people afraid of losing their job is the preferred motivation technique at BNY Mellon.
He informed us he had secretly devised a scheme to run spyware on everyone's laptops to more effectively gather information on who to fire. He had a PowerPoint presentation with graphs and charts showing what percentage of the team had certain programs open during what times of the day. Considerable time and effort had been put into this operation.
Now, this was the first time in my 20+ year career I had seen employee performance measured via the top-down Big Brother approach. Again, we were a software engineering group, career professionals. Most companies have figured out how to measure performance based on individual contributions, manager and peer reviews, project completion etc. BNY Mellon's approach was to instead spy on their employees, then tell them so everyone would know to be afraid.
He then started an open discussion about what everyone disliked about other departments he managed. It devolved into the group energetically trying to make other people look bad to redirect the laser targeting system of Cyber Wallace's job destructo-beams elsewhere.
After that meeting I fully understood the culture of fear that drives BNY Mellon and realized any effort to improve the situation was pointless. This is a company that runs more like a Victorian textile factory powered by child labor, managed by 1850s railroad robber barons than a modern corporation.