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.
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.
Yeah their new VP basically said “we don’t do mid-year raises” which is just dumb, they also never conveyed to me that I did receive a raise, but it was a 1.2% COL increase, which was a slap in the face. I received a higher COL increase after I had been with my new company for only 3 months at the end of last year.
My former boss and my dad used to work together which is how I had learned about the job to begin with and they happened to go out for drinks with some other guys and my boss just asked my dad point blank “Am I going to lose Haggis?” My dad just said “If you can’t get him 5% by the end of the year, he’ll probably jump.” My boss responded with “Well it’s been fun working with him.” He genuinely tried everything he could, had a 3 page document written up about why I deserved a mid-level position, explained why he couldn’t lose me and the company just said “eh, wait till next year.”
I applied for another job and had the recruiter reach out to me within 20 minutes due to it being a company I had worked for prior (left because I didn’t like the project I was on and wanted a change of pace) and within an hour and a half of applying they had called me and then two weeks later I was given an offer. The offer was the crazy part because I was making about 74k as a junior at the other job, I asked for 85 as a “high ball” to hope they would give me at least 80 and they told me they would beat that, so the next time they asked I said 90 and they just gave me 92 anyway. Definitely felt nice to be more appreciated.
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, 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.
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.
When I got told to never be honest about our situation again
I’m intrigued. What was your situation?
Found out I was making way less than others with the same title
DoNt DiScUsS wAgEs WiTh EmPloYeEs
Fuck that noise. I ask how much everyone is making on day one
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.
I’ve known several people that were good leaders until they became management, then it just became like Danno’s experience. “Fuck you, I got mine” was all too common of a way of thinking at my former place of employment.
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.
Surviving a layoff… time to leave before second layoff happens.
That seems like a reasonable and logical decision.
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There’s a lot of variables that go into those decisions. But for many people it’s better to have a stable future prospect then a possible payout short-term.
My current employer had a relatively small layoffs round (about 3% of the workforce). More people resigned afterwards than during the layoffs.
If management is really good. And they have to do a layoff no matter what. They will cut deeper than they need to. And then explain to everybody the financial situation and why the layoff was both necessary, but sufficient to guarantee the survival of the company. They will demonstrate to the people they laid off that they’re being taken care of in the company still cares and that the survivors shouldn’t worry because the company took care of its people.
Unfortunately the reality is a lot of executives will go incommunicado for a layoff. It’ll stop relaying anything. So the worst case scenario plays out in people’s minds. Especially about finances. They get very shy about the real financial situation.
The best I’ve seen is post layoff all the survivors are given a incentive scheme to stick around. That you know increases over time. To prevent people from jumping ship immediately. Cuz no matter what you do post layoff you’re going to lose more organic people. And probably you’re more capable of people. Because they’re more able to find a job quickly. so you’re going to have a brain drain you need to fight and if you don’t you might be in a worse operational position then if you hadn’t had a lay off at all.
Especially smaller businesses cuz they suffer from key person vulnerabilities more than larger companies.
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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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.
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!”
- what you say and what you do are only vaguely connected
- at the end of the day, money always matters more than anything else
- if you have to follow the law, just stick to the letter instead of the spirit of it
I am confused? The “previous violations” were your doing or the employers?
They would have surely been fired if they had two ethics violations. Only companies get away with a slap on a wrist.
The hospital had violations and for the next 5 (i think) years, all staff had to do ethics training twice per year. Money and productivity were much more important to them than patient care. Shortly before i left they quit buying wet wipes. Staff was expected to clean patients (bathing, vomit, BM, blood) with washcloths that were put into laundry bins for wash and reuse.
Nebraska Med?
No. An HCA hospital in Texas.
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.
What’s horrifying to me isn’t that VW used ‘everyone does it’ as a defense, it’s that multiple carmakers are apparently gassing monkeys for emission tests.
Wait, wtf… Volkswagen killed monkeys in emission tests?
Holy fuck you are right. Wtf is wrong with people…
Jeez… did that story ever reach the press?!?
It did in the Netherlands. And then people stopped caring as the next hot article got out.
It seems to be public knowledge. I hadn’t heard of this either. Yet another in a long line of companies doing shitty things and I’m sure a lot of money spent to make sure this didn’t become household knowledge.
a lot of monkey spent
Huehuehehe…, its ok, I’ll show myself out…
Germans and gas chambers, name a more iconic duo.
Username checks out.
Reminder that VW was established by Hitler.
OH NO
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.
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.
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.
“Mistakenly emailed a spreadsheet of employees salaries”? Sounds more like something a pissed of employee would do just before quitting
They gave me a $3 raise and warned me not to ask again for a few years.
Wait, $3 an hour, pay period, or annually? Because I would be kinda OK with a $3/hour raise.
Per hour
Depends on how much it was to begin with, I guess
Yeah, fair. $3/hr for a 15/hr job is amazing. For a 45/hr job? Not so much.
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?
Because metering pumps cost more in the short term than custom code, boards, software stacks, and most importantly…consultants.
Uncarbonated liquids are dead simple to titrate, it’s true. For a carbonated product like beer, it’s actually a much more complicated problem than it seems. The amount of foam you get on a keg pour of beer is effected by a lot of variables - how clean the lines are, how cold the lines are, how long the lines are, the diameter of the lines, whether you’re using beergas or co2, how old the beer is, if it’s keg conditioned or force carbonated, how recently the keg was moved into refrigeration, how cold the beer itself is, if it’s the first pour of the day or if the tap has been running frequently, the mechanical design of the faucet, the temperature, cleanliness, shape, and size of the glass it’s going into, and more. It’s really fiddly business, I can’t see how a push button system could take everything into account and render less wastage than a human operator with a feel for the system. Draft systems are voodoo, ask me how I know.
Anyway companies typically have an unrealistic expectation of what draft wastage ought to be. I would advise any bar to expect something like 15% wastage at minimum on professional draft equipment, more if they’re using bargain grade hardware anywhere in the system, but ownership doesn’t want to hear that.
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.
I’ve worked with many people during my life, and there are good and bad people at every company. Most are average, as expected. But I have the mindset that it’s not MY company, so I don’t really care if employees are good or bad anymore.
But I’m not really depending on them for my own learning. I’m pretty much always learning on my own. Which could be hard in other fields than IT.
Ah, but when the bad employees make messes that you then need to clean up? Or someone makes a mistake and everyone on the team gets reamed out because “we’re a team and someone should have caught that, so it’s everyone’s fault”?
I’m a software engineer.
Yeah we have the same culture here and it’s bullshit. :)
