I am quitting my job soon after five years of being neglected, dealing with inequity, and being taken for granted. I am going on vacation for two weeks next week for my birthday and my manager came in hostile into my 1:1 with him today because a little over one week’s heads up was arbitrarily not enough time for him to schedule future work around my absence (which was not his role from how he described it before).
We have unlimited PTO, and I’ve been asking for a senior promotion for a few months now because I have 9 years of experience in software engineering and know that I am very valuable to the company. I came on when the company was under 100 employees, and we are now over 2000. I have a ton of system knowledge, and am one of the few engineers that gets tasked with large projects that require a lot of research and architectural decisions in our codebase.
My request has been neglected and everything from a raise to a promotion has been an uphill battle where I just get bombarded with excuses and reasons why I’m not good enough (which I know is bullshit). My manager was hired externally just a few months ago through nepotism (along with a ton of fake culture management people), and his sole purpose from what he told my team was to just make sure we were all happy and got what we needed (bullshit).
I’ve been very withheld in our 1:1 meetings, as every interaction with him has felt superficial. Today he showed his true colors and berated me for taking two weeks off for my birthday (which he wasn’t aware of, nor did he ask or even bother to check the calendar).
I’ve been working on a large headache-inducing bug for over a month due to how poorly we handle time and internationalization. I get burned out a lot from the types of projects that I almost exclusively get because of my background in debugging and reverse engineering (I am the best at this in our entire org, says the director above my manager). So during his berating he then says it is disrespectful to the team for me to take so much time off on such short notice. I make sure to tag my lead, manager, and director on my vacation invites so they know. In the past this has always been fine. I also tell my team in standup when relevant. Nobody has a problem with this.
Well apparently my manager said he didn’t get a notification until just a few days ago, which is bullshit because I sent the vacation notification out over a week ago and he just didn’t bother to acknowledge it until recently. My team was told that we won’t really have any new projects until next quarter, so to me this is the perfect time to take a break. I was planning to wrap up my month-long bug fix today or tomorrow before I went on vacation, and honestly would’ve used the weekend too if required so that it’s all done, but fuck it. My manager was completely disrespectful to me and was hostile. He kept asking me “who is your manager?” Which is obviously him, as a response to me telling him the lead and director approved of the vacation, and then he said “I know we offer unlimited PTO, and in my 2 years of managing teams, I’ve never declined a vacation request”, yet for some reason he felt a need to berate me for this, even though he eventually said in this meeting that he will allow this vacation, wtf.
I told him my perspective about how there aren’t any projects lined up for me yet, and how I’m about to wrap up this bug fix, but he then cuts me off and says “you’re assuming” in response to me saying that there isn’t anything lined up for me. “You didn’t validate that with me”, he said.
Prior to this meeting, he was just the culture guy for our team. I check in with the team lead on this kind of stuff because historically he has always been the guy that tells me what to work on, and that’s always worked out great. He then tried to make up some reference in the employee handbook about how people need to get approval from their managers further ahead of time for vacations, which he doesn’t know for sure is actually something in our handbook. So he didn’t validate that rule at all. Then he said “I don’t know how this kind of thing was handled historically, but this isn’t how I want it done on my team.”
It was a huge overreaction, and frankly felt out of left field to me in my five years here. I’m overdue on a raise and seniority, and if I go anywhere else, I’m guaranteed to be making at least 40k more minimum, and a senior title. I even looked at Amazon’s Senior Software Engineer requirements and I’m qualified. So my employer has higher standards than Amazon AND pays less? Pathetic.
A lot of people have quit since the pandemic started; the highest turnover in the history of the company, many veterans of the company gone to better jobs that pay and treat them respectfully. From what I heard from people that moved on was that all the companies they interviewed with were incredibly impressed with how much shit we do, and they end up making like 60k more and a senior title right off the bat. I’m going to be putting in my two week notice as soon as I get back from my two week vacation, and am going to collect two more paychecks before I leave. They’re about to lose 5 years of very valuable experience to some facade culture manager’s powertrip. I’m not even going to open my laptop tomorrow. I’m pretty much done with this shit at this point.