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 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.
Bomb threat, also 2 colleagues went to prison, unrelated to the bomb.
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.
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.
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 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.
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
Sounds like the one I quit in 2021
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.
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.”
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.
Rejecting my vacation request for stupid reasons and not giving me a raise for over two years. I had been there for 10 years.
What exactly were the reasons? Just curious.
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 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.
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.
Gotta love the, “I am the leader here,” mentality.
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. [
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.
