After entering summer vacation I have decided to better make use of my time by applying to a business I was working on before my father had heart surgery.
They were an unprofessional lot. I was basically tasked with writing articles about SaaS marketing by rephrasing arguments from other web pages. This is some sort of content stealing but this was not all. Our superior(s) often forgot to assign writing tasks to “content writers” and deducted them from our pay.
Yet it only took 1-2 days a week and it was remote work. I thought I could return to the job and make some money to pay my credit card debt. Upon returning I learnt that some things were changed. The content writers (none of whom I recognized from my earlier period with the company since they probably quit) were assigned an editor. An editor that seemed nice enough at first. I saw this mainly as a growth opportunity where I would improve my writing skills.
However, this editor, despite knowing that I am in no way knowledgeable of the topic that is written(which was something cleared out beforehand), often made rather rude comments about my writing and content. “Tell me if you can come up with an article that makes sense” and some really “passive” aggressive messages. I know that my articles are not trash because I have worked at this company for half a year before and 3 or 4 of my articles landed on the first page of Google (which is the thing we are going for).
Again, I am open to suggestions and would gladly change my articles to make them better, but utilizing rude language is not the way to do it and it does not help the work environment.
She somehow requires us to do work that requires one to spend more than 3-4 days a week DESPITE paying less than half of the minimum wage. I know that people say “minimum wage-minimum effort” but I think this is a step further than that since there is no minimum wage to be even talked about.
The cherry on top is that the entire company is based in Germany while they employ people from a 2nd/3rd world country. The cheapest software package that they sell is around 400 USD a month while the average salary of a “content writer” is around 100 USD.
Anyway, I wrote to my manager and told him that I want to quit. When he asked why I told him it was mainly because of the toxic environment created by the editor. He told me that it might be a misunderstanding due to the language difference but I have worked with enough English-Speaking people to know this is not the case.
I am glad that I quit. I wish I had some other way to pay my credit card debt but I guess an opportunity will come along the way.
I know that this is not as “impactful” as other posts in the subreddit but I just wanted to vent a bit. Thanks for reading.