Exemployees of a company, what was your "fuck this shit I'm out moment"?

Prethoryn Overmind@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 423 points –
173

My company was discovered using monkeys for emissions tests. They were gassing monkeys, and legitimately used "everyone in the industry does it" as an internal defense to quell upset staff.

Fuck Volkswagen. Straight up. No fucks given, worst job I ever worked.

Jeez.. did that story ever reach the press?!?

It did in the Netherlands. And then people stopped caring as the next hot article got out.

What’s horrifying to me isn’t that VW used ‘everyone does it’ as a defense, it’s that multiple carmakers are apparently gassing monkeys for emission tests.

I got a promotion. There was no raise in salary just expectations of more responsibilities. I got a $100 visa gift card. I saw that as a big fuck you. I was out as soon as I could manage.

That is also a giant red flag. Normally, when you are paid via some non-taxable reward, it means your "promotion" isn't ever going to come with benefits that allow you to go climbing up the ladder. You made a good decision there.

My manager got a promotion with a hefty salary increase, then the company announced a hiring and salary freeze, then gave me a promotion with more responsibilities (some of my manager's as well) but with the same salary.

I quited a few months later as soon as I could secure something else

I'm dealing with that right now with my current company. They've had me working in a role 4 positions above the one my title would indicate for the last year. Being healthcare, they blamed not being able to change my job title because they can't afford increasing my pay during "these unprecedented times." Now, a year later, they're "working on updating my job title," but it's going to be a lateral title change with no change in payscale.
You bet I'm on my way out

Not me but my partner.

She was working as a research assistant in a lab for several years. She asked her boss if she could be promoted to a research associate, which was one level above her. She already been doing the job of a researcher (3 levels above her). Her boss said that they were in a hiring freeze and that it wouldn't be possible, but maybe in 2-3 YEARS she might be up for a promotion. Her boss wanted everyone to get the most they possibly could out of their current position before promotion. What my partner heard was that even if she eventually got the promotion to the next level, it might be 5-7 years after that promotion until the next promotion.

I've never seen her so angry when she came home. She immediately started applying to new jobs in a different field. She also stopped doing work above her pay grade, to which her boss actually tried to retaliate against her. Within 2 months, she moved onto a new job that is 75% WFM, pays more, has a better culture and is in a field where she can much more easily move upward.

Her former company has started layoffs.

Not doing more than what you're paid for was a great lesson to learn early in my working life, good on her for knowing her worth.

I wish I learned it earlier… I’m on the downslope of 30s, and still find myself going above and beyond.

I don’t expect to get anything out of it at this point though.. I learned a long long time ago that hard work doesn’t pay off, but I also don’t want to do my actual job, so I find other things I’d rather do, and do that. I can easily justify doing so, because everyone known I’m out soon, and what I’m doing has direct value even if it’s not really “my job”.

And from here on out, I’m just going to take contract work. Zero expectation of going above and beyond, because everyone knows it’s a temporary arrangement. Perfect, because I have no self control and am a major major people pleaser.

I guess it's not quite that level of "fuck this shit I'm out" but I realized that I was doing a significant amount of work that would be outside the description of a junior software engineer. I chatted with my boss and asked for a raise, he went to HR and they said no, so I asked for a promotion and he took it all the way to the VP and they still said no. After that I said "well they must not care about me but this other company is offering a 20k raise so I'm out."

It did suck because my boss was still probably the best manager I've ever had who gave me everything he could to help me succeed but they refused to give me a raise. I don't miss the work but I for sure miss that team.

As tough as it was for your manager to lose you, you probably also did them a favor by giving them ammo they can use to fight for future employees. Now they can point to your departure next time they're arguing for a raise for another teammmate.

I would hope that's the case, however the company is one that contracts to other organizations and my dad's former position was one of their biggest clients (I was on a different program). He was saying that their turnover rate is going up because they wouldn't give raises to hardly any of their employees. That and now they're being laid off due to the main contract losing funding, but that's just bureaucratic junk.

Better yet he should do what OP did and go to a place that will support him being a good boss.

I had a similar experience.

Was working for more than 5 years at a company. Pay was not very good, but okayish. The entire company was rather unhappy, though.

During covid we had a lengthy talk with the director about how we can't staff many projects since we don't pay enough and can't get new people or keep the old ones. He denied even the extremely obvious lack of people. I had offers on the table and told him, what other employers were ready to pay and he just told me, that this is bullshit.

At that point it was clear to me, that there was no way that I would ever get this idiot to accept reality and I accepted an offer for 50% more.

The funny thing is, my manager asked me, if he could ask his manager about a counteroffer. They came up with a comprehensive plan where I could "earn" the raise over a period of three years and at the end would end up about 10% below what was currently offered. Absolutely incredible.

It's really sad, that it had to go down that way. The company and the colleagues were pretty good otherwise. But 50% more is a really really good argument.

Yeah their new VP basically said "we don't do mid-year raises" which is just dumb, they also never conveyed to me that I did receive a raise, but it was a 1.2% COL increase, which was a slap in the face. I received a higher COL increase after I had been with my new company for only 3 months at the end of last year.

My former boss and my dad used to work together which is how I had learned about the job to begin with and they happened to go out for drinks with some other guys and my boss just asked my dad point blank "Am I going to lose Haggis?" My dad just said "If you can't get him 5% by the end of the year, he'll probably jump." My boss responded with "Well it's been fun working with him." He genuinely tried everything he could, had a 3 page document written up about why I deserved a mid-level position, explained why he couldn't lose me and the company just said "eh, wait till next year."

I applied for another job and had the recruiter reach out to me within 20 minutes due to it being a company I had worked for prior (left because I didn't like the project I was on and wanted a change of pace) and within an hour and a half of applying they had called me and then two weeks later I was given an offer. The offer was the crazy part because I was making about 74k as a junior at the other job, I asked for 85 as a "high ball" to hope they would give me at least 80 and they told me they would beat that, so the next time they asked I said 90 and they just gave me 92 anyway. Definitely felt nice to be more appreciated.

Bomb threat, also 2 colleagues went to prison, unrelated to the bomb.

I might be headed there too. For the first time in forever I like my manager and he always goes to bat for me. And I am the lead of a team I really like. But the company gave me a crappy raise despite huge profits and all the good feedback from coworkers that led to me getting the lead position (without raise) after only a little over a year.

Now they are reclassifying my job as an in-office position even though I was hired for remote and my team is spread across the country and the world including my manager, so I'd still be doing all communications over the internet. Fortunately, they are short on office space in my city and the next closest office is over 150 miles away and they made it so they only force people to commute 50 miles (as the crow flies, not actual driving miles) which is still ridiculous, especially for a couple of my colleagues who would have to take a ferry which adds a lot of time, or drive around a pretty big body of water to get to my city.

But if they try to force the office thing after expanding office space, or don't give me a better raise next year, especially after the unpaid promotion with extra responsibilities, I'm gone.

I'm odd because I vastly prefer in-office work so that's never been a deal-breaker for me. I like the option to work from home if needed, but the nature of my new job means I just don't have anything to do from home and have to be on-site.

But I too have received unpaid "promotions" recently, but they're generally because I seek out more responsibilities and take on more hats than I need out of necessity. "Oh no one is handling our new hires and I need to build a team? Guess I'm doing team allocation now." "We're out of seats and I need 3 seats for my team? Guess I'm in charge of that now." "We're out of VMs and have to steal them from other people to reallocate? Guess I'm organizing that effort too."

That's just good experience though as I'm using it for leverage to get a promotion next year, potentially moving to a management position.

Next time get the offer before asking for the raise and present it to your boss. Sucks that it works this way, but they probably would've handed you the promotion if you had an offer. Call it market research!

Or they would have him training his replacement the moment the other offer expired.

That's absolutely not how it works in the majority of corporations where you manager isn't a vindictive piece of shit, it's absolutely expected by management and HR. In this case, OP's manager had their back, they definitely wouldn't have faced retaliation.

I do this every few years and I've only switched companies a handful of them, and only because they wouldn't match the other offer. You can make corporations work for you you know, the "fear the corporation you work for" attitude is dangerous as hell.

Well the time between me asking and me getting a new job was like 9 months. I was actually patient and waited a while before I looked but eventually couldn't wait. So I got the offer and then asked for a counter and they wouldn't do it.

Ah yeah, that's the way to do it. Personally I interview around every few years and present higher offers to my current company, most of the time they counter and I stay, couple times they didn't and I left. Unfortunately it's pretty much the only way to keep your salary above inflation these days, but since I started in the data industry I've 6x my total compensation, so it definitely does work.

This was more than a decade ago. Someone from HR mistakenly emailed a spreadsheet of all employees’ salaries to a bunch of people who aren’t authorized to see it. As part of my job, my team was tasked to track down all traces of the file on email and company workstations and remove it. Naturally I was able to see the file because of my task. I saw how low my pay was compared to my colleagues and how absurd it jumps up in just a couple of levels in rank. I and a lot of employees quit shortly after.

"Mistakenly emailed a spreadsheet of employees salaries"? Sounds more like something a pissed of employee would do just before quitting

Not sure how common of an occurrence an HR mistakenly send the salary of all staff, but it happened to my first company more than a decade ago well.

I wasn't able to see it as I was on mid-shift and the email was successfully recalled by the time I got in the office. A team was going through every workstation to ensure that the file was deleted. Fun times.

I was working at a hospital that had to do ethics training twice per year because of previous violations. I was sitting on the floor in a super crowded room and the video opened with, "Do your ethics match those of your employer?" and i went, "Oh shit! They do not! I have to get out of here!"

I am confused? The "previous violations" were your doing or the employers?

The hospital had violations and for the next 5 (i think) years, all staff had to do ethics training twice per year. Money and productivity were much more important to them than patient care. Shortly before i left they quit buying wet wipes. Staff was expected to clean patients (bathing, vomit, BM, blood) with washcloths that were put into laundry bins for wash and reuse.

They would have surely been fired if they had two ethics violations. Only companies get away with a slap on a wrist.

  • what you say and what you do are only vaguely connected
  • at the end of the day, money always matters more than anything else
  • if you have to follow the law, just stick to the letter instead of the spirit of it

I worked for a kind of IT outsourcing center for a company that otherwise had a very good reputation. We were their cheap, crappy branch. They still had decent severance packages as a vestige of when they used to be a decent company. When they had a round of layoffs at our site, after a few days of calling people into the office and seeing them come out crying, I started to do the math. I would be paid well enough for a few months if I got laid off. I would finally have the time and mental energy to job search and move on. At the end of the week, when they announced that all of the people had been laid off that would be affected, I found I was disapointed. That's when I realized how truly toxic that place was, how much I hated it, and how badly I needed to move on.

That seems kind of shitty. Where did you end up going? I just started an IT job for a hospital in my city. Still learning the ropes for sure.

I ended up working for a bank next as a contractor. The grass was greener on the other side of the fence, but not by as much as I hoped. I used the skills I learned there and my increase in pay as a springboard for finding a better job with slightly higher pay as a regular employee elsewhere at a small healthcare company.

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To explain my "fuck this shit" moment first we need to understand the company.

They were a smart pouring alcohol, beer wine alcohol kumbucha, whatever. They could pour it. They sold their product as PaaS, Pour as a Service. The idea was that you a bar owner could have them come in, install their taps (which they maintained) and you would have fancy data and controls over these taps.

You want 1 push to mean 12 Ozes of beer and for the taps to lockdown at 12am automatically? Bam, they'd do it. In theory at any rate. Truthfully, they never could get the pours perfect. It was actually pretty hilarious in hindsight because they wanted to advertise that they were solving shrinkage and waste lol.

Let's move along though, when I got hired, the tech stuff was handled by me, a full stack developer, two electrical engineers, an embedded developer and a shit tier consultant that wanted to use Ansible for EVERYTHING including Infrastructure as Code (we'll touch on that).

The tech stuff was either non distributed architecture, basically a piece of shit application made in nodejs running on I shit you not, beaglebone blacks. For reference page one of the user manual says "don't use this in production" for good reason, one of the issues was the lack of a real time clock another was this hardware level race condition where the beaglebone just wouldn't boot fully so it needed a reboot. Lol. Oh, also it was running debian wheezy in 2019 (unsure on exact timing) which had been EOLed back in 2018. I always found it using when they talked about security as if they gave a shit.

The other one was the distributed architecture, this was running on a board that was developed in house by one of the EEs. It had feature parity and was supposed to replace nonda. This one ran a bit differently using async messaging and some really fancy bells and whistles. It was also running debian Jessie, which wasn't fantastic but better than nonda.

2 months after my hiring, the full stack developer left. The guy had a tendency to boil the ocean but he also knew damn near everything about both architectures. So losing him was fun and I had to take on everything he did, minus code, quickly. Our consultant meanwhile, took on very little.

As startups do, problems would happen and be bandaided, I would complain about tech debt get ignored and dumpster fires would happen as one would expect. After a while, we started losing more people, first the EE I wasn't close to. Then the embedded guy and finally the EE I was close to.

At this point, I was stressed beyond belief and fucking sick of it. Both the culture and the bullshit where if I fucked up, I got punished but if the consultant fucked up or ignored policy nothing would happen.

I'm not sure on the timeline here but two things happened.

  1. there was an outage after hours. I wasn't aware of it and was eating dinner with my family which is very important to me because family. After dad's battle with cancer, I wanted to make sure important things like family dinner were a family time thing. No phones, no TV. Maybe music but mostly talking and spending time together.

Back to the story, I got called. Family excused me so I answered and was informed about the outage. They asked me to pitch in because it looked like something I was knowledgeable about, I said sure I don't mind but I need to finish dinner with my family first, because we were already in the middle of it. Sounds reasonable right? Not to my boss. He demanded I stop, I held firm. He got pissy but relented and let me finish.

Bet you're expecting some heroic effort and a saved the day right? Nah. I had nothing to do because it had nothing to do with me. No apology was given nor was a thank you extended. I literally sat there, scrolling reddit "being available"

  1. after my team left, I got asked to step up and at that point I was getting interested in the SRE space. I had been interviewing and wanted the title. So I asked for it, and was told "I'll think about it" after they said there would be no raise. Weeks passed, nothing happened. Not even a "hey we need to say no". So I got an offer from my current employer, had the title I wanted and everything. I accepted and gave previous employer less than 2 weeks. First thing the boss asked was if it was because of the no promotion.

Fast forward 2 years to April of this year. The board of investors fired the owner and coo and the company declared bankruptcy. Good fucking riddance. Bunch of stupid fucking schmucks.

You want 1 push to mean 12 Ozes of beer and for the taps to lockdown at 12am automatically? Bam, they’d do it. In theory at any rate. Truthfully, they never could get the pours perfect. It was actually pretty hilarious in hindsight because they wanted to advertise that they were solving shrinkage and waste lol.

Um. That should be incredibly easy. Pharmaceutical companies have solved this decades ago. That's how ever single vial of whatever sterile contents is always exactly perfectly filled. Were they trying to reinvent the wheel or something? Why not just use a normal metering pump?

Uncarbonated liquids are dead simple to titrate, it's true. For a carbonated product like beer, it's actually a much more complicated problem than it seems. The amount of foam you get on a keg pour of beer is effected by a lot of variables - how clean the lines are, how cold the lines are, how long the lines are, the diameter of the lines, whether you're using beergas or co2, how old the beer is, if it's keg conditioned or force carbonated, how recently the keg was moved into refrigeration, how cold the beer itself is, if it's the first pour of the day or if the tap has been running frequently, the mechanical design of the faucet, the temperature, cleanliness, shape, and size of the glass it's going into, and more. It's really fiddly business, I can't see how a push button system could take everything into account and render less wastage than a human operator with a feel for the system. Draft systems are voodoo, ask me how I know.

Anyway companies typically have an unrealistic expectation of what draft wastage ought to be. I would advise any bar to expect something like 15% wastage at minimum on professional draft equipment, more if they're using bargain grade hardware anywhere in the system, but ownership doesn't want to hear that.

Because metering pumps cost more in the short term than custom code, boards, software stacks, and most importantly...consultants.

The year is 2020.

Covid was in full force, and we were suddenly assigned impossible tasks in very little time. Not to mention we hadn't been given a raise in more than 2 years, not because the company finances were bad, but because the owner was a greedy bastard.

Then one person decided to quit. And another. And another.

What did the owner do? Raise salaries to keep the personnel? No, he let them leave and loaded all the work onto us.

I decided I wouldn't be the one crushed by that load, so I was the next to leave. Bye bye.

Which company was this if you don't mind me asking

I don't mind, but I can't answer either 😅

Let's say it's run by a Latin American oligarch family.

Worked at a day center that cared for adults with developmental disabilities. Part of my job was picking up, dropping off clients, event trips, activities. In my 1st 3 months there, I saw:

Coworker parked bus, pushed wheelchair client onto lift, walked away to smoke a cig. Client and wheelchair 10 feet off pavement, not tied down.

Some staff had to clean, change diapers. They would grab clients, throw them down, rip diapers off, spray lysol on their genitals.

In parking lot, coming back from trip, coworker shoved client so hard he fell face first into asphalt, bleeding, tooth chipped.

I could go on.

I tried talking with manager several times. She didn't care. I really needed the money, but couldn't stomach it, called adult protective services, who came out, and they got in serious trouble, shut down temporarily, manager fired, fines, etc. Lost the job, but don't regret it.

Sounds similar to a job I had at an old folks home.

Throw wage theft and other DoL labor violations in.

I was happy to hear to hear when the state shut them down.

Just wish I had been older and less naive, I should have documented and reported myself, but I was a dumb kid.

This kind of nonsense is why my mom moved in with us. There are so many horror stories about elderly abuse, and those homes are freaking expensive!

Good on you. Years ago I delivered pizza when I was like 17. A couple times I had to go to a facility like this and it was the most appalling thing. I couldn't believe how callus the staff were and I left after dropping off the pizza wanting to cry. If I had a bit more life experience I would have called APS. I still wish I had but I was a dumb 17 year old at the time that felt completely powerless

Holy fucking shit, those people sound like the scum of the Earth. How the fuck do they live with themselves?

When after lockdown they forced us back into the office after we showed we could do all the work perfectly from home. To top it off they hired 2 sales people for remote work.

My office keeps claiming they want to maximize WFH while also enacting new policies to the contrary.

My favorite cherry on top is that the one top level exec spent the whole pandemic crowing about how she wanted everyone back in the office full time as soon as it was an option... then she takes a fucking sideways promotion that let her work fully remote for a position in a state over a thousand miles away without having to move, because it's remote.

There’s just so many of these fuckos who want everyone except themselves to RTO.

Rejecting my vacation request for stupid reasons and not giving me a raise for over two years. I had been there for 10 years.

I spent one night cleaning commercial airliner cabins at a regional airport.

Since I was would have basically unrestricted access to commercial airliners post 9/11, I had to go through serious screening to get this job. Fingerprinting, MASSIVELY invasive federal background checks, the whole 9 yards. You'd think I was going to work at the Pentagon. But that's a good thing. If someone has momentarily unfettered access to an entire jet that will be carrying a ton of jet fuel and hundreds of passengers, I absolutely want to make sure people are thoroughly vetted. It was made ABUNDANTLY clear to me, the potential consequences of fucking up this job. If I were liable for a fuck up I would be at the very least fined thousands of dollars, at worst I'd be thrown into federal prison.

So my first day passes and I get called into my supervisors office. Apparently I missed a non-sanctioned magazine a previous passenger had left in a seat back of a flight. I wasn't being fired or fined, but I was on final warning. Over a magazine. I quit on the spot.

I also forgot to mention that this job payed barely above minimum wage...

I wasn't going to bust my ass cleaning airplane cabins, risking my livelihood and freedom for a fucking pittance.

Surviving a layoff... time to leave before second layoff happens.

My current employer had a relatively small layoffs round (about 3% of the workforce). More people resigned afterwards than during the layoffs.

If management is really good. And they have to do a layoff no matter what. They will cut deeper than they need to. And then explain to everybody the financial situation and why the layoff was both necessary, but sufficient to guarantee the survival of the company. They will demonstrate to the people they laid off that they're being taken care of in the company still cares and that the survivors shouldn't worry because the company took care of its people.

Unfortunately the reality is a lot of executives will go incommunicado for a layoff. It'll stop relaying anything. So the worst case scenario plays out in people's minds. Especially about finances. They get very shy about the real financial situation.

The best I've seen is post layoff all the survivors are given a incentive scheme to stick around. That you know increases over time. To prevent people from jumping ship immediately. Cuz no matter what you do post layoff you're going to lose more organic people. And probably you're more capable of people. Because they're more able to find a job quickly. so you're going to have a brain drain you need to fight and if you don't you might be in a worse operational position then if you hadn't had a lay off at all.

Especially smaller businesses cuz they suffer from key person vulnerabilities more than larger companies.

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When the CEO let everybody work from home except for a female junior dev on my team. Not sure whether it was because she's female or an immigrant, but the two of us had other jobs within a month. Fuck these powertripping CEOs.

Early job delivering flowers in a work provided van. Late 90s.

Company is a one-man-band with me as second employee/driver. Vans 'maintained' by the owners wishy washy mate.

On a delivery run, driving down a hill toward a stop sign to cross a dual carriageway.

Brakes fail.

Quick engine braking down through the gears(column mounted) to first, and then pull the t-bar park brake to just pull up at the stop sign as two cars go past at 70kmh.

Call the owner, tell him brakes have failed, he says "no they didn't", I see red and say "yes they fucking did, I quit". I was seething.

A corner cutting brake bleed, leaving air in the lines almost had me in a car accident. Yeah, fuck those clowns.

The entire pandemic, our security operations team got constant commendations for how rapidly we scaled up, and they touted the increased productivity we had WFH. I was officially reclassified as a remote worker at the start of Covid.

Then we got a new manager after 2 years who decided everyone needed to RTO "as needed", then monthly, then weekly.

My disabilities and medication prevents me from safely operating a vehicle to commute and my respiratory disability puts me at an extremely high risk of complications from Covid (was bedrested for 3 days from Covid, took almost a month to mostly recover, after multiple booster shots).

Tried to get accommodation, which I had never had to formally get before. Was surprisingly easy to get from HR, but my manager on the other hand made my life hell.

My manager, though, pulled out all the stops.

  • He submitted a "request for family leave" for every workday that I was working from home instead of the office while I was working through HR accommodation request process. which I only found out about after HR mailed me a letter formally denying the requests.
  • Then my manager straight up told me, "I think the only reason you put in a request for accommodation is to avoid coming into the office"
  • Manager would "Forget" to invite only me to meetings, when others that were WFH due to illnesses like Covid would get an invite.

Jokes on them, though, I left with a very short notice, little to no documentation on key projects that I was the sole driver and maintainer on. Literally left 2-year project with 2 pages of documentation that weren't even up to date.

  • Went from making $100K total comp to over $150K total comp.
  • Insurance is kickass, talking like $400/m medication only costing $15/m with no deductible.
  • Nice RSU package, 60k over 4 years
  • No after-hours or on-call, no SLAs

CEO scolded me in front of my team for joining a meeting virtually and told me to come into the office more frequently. The underlying assumption that my work is not good unless I come in is what drove me away. Especially because it's a hybrid position and my commute sucks. 1 day remote is not hybrid. The interview process led me to believe they were far more flexible than they actually are.

A similar thing just happened at my current hybrid job. My company is owned by a much larger corporation and the only reason it hasn't been fully absorbed is because we're making a lot of money for them. An email was sent out from corporate with the usual RTO talking points (COVID is over, we did great working apart but now we need to all come in to work together because we're better this way) with the due date being early September. Less than an hour went by when a rep from my company sent out a follow up email asking us to ignore the first message because it's only for the parent company. I was halfway done updating my resume when I saw it. I'm guessing there where more than just a few people who sent out some very angry emails to upper management.

The company wasted $27 million buying a dumb patent where we wasted even more money trying to make it work. My boss made some reliability studies showing the design sucked but the director heading the project didn't want to hear it. Eventually my boss was let go because of this and I decided to turn in my 2 weeks right after. A few months later the project was canceled and the director fired.

When I was 20 I was given a literally impossible task by a senior sales exec. When I explained why it was impossible, his response was "do it anyway."

They gave me a $3 raise and warned me not to ask again for a few years.

My boss gave me stupid directions - stuff I knew was wrong or inefficient. I tried to convince her otherwise, she wasn't having it, and I'm in trouble if I don't do what she says. Fine, I'll follow your stupid orders, no problem. My dad taught me, "If they want a little bullshit, give 'em a little bullshit."

Then in a meeting with her and her boss, I get asked why I did the stupid thing. "Well, I was directed specifically do to that very thing."

He says to me, with her right there, "Well, you need to take responsibility for your actions."

Started applying the next day, now have a team working for me who are great, and my greatest fear is giving them stupid directions.

Don't give directions. Offer support. Unblock them. Teach them to be autonomous experts. Good managers help their teams do their work by making sure they don't have to do anything but their work.

You probably already know this, but I'm saying it for the group. Good managers exist, and their role is to help actual workers work more effectively and remove obstacles to good work. Not to tell people how to work.

I've known several people that were good leaders until they became management, then it just became like Danno's experience. "Fuck you, I got mine" was all too common of a way of thinking at my former place of employment.

Grew up with 2 passions- cars and computers. Wound up working at dealerships for 12 or so years.

One day I'd been with this dealer for about 4 years, I got passed over for a better position because "You're too good at what you do to move you out of it."

I'd been looking for an excuse to go back to computers, and that was it. Quit on the spot, took my tools home and started tech school.

I worked in Customer Support as one of the most senior people in the department. I wanted to be a programmer for the same company. They had many openings. They passed me up countless times saying you're for sure going to get it next time. Finally a supervisor was honest with me. They never intended to let me leave support as they knew it'd be a major loss for the Support Department if I left.

Naturally that killed my motivation and so I started not caring about the work and turned down my energy and output. Started telling the mgmt no I wont work on Support tools code anymore. I made a bunch of tools used by the support team, Dashboards, zendesk apps, lots of browser scripts to fix common problems instantly. I just would reply It's not in my job Description. Make a role for me in Support or give me one of the many programming jobs and I'll do it.

So they started writing me up for insubordination.

After the second write up I told them they were only guaranteeing that I would leave the company. I wouldn't wait for the 3rd strike and I'm out. I told them they have turned support into a Dead Sea. They would make it impossible for their best employees to stay and they would all leave, Like the water in the dead Sea, leaving only the salt, the people who don't perform / care.

Took me all of 30 days to find a programmer gig with twice the pay. I should have left them years ago. Moral of the story is this, The business doesn't give a shit about you, Don't misplace your loyalty. There is no honor in staying at workplace that doesn't work with you.

And my prediction of the Dead Sea effect taking hold after I left has shone to be quite true. When I was there, they would end the week every week with an empty bucket. Avg ticket closes per rep were 100+ (fantastic for us). After I left they haven't seen the bottom of the bucket once. It's thousands deep and avg rep is closing only half what they used to. The friends I have still there (not in support but can see tickets) say that everyone left is clueless. [

Standing under the fuselage of a Airbus A320 in the pouring rain holding a torch for the "senior" engineer, while watching him fail at troubleshooting a simple door bell circuit.

That was the straw that broke the camels back, I could not spend my career working under someone like that.

I've worked with many people during my life, and there are good and bad people at every company. Most are average, as expected. But I have the mindset that it's not MY company, so I don't really care if employees are good or bad anymore.

But I'm not really depending on them for my own learning. I'm pretty much always learning on my own. Which could be hard in other fields than IT.

Ah, but when the bad employees make messes that you then need to clean up? Or someone makes a mistake and everyone on the team gets reamed out because "we're a team and someone should have caught that, so it's everyone's fault"?

I'm a software engineer.

Yeah we have the same culture here and it's bullshit. :)

From the CEO: "Our competitors won't accept these jobs. They result in too many workman's comp claims. We'll take them."

It's a gig economy company.. They are willing to take them because the workers are considered independent contractors and not employees. They offload liability onto the workers themselves.

Good lord do I wish I was recording that when it happened..

My original contract was anytime before 9 to whatever 9 hours after star was. So, if I decided to get to work at 9, my shift would end at 6. If I didn't take a lunch, it would 5. Now, I usually left anywhere between 7p and 9p (averaging on 7p), with some days at 11p. So, given the extra hours, I allowed myself to get it as close to 9 as possible, considering I'd likely stay 10+ hours anyway. Turds tended to hit the fans around 4p/5p, extending my hours. It was the nature of the job.

New manager comes. He doesn't like that his employees don't get there at 8, but doesn't bother to tell me. He just tries to writes me up. We have policies, where I have to be told and given an opportunity to improve before a write up, so he and HR do that. But what they say is, "if you don't think you'll get to work by 815am, call Mr. Manager". Ok, cool. So, I call him every morning. Then the write up. I ask why, and they said that I'm not at work by 815. I explain that I'm adhering to my contract AND I work WAY longer than anyone else, including Mr. Manager. "That contract was with the previous manager" they said. "With all due respect, it wasn't. It was with the Company. And Mr. Manager never attempted to renegotiate a new contract, nor would I have agreed to it anyway. So, let me get this straight... You care more about arrival time, than the hours I put in ensuring the lines never go down?". "Yes" they respond, "but you still have to make sure the lines don't go down". "Ok, so the extra hours and effort I put in, every single day, mean nothing and I'm still getting written up?" "Correct". "Ok. The consider this my two-week's notice"

Whoo. I thought I was over this, but reliving it just now pissed me off something fierce, I'll tell you that for free!

i would have told them that since, according to them, the contract was with the manager not the company, then it was void the moment he was replaced, and therefore I have long since already worked my notice period. And leave there and then

It was an internship and I didn't plan on staying but once I got called in the manager's office. He asked me if I were doing some industrial spying . At that point in life all I wanted was to go home and play some games for the rest of summer until university starts over.

He threatened me he could see everything I did on my computer and asked me if he should look it up. To which I said go ahead you'll find my job.

Couple days later I arriver exactly 3 minutes lates because of public transportation issue. I used to arrive 15 minutes early everyday because my transport schedule was that way. I got summoned again to tell me to leave earlier.

I told all that to my university and they decided to blacklist the company. Being that my university was part of a .bigger network, their behaviour led them to be cut off from the biggest local intern pool.

No idea why they were so annoying, I wasn't even browsing Reddit on their computer back then and used my phone for that kind of stuff. No idea what lead them to think I'd steal data. I don't even know if they have competitors haha

My first job out of the military, I was hired as a project manager and was largely brought on to improve their processes. After speaking when almost every person in this company (200 or so), documenting the current business processes, and pulling together feedback for areas of improvement, I put together a plan to present to the president of the company (my boss). He said all the right things, but took absolutely no action. A few months and a few repetitions of this, and my boss asked me how I was doing the Wednesday before Christmas. I told him I was frustrated due to the lack of process improvement. He told me "if you can't find a way to be happy with how things are, maybe it's time to look elsewhere"

Noted. I had a recruiter call me the next day, and that turned into an offer making another 30%, remote two days a week, shorter hours, and a better work climate. My boss had the audacity to tell me I should've talked to him about it

Started a job in July I was 60% qualified for. By December I had made enough changes to the job description (by adding things I was able to do that prior people couldn't), my manager decided to reclassify my job. New title, new description, new salary pay band. Manager hands me an envelope with my new title, description, and rate of pay. I say "thanks, but we just created a job that I'm 95% qualified for. I expect to be in the 95% qualified section of the new pay band, but this rate is for the 60% qualified. We go back and forth for three months. With 1 hour notice he calls me into a phone meeting with his boss where I can state my case for a proper raise to reflect my new duties.

Big boss says "we don't negotiate raises, you were hired at 60% qualified, you'll stay there, and get 1-3% raises annually based on merit. If you want a raise, find another job." I did.

Last I heard my job was filled by one of my subordinates who was maybe 30% qualified. The good news is the job was kind of a joke, so I'm glad one of my old reports was getting a huge raise to do essentially her same job, because even my boss didn't understand the changes I made, and they were instantly forgotten when I left.

How do you quantify "qualified"? And why were you allowed to completely rewrite your job description to one you were "more qualified" for?

There was a rubric for qualified scores. Software X power user? +8%. Experience in position Y? +1% per year. Bachelor's degree in the following fields? +20% The premise was "make everything internally clear and we can internally promote, set career progressions and encourage people to remain loyal. This was a huge company that tried to absolve themselves of any accusation of racism/misogyny/ageism by saying "no, we apply the exact metric to everyone".

I didn't personally rewrite my job description. I was able to demonstrate other programs and processes were able to achieve the same/better results, and would do so quicker/cheaper/more easily. This was really easy because the job was stuck in the past. Shit like "I can upload a csv to import this data" was basically witchcraft, as the current description called for typing thousands of lines by hand (and rewarded this experience with +2% qualification for every year of data entry experience). Suddenly the two week long job that required ten years of experience was done in thirty minutes.

I convinced them the -35% hit I took on my qualifications because I'd never used done ancient software could be swapped out with a +40% qualification in excel, for example, so my supervisor rewrote the job to include these advancements.

I won the major ideation jam at a tech telecom company every year I worked there, making them millions...

Meanwhile I was having my desk destroyed and harassed due to my disability by lower management

I sued them for discrimination not but two weeks after I came back from the vacation I win because I got the desk trashing on camera.

at my old company I had a co-worker who was moderately competent if he tried but didn't seem to do so all that often.

My boss had been dangling a promotion for me for a few months, and I'd put in some extra work during that time related to my co-worker who seemed to be unable to manage a development team for one of his projects.

promotion time came and even though my manager was very aware that I was doing a significant portion of a co-worker's job, they offered the co-worker the promotion in order to keep them around since they had another job offer.

I think I was gone in about 2 months? didn't take too long to line something better up.

When my management chain was busy doing everything but listening to engineers, and then tried to do the engineering themselves. A real moment of clarity happened and I realized they were determined to fuck up badly and cost the company money, 8 months of work, and possibly put us in an unrecoverable position.

At another company, we were bought by a private equity firm. There's only one way those transactions go, and I wanted to be first out the door rather than compete for jobs with thousands of other engineers.

they had me work 9-5 most days, and deploys started at 11pm but were on weekends. It sucks that we were salary and didn't get comp time for the late nights, but we were salary on the days when there wasn't much to do too, so it kinda balanced out. Til they decided that they were gonna switch deploys to Tuesday night. So I worked 9-5, came back in at 11, was supposed to be done at 5am and then sleep til 9, but the deploy went over, and we ended up not getting off of the deploy call till about 5pm the next day. For those of you keeping score at home, that's 24 hours out of 30 spent at work. There was no comp time, there was no "attaboy!", there was no talk of changing the way we do deploys, or having a handoff team available if they run long again. The next two deploys were someone else's responsibility, but they also went long. Once It seemed to be that this was just how things are, I started looking. They had the nerve to say they were "shocked" when I handed in my notice.

This is wild to me. I'm on salary. But paid by the minute. We almost never work our full 152 hours per 4 week cycle, usually 130-140 hours. We do anywhere from 4-11 hour shifts. We are rostered for service calls, if any adjustments are made to our shift, the entire shift will be paid overtime @ 1.7 (and not counted towards monthly cycle) if we go over our 152 hours we are paid overtime rate by the minute. And if we reach 11 hours on a shift we are not allowed to do any work or drive any vehicles, we have to call a taxi or get another crew to take us home.

Excuse me, but "full time" is 120 hours in 4 weeks. What's this 130-140 bullshit, let alone 152?

You're getting screwed even in what you intended to be an example of a better workplace!

Edit: I can't math gud.

40 hours per week, the standard of "full time" in most places, equates to 160 hours per four weeks. 152 hours is the equivalent of a 38 hour week...

You seem salty. What do you do for work? Do you love it? How much do you make?

yeah we were on salary and if you went over 40 in a week then you went over. I ended up leaving for a job that pays about 15% more, has unlimited PTO, full WFH when this job was hybrid and I haven't put in more than about 35 hours in a week since then

I worked a day and a half at Hardee's. First was half a day of "training" on the nastiest, greasiest tablet you can imagine. It was mostly health and safety protocols and regulations. Next was a full day of not doing any of that shit and selling dirty food. I never went back. It was a really fucking bad time to quit a job, but I couldn't bring myself to basically give one or more people food poisoning every day....

Wasn't the location that used to exist at N. Broadway and New Circle Road, by any chance?

Nope! It was between an on ramp embankment and one of those gnarly rural streets that looks like it's been fucking mortared. It was in a cartoonish shithole of a small town in the moddle of nowhere.

Small tech Company fired a loyal and tireless employee so they could use her salary to hire an executive.

Fuck that shit, I bolted.

Worked at a company where I built their entire Amazon sales channel. Literally brought in millions in revenue. Dealt with a lot of shit throughout, and didn't get paid nearly enough.

They had been dangling the promise of a bonus structure or commission in front of me for a year.

Boss flipped out over stupid shit regularly.

Throughout COVID, they expected us to be in office. This went as well as could be expected and the office became a huge transmission vector.

But what finally did it was being brought into the owner's office and getting told "We just bought this company. We need you to learn their 3PL system, learn their website backend, and manage their inventory levels. If this goes well, you might even get a raise in a few months."

I was gone within a month.

Worked for a company that had a bonus plan, we never hit it because sales sucked at their job and if they didn't sell no one got bonuses. One month we happened to be on track for once, since my department wasn't revenue generating all I could do to help was put off buying a few things until next month. We hit our numbers but never got any bonus. When I asked why I was told that adding the bonuses into the budget made us go over so we didn't qualify.

What part of bonus did they not get.

At a startup, Pushpay if anyone cares.

I was the most senior person in the customer success team, I was the one that built out the majority of the materials used for training and resourcing other departments, I was relied on to lead the team even though I wasn’t a manager, and in my third year with the org they gave everyone on the team a raise except me. Said I was above the new pay band for the role and that I wouldn’t get any more raises unless I got a new role. I’d been asking for a new role and promotion to be in line with my duties for over a year and had been passed up for 4 promotions to other people who all had an uncanny similarity in their demeanor, the way they did their hair, and how they dressed.

I was gone something like four weeks later for a much better job, which I was then head hinted away from 9 months later and am now in the best job I’ve ever had.

This happened back in 2012 when economy was suffering from the 08 market crash. I worked for a third party utility company. The kind that signs you up and rates go sky rocket high. Anyway, the firm hired a lot of data entry folks including myself. It was an interesting time because there were no jobs for many years. We have teachers, a chemical engineer, a stock trader, college students, personal trainer working at this dead-end minnimum wage job. There's got to be 20 of us sitting in rows. The supervisor would sit at the far end facing us like how a classroom is set up. Like teach facing a bunch of students.

So they fired people for random things. One dude was fired for standing up to stretch his legs and decided it was better to stand and work at the same work. One lady was fired for using company internet to browse her class materials. And a lady for eating fish for lunch. She ended up causing a scene, and cop was called. She kept emphasizing how the boss has a small genital. One day, this dude under me sensed it was his time. He's been warned by the supervisor for not sitting up straight. And also he thought him being black and the previous two ladies fired were black meant he is next. So next day, he didn't show up. I stayed for a while and left without a job prospect in line.

Was this in North Korea by any chance? It sure sounds like it.

Eating fish ? I can't tell if this is all an elaborate joke... what's with the fish ? or standing up ? sounds like you're describing the book 1984

Italian family owned business. Ran the business like a mafia. Also people are just desperate for work during that time.

When the new general manager (the third one in a year, and 5th since I started) decided to go really big into "Lean" and was literally reading to the office personnel from a Paul Akers book on lean as if we were in the third grade.

I read this comment twice before I figured out you weren't talking about codeine and soda.

What was he talking about tho

Lean/six sigma. Its kinda hard to describe, but its basically a way of doing business that is 'more efficient'. Its principles are having as little inventory on hand as possible and trying to make sure there is no process waste by making sure everything happens "just in time". For everyone but workers it works pretty well to generate more profit and produce more goods, or at least it did until the supply chain got completely fucked.

Yeah. And it's wildly risky for the business. Another sign that the leadership intends to inflate the stock price, sell their stock, and move to an island somewhere while the company fails.

A few main issues contributed: the commute was 1.5-2h each way. The pay was low, and the raises that kept being hinted at never materialized. And the supervisor... picture this: you're in your mid 20's,and your supervisor is the same age as you. He was clearly only made supervisor because he's good at the work he used to do, not because he has any leadership skills. He doesn't seem to enjoy being in management, and is responsible for a solid 90% of all workplace hostility. He's not exactly mean or anything, but definitely way too intense. Despite having done the same work you're doing, his expectations seem maybe impossible? His work is his life and he brags about things like working on Christmas.

There were a lot of things I genuinely liked about the job, but after a time my mental health was the worst it had ever been. It's the only time I've genuinely felt suicidal at all, as in, not intrusive thoughts, but actual desire. I had so little spare time because of the commute, but couldn't afford to move closer. I knew I had to leave the job and was frequently applying for other jobs but hadn't had any success yet. I was too scared of not having another job lined up.

Then I went and hung out with an old coworker from a restaurant I had worked at in the past, and I found out the dishwasher there had a higher hourly wage than I did at my STEM job that required a degree - it was a pretty fancy restaurant but still... Within like two or three days (I think, although I was dissociating a lot so it's hard to say) I had my resignation letter turned in, and I was ready to leave and never look back.

When my then senior dev left and made his own company and asked me if I'm willing to go on a bumpy ride with him.

I'm currently Employee Number 3 (the other 2 before me beeing the owners) and am happier than in any other odd job I had.

The company we left doesn't really look that good right now, but they are backed by a gigantic mother company.

Where my infosec homies at??

They were issuing a single SSL cert to all of their clients. This cert was encrypting CC data.

That SSL cert lived on an FTP server.

The password was something like Spring2019!

We stored clients images on an SFTP server. I was a web dev. I didn't have access to the SFTP server. I had to tell a team what dirs to put assets in so my clients websites could display images.

... Tell me youve seen worse, and I'll continue to up the ante.

Current company I'm at I was reporting a slow Virtual server. It looked like one of the monitoring scripts was stuck in the loop and slowing the machine to a crawl.

Call up cyber, they proceed to tell me it's drive issue. The google DRIVERS Download the first thing they see an ad for some virus. The machine ended up needing to be completely reimaged.
Some days mann

They were issuing a single SSL cert to all of their clients.

How does this even work? Doesn’t the domain admin send their own CSR? Even if your company was serving as that admin, a single cert only works for the domain to which it’s assigned, so how could it be reused for multiple clients?

I think it was a self signed SSL.

Not all SSLs are domain specific. There's wildcard domains (used for subdomains or related domains), and self signed domains, and probably more.

Think like... A liquor store in the middle of nowhere that transmits CC data via internet. They have a SSL. They don't necessarily even have a registered domain.

Self-signed certs are not viable for general use because they’ll generate a browser warning that “Joes Liquor Co is not a trusted Certificate Authority” that will scare off 99% of users. And wildcard certs still need at least one specific domain, e.g. *.joesliquor.com. The only way I can imagine this working is if the vendor was handing out separate servers on client.vendor.com and giving each of them the same SSL cert for *.vendor.com.

We would do the implementations. It would include Tomcat, IIS, and an out of date version of Internet Explorer. Beyond that, I'm not sure how they were getting by the warnings. All I can tell you is we were issuing one SSL certificate to multiple clients, and that SSL cert lived on our FTP server which had a very weak password.

I'm not sure I've seen worse, but I still want to see what's worse than what you've posted

Oh I can keep going, baby. We just scratched the surface.

Ever heard of ProgressABL?

Don't think I've ever had a proper FTS moment in my career but the closest was during Covid, before any vaccine had come out and the company mandated RTO. Did the science and worked out I had about 25% chance of DYING if I caught it. I was it wasn't going to happen, they said yes it was, bit of to and fro then they said "disciplinary" so I said well let's cut out all the unpleasantness and just go for a mutual agreement. Got three months pay and walked out at the end of the week, shortly afterwards landing another job with a substantial pay rise and 100% WFH.

I had a proper FTS moment in an interview, which the company failed with flying colours. It's a good job it was a mile walk back to the railway station because if I'd spoken to the agent before that walk (which took about 3 minutes) I'd have said something a lot ruder than FTS.

Company hired 5 fresh grass grads, me included. Tasked to build AI products (this was when LLMs were still conceptual Markov chains and ANNs were the shiny new things) and other software products for huge corporations.

Obviously one of the projects failed, regional manager went into a meeting to discuss what to do with the failed project and told the client "we're not even a software company".

Started looking for interviews the next day.

I worked for Dish Television. One day their CEO announced that they were going to enter the 5G cellular space as a pivot from their primary TV distribution business that was losing subscribers at an alarming rate.

Cox cable has been advertising that they now have cell phones. Again. They tried it ten or so years ago and then they stopped providing cell service after about a year.

I wouldn't even get internet through cox if we had a reasonable alternative. Why would I torture myself by adding another service?

Standard Millennial means I've had so so many, but I can define one specifically, my first "career" job.

Worked in a construction job with inspection. Anyone who's worked in construction knows it's feast or famine depending on season, winter/rainy season may not be a lot of work. I was told everyone was to help out around the lab, there was one full time lab guy who did need help. Took them at their word and helped him out, all the other techs ran away. This led to a lot of overtime. A LOT because I was in the field expected to show up to availability to jobs 24/7 but also work regular office hours. Led to interactions like in a meeting

"No more overtime, there's too little work" "YES!" "No @Azal, you're still bringing in money."

As you can guess, there was a lot of bullshit piling on. But the one that made it happen was them taking out the one thing that made the job tolerable. The vacation policy was such that if a holiday came on and you had no hours, you didn't get paid. All your PTO was earned a certain amount of time based on your work. What this meant was you had guys that worked there for years but barely scraped 40 hour weeks and used up all their PTO in hunting season and whined when there was no pay at Christmas. Me, who worked 80+ hours weeks was able to take a week long vacation, first I've ever done, and when a snowstorm blasted the state and shut everything down I didn't miss out on pay when the week there was no work to be done.

So that next year they changed vacation policy. 1-5 years, 1 week vacation. 5-10 years 1.5 weeks and so on, now holidays didn't count against your PTO.

I promptly went and got my CDL and left that shithole of a job.

Leave in the states is weird. In NZ I work 40h a week and I get 4 weeks of annual leave (vacation) and 10 sick days. The sick days can accrue up to 20 days, annual leave is infinite but lots of businesses try to encourage you to take it every year.

When you change jobs all the annual leave is paid out.

If you have 15 days of annual leave accrued and there's a public holiday within 15 days of you leaving then you're paid for that too.

That sounds like a dream.

Current job I can accrue maybe 2 weeks, and it's a use it or lose it scenario. That two weeks is sick and vacation wrapped in one.

We're kinda fucked over here.

One week vacation... ? per year ??

That's pretty normal for meh-tier kind of jobs in the US, though usually you "graduate" to two weeks sooner, like after a year.

In many workplaces there's a culture of taking as little as possible of the allowed vacation time. Sometimes it can lead to a small bonus when those days get "paid out" at the year end. Other times, the only encouragement is just pressure from the boss or coworkers. Note that there is neither a legal minimum for vacation days, not a requirement that employees actually use the days they have.

Hey, it was my first job I got any vacation, period.

That is shockingly normal over here in the US.

That vacation policy change sounds like it was a huge improvement. I find it odd you didn't agree with that? The numbers should be higher but it's much more fair. Holiday pay should never depend on vacation time, that's just cruel.

I'll TLDR it because my problem may have been buried in the details.

Old policy, the sheer amount of hours I had to work meant I had 2 weeks of PTO, plus I had a pocket of time held aside for sick time just in case and I had the time banked for holidays. Anyone else could have gotten the hours, I got them because I helped in the lab which was billable hours, everyone else took off at a moments notice.

New Policy. I had a week of PTO plus holidays. Full stop. Suddenly working a job with those insane hours meant jack and didly.

And I realize it helped the old guard there, made things better for them. But when I was quitting there wasn't a talking me into staying because it took the very last reason to stay at the company for me.

Call center at KP. A radiology department with the worst micromanagement. I hurt my back when I was first hired then a few months later. Missed three days the second time. They’re suppose to look for patterns in the attendance and the supervisor decided that was a pattern. Two occurrences months apart. Had to get the Union involved.

Anyways, the supervisor will look for ways to write people up because once someone is written up, they give you a two year period where you’re unable to transfer departments. Let’s call her… Vicky. Vicky didn’t want people leaving so she would write people up or talk shit about you to the manager of the department you’re trying to transfer to. The turnover rate was so high because of her. People wrote complaints about her but she’s good friends with her boss so they never do anything about it.

She constantly harassed people. I was part of the company for five years and going into that department made me quit. How they can allow such a person to get away with the harassment… I couldn’t stay. Made me hate waking up and going to work. Was depressed and hit a bad place in my mental health. So glad I was able to get out of there and now I’m trying to go back to school for a better job. Can’t say I’ll never deal with horrible bosses again but at least it’s not with her making barely enough to survive.

When the CTO decided that he wouldn’t do anything about my work getting sabotaged by a busy-body from another department. As soon as I had signed a new contract, I handed in my notice and told our head of HR (who was very understanding but ultimately powerless) all the reasons why I quit. They didn‘t even try to make me a better offer. I don‘t think I did anything wrong, in fact the CTO had awarded me the company’s "tech employee of the year" award just 3 months earlier.

Managed a shop for over 10 years and took on duties to the point that the owner was only there for a few hours a week in the morning to check emails. The store did record business during the early covid days, and never closed the doors for a single day. The staff was stretched thin, stressed, and everyone was working like crazy and a bit nervous about health because we had a couple older guys working with us and nobody knew the harm profile of covid at that time. The owner bought expensive store improvements (with profits, and fraudulently claimed federal covid benefits) instead of paying the staff, or even saying thanks in any way. See ya!

I want to report them for the fraud thing, but I'm the only one who knows about it aside from the owner, so they'd know it was me who reported it.

I want to report them for the fraud thing, but I’m the only one who knows about it aside from the owner, so they’d know it was me who reported it.

What's the owner gonna do, fire you?

Fair point. However, we still run in the same professional circles & there would be blow back. The fraud thing offends my core values on fairness, but its easier for me to leave it weighing on my conscience, than report it and stay up at night wondering if it will come back to bite me in my professional life and make it harder to keep a roof over my head and food on my table. It's a shitty situation.

It was my first real job out of college. It was at a university "group" (literally 3 people at the time including me) planning to spin out into a company.

It started with stupidly long hours until covid hit. Then things were okay for a while, we were just working on our prototype product at a comfortable pace. Then this prototype started nearing completion and shit hit the fan.

First off, I was asked to be a co-founder. This would apparently entail working evenings and Sundays (!!!) on company-related stuff so the normal working hours stayed free for working on the product. I declined.

Then, the team lead started making promises. Lots of promises, for demonstrations of our product. And every fucking time he never told us until the last fucking moment leaving us scrambling to prepare something. At some point there were a couple of 12-hour days and that's when I said fuck it and handed in my resignation.

What also played a part is that I wanted to do more software development for quite some time but the team lead kept blocking me in that.

Was a telemarketer for 2 weeks once. Mostly calling for donation type stuff on behalf of March of Dimes and the like but sometimes they put us on scripts for the NRA. I had gotten used to plenty of no's and was already on the verge of quitting when this fellow said yes.

Phones are already a bad job for me as I am both a people pleaser and get stage fright, so imagine my reaction when the prompt after his agreement to a $25 donation was to ask him for $50, and then $100, and well you get the idea. The final prompt it gave me was for a $500 donation in exchange for a lifetime NRA membership and a leather jacket and I'll be god-damned if this guy didn't agree without breaking a sweat. I quit within 48 hours.

Now I'm a mail carrier and am much happier.

When I acted as a lead for two years while they dragged their feet on giving me the official title, then immediately gave it and a major raise to my successor (who I mentored to midrange from junior) when I switched departments. I threw away the whole company, which ironically prided themselves on diversity and made a big deal about it every chance they got.

There was only one female leader in the entire division, and she was only put on fluff projects. I went to a supposedly conservative company, which gave me the title and a 50% raise within the first year.

Left after 2.5 months in a company, had 2 weeks annual leave before leaving on day 1 after returning.

That's IT job and it was in large multinational company. I won't name the company, because it was team's issue, not a company's issue. Also the company moved out of the country so it's in the past anyway.

Basically manager was on power trip - think of "everyone sucks except me", or "I don't have time for this shit" sort of thinking. One moment "hey my best friend!!!" sort of behavior, another moment treats you like shit with almost being passive aggressive all the time. Few examples what happened:

  • "We've already agrees on this" and "we already discussed this" or "you need to understand what sort of answer you expect before asking". These were the answers most of the time to my qiestions.
  • Can say "fuck you" in front of colleagues. Yet some of the colleagues tolerated it. 🤷
  • Blames you for a minor reason. Treats like shit.

During the annual leave, when there was around week left, I started having annexiety/panic attacks. Wake up in the morning with high heart rate, stresses, that I have to returnt to work in several days. I realised that I have to leave this job, just fuck it.

Luckily, through friends, I found another job few days later. It's been MAJOR upgrade, felt amazing and valued.

Fuck that ex-manager in particular. I know where he works now, and I will never apply to that company at the same time he works there. 🖕

Worked at a music instrument store Wednesday through Sunday. Was required to come in Tuesday before the store opened (7am) to attend accessories department meetings that were a giant waste of time. Hung out with friends Monday night, car wouldn't start, had to walk home. After an hour long walk, burnt out from partying, I finally landed in bed at 4am. Skipped the meeting.

Got "fired" but was given a chance to grovel for my job. Yeah, I'll pass. Fuck that company.

Stayed at the office until 3am to finish something that wasn't even my responsibility but would make the whole company look bad if delivered late. Boss was mad I wasn't back at 8am and tried to send someone to knock on my door to wake me up.

I ripped one out in the elevator with the CEO. He said 'you disgust me' and the secretary ran out in floods of tears. About three months later I tendered my resignation because a promising opportunity for advancement presented itself.