Half my team quit because I told them about a better job offer I got. Oops. I don’t feel bad it. I stayed because I got a WFH guarantee that was pretty much immediately taken away from me.

On Monday, I got in trouble for waving goodbye to one of my bosses at the end of my day. Not even an exaggeration. That’s exactly what happened. I hate my job.

A few weeks into a new job someone reported me for being a dick to them. Management was not happy with me until I proved I had never interacted with this person. Turns out it was just a dumb asshole playing some kind of weird office politics.

Our CEO made a big announcement about how we were going to move from a B2B (Business to Business) environment to a B2C (Business to Consumer) environment. B2C is the future, Internet of Things, yadda yadda.

So, since we have an open door policy, I popped him an email and asked him what the plan was to invest in our infrastructure because, as it stood then, B2C was out of reach and the clients we had attempting it were finding it wasn’t robust enough, citing my example client list and recent failures.

I got immediate heat. Nobody had told him our infrastructure couldn’t do it. “What are your sources? How do you know?” - Sources cited. CEO went to his yes men: “This guy knows what he’s talking about and seems really sure of what he’s saying…”

Oh.

10 years later, we’re on our 3rd CEO, our infrastructure still isn’t updated, and B2C still hasn’t happened.

i realized (in retrospect & a few years ago) that i was near the center of a strongly controversial political hiring decision based on the comments i got from some of my colleagues; but didn’t them piece together until almost a decade+ later.

i’m still not sure what the controversy was; but i do know it was committed by the same c-level exec who took a strange interest in my well being in my the company like i was pip in the dickens novel, great expectations. i assume this because his tenure ended an hour before mine did when the company got bought out. lol

i also learned that my team lead and my manager were on the opposing side of the decision; so i got quite a lesson on what it means to watch your back at work and keeping your ear to the ground.

At my first company I was part of a team of about 20 people. In this team there were multiple instances of office romance drama. We had a manager with a wife and kids that cheated on them with a marketing colleague during a company skiing holiday, we had a team member that had a (not so) secret relationship with a manager and we had a colleague that was in a relationship with a colleague from another department and then started cheating on him with a direct colleague.

The first one I don’t know too much about because it happened before I came to that team but the second and third ones I was in the middle of. The colleague-manager relationship was especially weird because to me and my direct colleagues it was obvious what was going on, they weren’t hiding it that well. But when people asked them about it, they would always deny it which was kinda weird. Anyway, after one of them left the company they supposedly fell in love afterwards and are now (to my knowledge) still together.

The cheating colleague was a whole different story. She had a relationship with a guy from another department who was pretty good looking but he was an ass. They were even living together. She then proceeded to fall in love with a direct colleague from our team and ended up meeting up with this colleague in the company bathrooms during lunch breaks… This went on for a bit (and was somewhat common knowledge in our team) before she broke up with her partner and started living with the new one. Pretty weird. Also, there were multiple occasions where I saw her straight up kissing another guy in our team on the lips for his birthday which was a bit strange as well.

Last story: at my latest company I got hired to be a business analyst. When I walked in, there was no way I was going to be able to carry out this role. They asked me to use data to support and advise but there was literally no data available. So I stepped in together with another colleague to work on this for the next year or so, with great success. We had a whole data platform with interconnected data and a visualization tool by the end.

However, close to the time we finished our work a new colleague joined our team. When he presented himself, his tasks fully overlapped with my original role. I went to my de-facto manager (my actual manager was only HR-responsible and was not very available at the time) and asked him if this person was my replacement, I got told that he wasn’t. The new guy then proceeded to start getting in my way every step of the way. I went to him and asked him if he was there to take over some of my work, he said no. Long story short, by the time it came to the time of the decision of extending my contract to a contract without an end date, they gave me a bunch of negative feedback (which I later found out mostly came from the newly introduced colleage) and only offered me a temporary extension.

This got me so frustrated and annoyed that I ended up quitting over it. They were very surprised by that but I did not hold back with my feedback during my exit interviews. Luckily I’m now at a different company that seems a much better fit for me where I can actually carry out work that I like. But yeah, overall a pretty eventful 8 years so far…

Wasn’t exactly my workplace, but a contractor. Basically, as a cost saving measure, they layed off half of the IT department. And then they got hacked. They just re-flashed everything, and the threat was out of their system, but they messed up big time. The new images weren’t locked down properly, so they almost immediately got hacked again. I noticed that they’d messed up, and pointed it out to a few people, but it was too late.

Now the execs need a scapegoat, so they gut the IT department again. I don’t work for them, not even close to the business relationship, but their managers call me to a meeting room and try to get me in trouble? Try to make me admit to doing something wrong? And it was just their admin people there, not like my heads or anything. It was kind of a surreal experience.

This was a while ago, and their tech is still a bit funky. (Some details are lightly fuzzed, but this all is basically true)

Left a management position because of overstress and poor work culture. Before leaving, I recommended a guy for my replacement. Not the most skilled folk, a bit of weird guy, but was very passionate and good to motivate people.

Sometimes later, an ex colleague told me he was saying bad things about me, that I hired a girl just because she was pretty, and such evil things.

I got pissed so I started investigating, noone believes those things because they know me, but they still believe he is good and downplayed my concerns, even the girl confirmed nothing innapropriate ever happened with me (it was actually a joke I said in a completely non serious context that was used maliciously by somebody). My supervisor is “of the old kind”, so he just repeated I was a good guy, I didn’t need to worry and I should just go on, that I will encounter mean people all the time and that I should just “get a beer with him” and all will be good.

I even confronted the guy and he exploded in a fit of rage, saying that he heard those things from the girl, that I was a terribile manager, that people hated me and my organization was terrible.

I understood he was delusional, no one really belived him, so I left him to his delusions and went my merry way. To this day, months later, people still come to me for help with my supposed terrible organization that now crumbled with him.

I was part of a small team and our two chief people got accused of stealing corporate IP and selling it to competition. That was part of a larger mess involving the dissolution of our entire company branch. People were ordered to write transfer requests and move to a different company (which was taking over stuff our branch did). Those that refused were told to quit. Those that refused to quit had pressure applied to them (via fudging payment, raising their workload, etc) until they quit.

It was a mess, plain and simple.