Ask Lemmy

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.

When I got told to never be honest about our situation again

The boss told me to leave and never come 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.

Found out I was making way less than others with the same title

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 🖕

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.