3 ms·
Pay is one factor but rarely is so misaligned across all coworkers. My last job(MSP) had about 30 employees. I received my job entirely because 3 people quit a
by sleepysysadmin 5y ago
Pay is one factor but rarely is so misaligned across all coworkers.
My last job(MSP) had about 30 employees. I received my job entirely because 3 people quit at the same time freeing up some spots. In the job interview they talked about how they only expect 60% of my time to be billed. That they have work-life balance meetings and if you ever have an idea pose it.
Those meetings lasted about a couple months and contributed no changes. Many months went by and it was certainly a 'beating continue until morale improvements." Personally I just stayed out of the office as much as possible and avoided a truckload of office drama.
Long story short, the first head to leave was another senior guy. He took this job because he thought it was an upgrade. Except one night he was on-call and when the phone went off. He slept through it and missed it. It was one of my clients, large international enterprise that operates 24x7.
The client demanded that he be fired and my boss told them he would fire him. Except he went around telling most people that we were only pretending to fire him. Except said boss now made his life hell and basically forced him to get a new job. Nothing surprising there. He got his old job back with an excellent raise and far better benefits. He went around telling EVERYONE. They couldn't just send him home neither. We were booked weeks in advanced and nobody documented anything. So when you give 2 weeks you are expected to worker harder than ever.
Then another senior guy finds out he's severely underpaid. He was getting like $22/hour, minimum wage is $15/hr as a senior sysadmin with a decade of experience. He had home problems as well. He often worked 60-80 weeks. So he went and got a new job.
Mind you we are now down 2 senior staff... their workload didnt disappear. It got piled onto everyone else.
Then another senior guy, best friends with previous guy, and he was planning to stick it out. He didn't care about extra workload, he worked at his pace. Except working at his pace meant the scheduling folks badmouthed him regularly for not getting work done. He overheard that one.
Then one day he was assigned a new client. They had like 3 employees, not a priority. They were nothing but they had an issue that a junior tech was taking hours to fix. Which should have been a 15 minute fix. The client complained to our boss. The boss then proceeded to chew out me and this other senior guy because we were dropping the ball. Mind you. I had only ever done 1 ticket for these folks many months before, they werent my client. Whereas this other senior guy never met them, never talked to them, and wasn't responsible for the ticket he was getting chewed out about. He held his tongue and went and got a new job that night.
We're now 3 senior staff down. Mind you, I'm working 60hour weeks and capped it there.
It was now performance review day for me. I'm in the office and I have 1 coworker on sick leave for 2 months because his blood pressure while sitting was 200/150. He was on the verge of heart attack.
I go into performance review expecting a very nice raise. What I got was absolutely nothing. I got no praise. I was told I was late to work >40 times. Which broke my mind. I was never late, I was one of the first people in the office. He shows me my lates. Oh wait... all >40 times were me signing in on the weekend. I wasnt on call or on duty. I was responding to emergencies on weekends. But because I signed in after 9am. It counted as a late.
So I was pretty angry naturally. I leave performance review feeling like I was smacked around. I go back to work and I'm talking to our contact at the same large enterprise above. They then tell me that $coworker was bad mouthing me. Saying an outage was caused by me. Except for one thing. It was caused by him. A router/firewall that I configured that had been stable and untouched for months. He decided needed to be modified to his standard and when he made the changes to his way. He took them down.
I'd never really interacted with this coworker. We were the only 2 network guys, so we very very rarely cross paths in any way. I mentioned this to another coworker and apparently this coworker was constantly bad mouthing me. People volunteered and forwarded stuff that was absolutely absurd. Whatever, I move on. Cant be friends with everyone.
Then this same guy comes into my office one day and is talking about how he's so angry with everyone and he's going to kill our manager. I'm just so baffled by this ridiculousness. I report this death threat and harassment to one of the bosses. I get fired the next day.
Over the next 6 months or so, literally over 25 people were no longer working there. I had people from the community who knew me contacting me on linkedin to find out what happened there for months.