This was originally posted as a reply to u/redzaku0079 in u/GentlyUsedOtter's post, titled “
I really need you to train your replacement right.“. LONG in setting the stage, but worth it. (It's a little choppy because, originally, I hit the reply character count limit and had to butcher it a bit.). The events happened about 10 years ago and I'm now in a great job at a good company making decent Bay Area wages.

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I quit a job that egregiously took advantage of my situation during a desperate time in my life. It was in an industry I loved but had started fresh out of ~2 years of unemployment, following a severe accident that severed my arm and, ultimately, ended my prior (much loved) career after just 4 years. I was at the new job for about 3 years.

I was a fairly fresh college grad that with 4 years of experience as an analyst, reporting directly to (and mentored by) executive management at a fortune 1000 software giant. Desperate to find a job in the post-2009 job market, I took one at a retail store @ $10/hr. Within 6 weeks, I got promoted to the HQ as an operations coordinator (HW was conveniently located closer to my home than the store). I was “promoted” at ~$12/hr. I was successful, if not a little bored.

Within a month, they had me doing the job of the recently retired ops manager. As the scope of my work increased I began asking for raises that would keep my pay in-line with my increasing responsibilities and job scope. Almost all requests were flat-out rejected. ~1 year in, after the first couple of rejections, I said, “ok, send me back to the store, I'll make more $ with the sales commission store associates get” Knowing that they were getting MUCH more value than than they were paying me, being the fine capitalists they are, they relented and put me on $30k salary. At the time, $30k was the minimum legal salary, I'm sure they'd have paid less if it were an option. It was effectively a $1 raise. As an extra f*ck you they added (err, stipulated), “We're going to put you on salary-exempt, HOWEVER, we expect you to continue working 4-6 hours of OT each week so your productivity stays the same.” By the time I left, I was making ~$40k per year.

Now, many of my growing responsibilities were well above my title & pay rate. Things like:

• (This bullet was added to this post, but was not in my original comment. It provides more context the f*ckery that happened) At about 1.5 years in, after running all kinds of HR support analytics, I was asked by the HR director to join their team as an HR analyst. The transition started, again compounding my total work load, but would've come with a large bump in pay. A few days before the finalization of the transition, I made the mistake of voicing a concern I'd been told by a couple long-standing staff. I mentioned that I was worried that the COO was allowing this to happen because she wanted an insider in HR. Well, after I left for the day, the director told my boss and the COO… They immediately maneuvered to fire me. They came up with a BS list of 10+ reasons (coming to work drunk, frequently late, bad attitude, poor performance, lying, lack of ethics by using my knowledge of salary info to “blackmail them” into raises, etc), stating that these issues had been ongoing and long standing. The CEO/founder was the only reason I wasn't fired. He challenged them, asking “wait, wait… I've only heard amazing things about CG. If these have been endemic, why has he never been written up for ANY of them?”. They didn't have an answer, so they settled for reneging on the HR job offer and writing me up for the laundry list of BS. Also I was banned from expressing interest in other positions in the company without permission from my manager AND COO.

  • Things were borderline hostile with HR over the next 6 months. But in that time, they saw that EVERYTHING that happened was a lie by the COO to save face and/or punish me. Eventually, they stared to protect me, going as far as to have me hang out in their office to chat/chill, and if asked, I was “explaining the meaning of data I'd provided”. The relationship went from good, to horrible, to amazingly awesome, especially with the HR director herself, who grew to LOATHE the COO.

• Working closely with HR to assist with analytics, including reviewing pay and benefits analysis for director-level and up. I had a great relationship with the HR team and, towards the end of my tenure, they revealed that after a few of my rejected “demands” for raises, they did a market review and found that MY market rate was close to 2-3x the “raise” I'd been given when put on salary. They told me that when they provided the report to the COO (my boss's boss, the devil, and who had requested it), she told them to disregard it and give me the $30k. Why? “Because the percentage increase is unjustifiable.” Learning this was what finally set me into scorched earth mode, despite having been recently bumped to $40k after 2.5 years of abuse. As a bonus from my time/education in HR, I realized I was illegally classified as exempt.

• Within my first three months I was maintaining the company PTO accrual tracker (in Excel, we had software that could do that in ADP… WTF??) for every employee, showing hourly pay rate (salary equivalent) from the lowly janitors all the way up to the CEO. So, I knew how much everyone's was making. It was the basis for many of my (rejected) requests for raises. The other ops coordinator, an equivalent peer in terms of title and “official” responsibilities was hired 1 month after me…. at $10k more than I was currently making. The one other person, relatively equivalent to my actual skills/responsibilities was making THREE TIMES what I was making.

• Over the course of a year, I built a key metrics dashboard/tracker for real-time retail performance analysis. I was running the monthly sales competitions for the stores; they competed to see who could have the highest stats in a particular metric each month. The month's winner got a couple hundred bucks. This report allowed me to run the competitions and provide current/historic metrics, ranking the stores/employees in each. The Excel file was connected directly to our ERP and showed metrics like sales margin, avg transaction value/units, POS add-on performance, historical comparisons, employee sales performance, and several other metrics that the company thrived on jerking off to. It evaluated all of the 100+ retail stores across the country & became a required tool for the directors & executives during the monthly meetings.

• AS A PET PROJECT, and as a favor to the warehouse manager, I created a Time And Scheduling/attendance tool for warehouse staff. It mirrored the functionality of the dedicated TAS software we used in the retail stores. It could handle 5×8 or 4×10 hour shift structures and accurately calculated OT and break/lunch stats. In comparing my tool's figures to the software app's database records, I found tons of 1-hr variances. Turns out the store-level TAS system was calculating California's lunch hour penalty law for ALL states. Stupidly, I called it out so that I could reasonably ask/argue, “Hey, I just saved the company $70k ANNUALLY. In light of that, can I have a bonus or a raise that would bring me up to (even just low) market rate? Their reply, “No, of course not. Part of your job, every employee's job, is to save the company money. Stop asking for raises or you'll be written up”

Needless to say, I put up with too much shit for far too long. My (boomer, of course) parents had instilled the notion that if you work hard, you'll be rewarded. Nope – I've since learned (realized) to work as hard as I'm valued, rewarded, and treated/respected. Eventually I found my next job, paying 2x more, all-in, and now, 10 years since, I'm making much more. But I digress…

Knowing I was going to be leaving, I had started replacing all my badass files/tools with new “dumb” versions. The user functionality remained but the bread and butter of it was in how it automatically retrieved, stored, and referenced the new data. I did this months in advance of giving my 2-weeks, so that there'd be no backups of the old, self-driving files (I also worked closely with IT and knew their systems, thanks to being in charge of the intranet communication websites as part of my 'unofficial' duties).

To no one's surprise, when I put in my notice, they freaked. By “they”, I mean multiple departments freaked. It happened it 2 stages:

Stage 1: Attempt to retain me. End of week 1 of my 2 weeks

The company had a widely known no-retention-effort policy for departing employees. No counter offers, no exit interviews, nothing. Some were allowed to stay their 2 weeks, most were shown to the door immediately.

The CEO (who was a good guy but, as the founder, was largely checked out of the day-to-day operations) asked to meet with me. He asked why I was leaving and what it would take to keep me. I reminded him that I had mentioned to him my struggles (with my manager and the COO) in the past, giving the example of the HR fiasco. He apologized for not taking it more seriously and said if I stayed I'd report directly to him, never having to interact with my shitty manager or COO in any official capacity. I said I'd need to think on it overnight and come back with my ask tomorrow.

The next day, he got pulled into a big meeting in SF, so his head/personal analyst had the meeting in his place. His analyst, Chuck, was older than me and liked to talk up his time spent “as an analyst for Macy's leadership”. His pitch was largely around his assertion that “I could learn a lot from him and his experience as an analyst for a huge, respected corporation”. I told him, “that's nice, but I'm here for the pay, especially given the under-market rate I'd been making up to that point”. He, like everyone else I was dealing with at the time, went on to pull BS card of, “The % increase in your pay, since starting, is very unusual in the company. And to give you ANOTHER raise within 3 years is unheard of”. After trying and failing with various “softer” tactics (like covering how a percentage increase is meaningless if the dollars were bullshit to begin with), I decided it was time for Napalm. I said,

Alright, so, let me get this straight, I got hired here for a simple coordinator job, one that I was ok with doing at the rate I started at – low pay but very low stress. Just a few weeks after starting, seeing my skillset in action, the company had me, a coordinator, doing the work of a senior analyst/manager, requiring lots of OT to do my 'official' responsibilities in addition to the technical work of the old manager. It was 6 months before I asked for a raise and had to fight tooth and nail for each one since, none of which got me to the low end of market rate for the work I did or the money I saved the company. I was punished for asking 'taboo' questions, YOU told me my key metrics dashboard (now a required tool for senior/executive staff) was a waste of time when I asked for your guidance. And I was denied promotions to other departments because I was 'too valuable' in my current one. HR's own market analysis stated that the LOW end for my role is $65k. The new job pays $65k and you're trying to retain me at… $55k, on top of inferior benefits?

Chuck replies, “Yes, but if you stay, you don't need to worry about the COO being all over your back and I will show you the skills and tricks I learned as a Macy's analyst.

Ok, Chuck. Just tell me this. Would you say that (name) in marketing has similar education, skill sets, and responsibilities as I do?

“Yeah, I'd say that's a fair comparison”

You were an analyst at corporate Macy's, cool. But I should remind you that I, too, was an analyst for “big guns”. I reported directly to the customer insights VP at Citrix Systems. After all the BS I've been through, and how valuable I seem to be, given this “unheard of” retention effort… why the f*ck would I stay for less money than my other offer, especially when (name) is making $30k+ MORE THAN YOUR RETENTION ATEMPT for, as you just acknowledged, the same level of criteria?

With another offer already on the table, all of the fear I'd had was gone. The meeting ended and I went back to “work”, mentally checked out and elated that I was escaping this workplace hell. I'd have given no notice but didn't want to give them any ammo to negatively impact future job opportunities should they call for references.

Stage 2: Training (name) & consulting:

For the first time since my first request for a raise, the ass-hat COO, and her Igor-esque stooge, my direct manager, were nice to me. They asked me to train my higher-paid counterpart in the more technical files I'd created. He was a good dude, I liked him. But I was honest with him about the situation, except for one bit… I'd removed all the formulas that powered my files. I told him that I'd hard coded only the most basic functions that had automatically pulled the data and had been (tediously) manually updating them for the last couple of months. I told him where to find them in the ERP and he was like, “oh hell no.” Every file that I developed (and was highly important to leadership) was gimped in terms of updates, functionally they'd still work for the rest of the month, as originally designed. The next month, they go from 5 minutes to update to 2-3 days… and lost the flexibility to compare to prior years for the almighty comp-analysis.

The COO sent me an email asking if I would be willing to contract for a few weeks to polish up some things and train various people. It was one of the most satisfying email replies I've ever sent;

Hi Tracy,
No problem! I'd be happy to continue helping as a consultant. I'm willing to help with a minimum of 40 hours of training, up to any limit, billed in full hour increments at $144.27 per hour, paid in advance”
Sincerely, CG_Ooops

$144.27 was her hourly rate. This was sent on Monday of my last week there; I never got a reply nor did she look me in the eye during that last week. She was, at last, impotently furious at me. Good.

Final Stage: Arming the Nuke:

As a my final (and only 'real') act of “you f*cked around, time to find out”, on my last day, I reported to the Ca DOL all of the various pay violations I'd witnessed during my (unofficial and official) time in HR. The investigation lasted months. Hundreds of current and past employees received checks, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars. The company faced fines totaling well over 2-million dollars for a multitude of wage, overtime, and lunch-hour violations (when I discovered the lunch-hour issue, they shut the feature off or ALL employees, for months, until they lazily figured out how to apply it to only California locations). I ended up getting a check for a couple thousand $ after taxes; despite not clocking in/out after going on salary, when they said I needed to continue working mandatory OT, I'd started recording all of my hours worked and, because I was illegally classified as exempt, got paid for the OT I'd worked over the last couple of years.

As final vindication of what I felt I was worth, and what the HR analysis had confirmed, 6mo later I left, my director friend in HR forwarded the job posting for my role, titled Operations and Finance analyst (the responsibility list being 95% of the same responsibilities held as of when I left). The salary range was $80-95k. It's expensive to be a dick employer.