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 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.

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.

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

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.

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…

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

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!

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.