Today marks the start of my first week of unemployment after quitting. My boss and I were into each other, but he refused to pursue anything with me while I worked there because it would’ve been unethical. So I quit.
Worth it.
I worked in a shithole warehouse as a rentals manager with various types of drug addicts, ex-cons, and temp workers. The shipping manager nodded off on heroin and crashed his forklift into a wall for example. Wasn’t fired. That’s the dangerous environment I was in for my previous job. The person I replaced as manager was an alcoholic who couldn’t keep up with paperwork. My general manager loved doing crack. I could go on, but it’ll get too lengthy. The warehouse focused on construction supplies and concrete. Very dirty building, I’d blow black boogers out my nose after every shift.
Briefly I started as a parts picker. I had some functional grey matter so I moved up quickly within 3 months and was making 22/hr in 2012. My job was then counting scaffolding and other stuff like sidewalk pins/small pieces of equipment on returns, rebuilding the rotting/damaged wooden boxes that sat outside on a construction site in the mud and snow all year, inventory, and trying to get brain fried temps to count accurately which wasn’t possible. Then shipping new rental orders and loading customer trucks via forklift. I started smoking.
I had applied for new jobs and then got the you’re hired phone call for the career I’ve had for the past 12 years while at work counting muddy snowy shit in a box. They asked when I could start, I said 1 month from now which they accepted, and then I just left. Didn’t say a word to anybody working there and blocked all their numbers. Poof I ghosted them. Had my month off work and it’s been an okay I guess time ever since.
The shit hole warehouse sounds awful yeah? It was an upgrade from working 6 days a week patching garbage truck tire flats. I quit that job after a caged tire blew up while filling it. Blew up as it hit target pressure (110 PSI IIRC) as I went to disconnect the air hose, shredding my left palm and throwing me across the building fracturing my left leg purely from the air pressure. I’d be dead if it wasn’t caged. I didn’t particularly enjoy crawling under garbage trucks in the snow with 1 day off a week anyways.
Welcome to Alberta.
quit with the reason of physical health problems but i was also psychologically at my end.
Still put the physical concerns on front because i felt bad for an understaffed grocery store that has a stressful schedule because of rotating inventory even in a calm week.
I liked 11 hour Saturday shifts best because that was just me at the register, with an hour break in the middle, and no additional tasks beside keeping shelves orderly.I had what a lot of people would probably consider the ideal job situation.
I paid my dues and worked moderately hard for 4 years. The company grew from a medium sized company to a massive company. Everything was bogged down by bureaucracy. I ended up being a tiny cog of a massive machine. It felt like what I worked on didn’t really matter anymore and because of the bureaucracy I was only really working 10 maybe 20 hours a week. The work-life balance, perks were all amazing. But I was still young at the time (pre-30) and I thought it was way too early in my career to stop giving a fuck.
So I quit and got a job at a startup. Lots of work, but it also felt like I was learning again. It felt like I was being challenged. I don’t regret it, but maybe if I ever get burned out I will try to find a job like that again.
I was dying.
Not exaggerating, get your thyroid checked.
I didn’t, I was fired because I couldn’t work, because I was sick, because they made another sick guy turn up to the office during in global pandemic.
Anyway jokes on them, because I was able to get a different job that I hate as soon as I got out of hospital.
I set up a reliability lab with my boss while we were the only two members of the new department in the company to test our developmental equipment against the competition. After testing our competitor’s gear and finding out they can withstand anything short of being run over with a truck, the head of R&D refused to give us any units to compare with. My boss kept pushing for the units and caused the head of R&D to pull strings to have him fired instead.
I ended up having nothing to do in an empty lab for a few weeks before deciding to quit. I’m glad I did because the R&D units were a dumpster fire and never made it to market. The company wasted over a hundred million buying patents and facilities to develop a garbage product.
So, uh, how’s it going with your former boss then?
I quit my last job because I decided to move from the south to the extreme northern end of New England. Now I’ve got a stupidly long commute ever day, but I also have a 70 acre homestead that’s 15 miles from the nearest flyspeck town or gas station.
I was fired for bullshit from my last job. My job before that, I quit without notice because the place was soul sucking and a capitalist nightmare and I literally cried at my desk daily. If you value your sanity, never work in health insurance claims no matter how desperate you are for money.
got PIPed the instant I returned from work after a week of bereavement for my grandpa’s death, then the week after that we had to euthanize our dear sweet dog of 12.5 years so I took another week off to mourn him.
Literally, 8am Monday when I get back, meeting with my manager PIPing me.
Except I didn’t quit. I made an effort with the PIP until my manager nitpicked over the dumbest shit. Silently decided it wasn’t worth trying to salvage, so I made them fire me.
I still got unemployment and two weeks severance on top of that. If I had accepted the voluntary resignation alternative to the PIP Id be worse off
voluntary resignation alternative
The term is “constructive dismissal.” Get them to put it in writing and either a) they’ll cave, or b) you got a case that most employment lawyers would take on contingency.
Most likely is they’d cave.
It was in writing. I rejected it and went for the PIP instead. And I came out slightly ahead than if I had chosen the resignation, regardless of the specific term.
I would not have been likely to come out ahead going after them for constructive dismissal.
What do you think I would have gained from lawyering up? (if I had the spoons to do that anyways, which I didn’t being in intense grief)
Got a new job that paid more than double the last one and comes with a pension.
My prior employer hired me as remote then had me start coming in 3x a week and the drive was ~1.5 h without traffic and 3+ with traffic. It was too much of a strain on my well-being and family life so I left. I now work fully remote and make 30% more.
I was director level and they were putting me through hell. I found a job working with friends and it’s been stellar since leaving that shitty job. I also felt like their approach to stuff was backwards and archaic… The exec team would review PowerPoint printouts with a red pen then ask for updates… Everything printed… Insane (among other things)
I had very specifically stipulated a hybrid arrangement when I started. Apparently I didn’t get that in writing anywhere, but the vibes were good and I didn’t expect them to back track on that (foolish on my part). I was leaving a fully remote position for the role, and the fact that I’d be earning more money was the only reason I agreed to some time in the office.
They tried to force me into the office 5 days a week, and I made it very clear that I wasn’t going to do that. My manager was fine with this, but their boss was insisting on the schedule change. They fired me and I recently learned that they are now on their 3rd attempt in 6 months to hire a replacement. The person currently in that role does less than I did and they’re paying them nearly 20k more.
Oh well, hopefully about to land a new job with better pay and back to being fully remote. Honestly by the time they fired me, I was just glad to get the hell out of there.
They asked me to develop and install a very invasive spyware on computers (both personal and company’s) of all employees.
Personal is crazy
Yeap. I know they ended up getting nudes of an employee’s OnlyFans due to that.
It was a totally mutual two way equitable firing
Left my job 6 months ago because I was burnt out. I went from being a software developer in a team of 4 to being the only developer at the company. Then the IT support guy left so I was also doing IT support for 30 retail stores along with my regular job. I didn’t have a review or pay rise in the 4 years I was with the company. There was some other stuff around data privacy which was the final straw for me so I left. Still unemployed.
Obviously the workload they were putting on you was way beyond a rational amount for one person. If you’re willing to talk about it, can I ask if you considered simply refusing to do more than “one person’s” amount of work and asked them to prioritize all your tasks so you could work on the things they deemed most important? Obviously this could lead to you being fired, but if you were already set to quit, the outcome would have been the same (except perhaps you’d be eligible for unemployment insurance).
Yeah, it was meant to be one of those ‘temporary’ situations until they found the right people. It became pretty obvious after a while that they weren’t planning on hiring. A couple of months before I quit, I sat down with my boss and told him I couldn’t do my job because I had too much work. I also mentioned that I was burning out. His response was ‘just do what you can’. I gave it a couple of months to see anything would come of our conversation but it didn’t.
The reason that I stayed so long was because it was in an industry that I’m passionate about and that I wanted to be in. I was hoping that things would improve but they didn’t.
After I resigned, they hired 2 people to replace me. I spent my notice period onboarding them.
His response was ‘just do what you can’. I gave it a couple of months to see anything would come of our conversation but it didn’t.
This sounds like he was okay with you pushing back on any work that was too much and saying “no” to any task beyond your reasonable work limits. Even with this did you feel the damage to the working relationship was just too far gone?
You’re right and I did push back on work that wasn’t urgent. Generally my project work got sacrificed for the more pressing things.
The nature of the business meant that a lot of work was urgent and needed immediate attention. When you’ve got a customer in a store and they’re having trouble putting a payment through, you have to drop everything to sort it out because it’s really awkward for the store staff. The same thing if there is a truck waiting to pick up a wholesale order and the warehouse crew is having problems. At that point, the company is losing money. When you’re dealing with external suppliers systems, there’s so many things that fail or go down.
Unfortunately its difficult to build software and manage systems while also dealing with a lot of phone calls and chats from retail and warehouse staff.
At the end of the day the company was under resourced. I highlighted the issues and asked for some help but I didn’t receive any. By that point I was burnt out and made the decision that was best for my health and not the company.
