Ask Lemmy

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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 gone within a month.

They gave me a $3 raise and warned me not to ask again for a few years.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.