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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!”

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

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.

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.

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”

2. 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.

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!