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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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....
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 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.
I worked for UBreakiFix at the start of the pandemic and they were paying $12/hr. The owner did away with health insurance the year before and announced that we would have to pay the retail price of any broken parts taken from our paychecks. Glass breaks. It happens. Some of those screens are $300+. I wrote a letter to the owner explaining how devastating a sudden $300 drop on a $12/hr paycheck would be and said I won’t earn him one more penny, left my key and never came back.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 🖕
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.
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.
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.