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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

It was my first real job out of college. It was at a university “group” (literally 3 people at the time including me) planning to spin out into a company.

It started with stupidly long hours until covid hit. Then things were okay for a while, we were just working on our prototype product at a comfortable pace. Then this prototype started nearing completion and shit hit the fan.

First off, I was asked to be a co-founder. This would apparently entail working evenings and Sundays (!!!) on company-related stuff so the normal working hours stayed free for working on the product. I declined.

Then, the team lead started making promises. Lots of promises, for demonstrations of our product. And every fucking time he never told us until the last fucking moment leaving us scrambling to prepare something. At some point there were a couple of 12-hour days and that’s when I said fuck it and handed in my resignation.

What also played a part is that I wanted to do more software development for quite some time but the team lead kept blocking me in that.