Hi everyone,
I just wanted to get this off my chest as I have no one else to talk to about this. For context, I am a university student who took an internship offer at a telecom company. I am working in a technical role with a slightly atypical educational background; this becomes relevant later on. Before taking this internship, my experiences have mostly been in the public sector, where things are unionized and in my experience, where people are not so cold-hearted. I don't know if this has made me more outspoken towards negative workplace behaviour, but regardless, I am being branded as deceitful and incompetent for no apparent reason.
I should have seen the red flags with my manager at the beginning of the internship. When I originally interviewed, the company advertised the role as a flexible hybrid with 2 days in-person that was not enforced. Despite this, my manager decided to force us 3 days in person despite having team members spread across the country and often being the only workers in their central office. No one else in the company adhered to these rules, not even other teams within the same department as ours.
As silly as this sounds, I think this is where things started to take a turn for the worse. A few weeks into this internship, a co-worker that had been with the company for years was let go because of “economic reasons”, in reality the company wanted to save on having to give full compensation when my co-worker's original team was dissolved, so they were moved to them my team (before I joined) despite their background having nothing to do with the department. From then on, I was required to replace their work while doing my own, essentially working two jobs for a quarter of what they paid my co-worker (classic). I never realized how heartless people could be because a few days prior, my co-worker was expressing to our entire team their anxiety because their spouse was unable to find a job in this crappy job market, and they have kids and a mortgage to pay. Our manager told us that our business unit had enough funding for more workers, so we all thought our jobs were safe.
When I interviewed, I informed my manager that I was taking a few courses while completing the internship, and they were fine with this. However, I noticed that during the internship, my manager and supervisor were getting frustrated that I was leaving lunch to attend lectures. I was working enough hours to cover what my contract stipulated, so this should not have been an issue. Complete side note, but there's an unspoken rule in our team to not take lunch; for the first few months of my employment, we would literally work through our lunch every single day. Anyways, I noticed that when I was taking over projects, I was getting critiqued excessively on decisions that I had not made or even had control over. For example, I was being asked why a report was designed the way it was, even though the co-worker who was recently laid off had been in charge of it well before I was hired. I eventually stopped going to lectures because of their poor behaviour towards me, I noticed that things were improving. However, this did not last.
Shortly after, I was given more tasks that were unrelated to my job title. My manager once gave us instructions to do a specific task that clearly violated workplace safety rules. My co-workers and I decided to raise this issue to my manager and supervisor but to no avail. For the record, the work we were being assigned was supposed to be completed by unionized workers that are also hired by our company which I brought up, again to no avail. To no one's surprise, after completing the task, another team complained to our director about how our team had violated workplace safety. In a meeting, I got singled out and blamed for being unsafe. I reminded my manager of the concerns we previously voiced, but they just said it was a “lesson learned” and to move on. I told them that if there was an issue with me working a job that had nothing to do with my job title, I'd be happy to do something else for safety's sake. I was implicitly threatened that I'd be fired if “I did not do what I was told” to do.
During my interview, I was also told that I could work from a location in a different city to be closer to family. However, when the time actually came to do this, I maybe worked a month and then was forced to come back at my own expenses. My manager gave me an excuse about HR, but I later learned from someone else at the company that this was a lie. I had an extenuating circumstance as well, being that one of my family members was hospitalized, and I needed to take care of my younger sibling. Another side note, when I first learned about my family member going through this health issue, I saw the message during a Zoom meeting with literally hundreds of people in it, so I turned off my camera and quickly responded to the message to see if my family was okay. My supervisor and manager verbally reprimanded me 3 separate times in our one on ones despite telling them it was a family emergency.
Fast forward to last week, I am chatting to a co-worker during a coffee break and they inform me that my manager has been talking badly behind my back in my co-worker's one on one. They tell me that my manager said that I am deceitful and do not have the team's best interest at heart. They were also complaining that I was not technical enough and had an issue with my educational background. From what my co-worker said, I would not be getting referrals or a letter of recommendation for other jobs or even a call-back to this company.
I'm just so frustrated with how this played out. I sacrificed my sleep and mental health to balance a full-time job with the school. I grinded self-learning the industry in my own time because my manager did not put me through any training. I am even more upset that my manager is saying I am not technical enough, despite them having even fewer qualifications than I do and making significantly more than anyone on our team while contributing nothing.
I am sick and tired of corporate culture and inept management. I am not even allowed to take my allocated vacation days because all of the senior workers decided to go on vacation during the same time. I'll be spending my 20th birthday alone in an unfamiliar city, in a tiny ass apartment that I am overpaying for because landlords love taking advantage of students. Fuck everything.