This post now warrants a TL;DR; at the bottom.
Been lurking for a while, but I've never posted to this (or any other) sub before. I've gotta tell you this sub has changed my life (and my work) since I started reading many of the stories posted here. I now actively send anti-work posts (from this sub) to my colleagues, friends and family, hoping they stand up for themselves, increase their self worth and value their personal and family time above EVERYTHING. And I hope they someday stop being capitalists ants, because most of them are really brainwashed.
Anyway, I thought I had nothing to contribute to this sub, but this morning I remembered how I, figuratively, flipped the bird to my ex-employer when I followed his “recommendation”; but first, my credentials:
I'm a software developer in a third world country. I hate this place. I love my kids above anything else. My partner is a wonderful Head of Development in another company. Believe me when I tell you she's one of the best bosses you could ever have. That's about all you need to know.
So, I used to work for one of the largest liquor makers in this sh*th*le along with many other young software developers. Before working there, I used to work for a shittier company, but that's a story for another day.
By the time this happened, Covid19 had just made its appearance and companies were starting to send their employees to WFH. And the dev team was not the exception.
Now for the kinda antiwork part.
We were underpaid (as far as software devs go), our laptops were SLOW (using mechanical disk drives instead of solid state).It was not impossible to work on them, but if you're running two or three instances of VS2019, it can get awfully slow. Many of my team mates worked REALLY long hours, maybe 14-16hrs a day because
“It's a very important project and [insert corporation's owner son's name] needs it working yesterday”.
I reminded some of them that even though our paychecks showed the same payout, I made more than them since working longer hours meant a lower rate per hour, thus a lower salary. One of them got pretty upset and ended up handing his notice the day after I did. Nice.
So, one day, while working from home, I started complaining on our dev group chat about how slow the computer was. I also pointed out our yearly profits (I had access to upper management profit reports) were enough to buy laptops for the whole company twice a year, and voiced how my partner's company was upgrading ALL laptops (not just devs) and workstations to include SSD's and more RAM.
My manager wrote back
“Why don't you go work there, then”
I didn't respond. I immediately polished up my resume and sent it to different places, just not on my partner's company (laws won't allow that). I heard from a recruiter that same day, and by the end of the week I had an offer in hand, twice the pay. I signed the offer, and then went straight to my team lead's (not my manager) house to get his signature (I needed it for my records) with a HUGE grin on my face. It may not sound like much, but for me it was a perfect FU.
Manager never said anything, he's to proud to admit he shouldn't have answered like that, but such are crappy managers, I guess…
The rest of my coworkers left in the following 12 months. From the original, 8 people team, there is only 1 left.
And that's my antiwork story. It's one more for the “Then go elsewhere” lot, but I enjoyed it so much while it happened.
TL;DR: Complained about slow laptop. Boss told me to look for a job elsewhere. I did. Rest of the team did so in the next 12 months.