First off let me just say that my states laws don't require pto payouts by law but if a precedent has been set then they can't target people by not giving them one and my company has that set. Everyone on my team who left got a payout before me.
This might be a long one. I was a software engineer for bank of america that was on one of the best teams at the bank and our team was full of some of the best engineers in the business. Everything was great for the first year and a half that I was there then the pandemic hit and we were one of the last ones to be dismissed and allowed to work from home permanently in our city. Turned out we could do our jobs as good at home as in the office so things continued fairly normal for about a year.
In mid 2021 the pandemic was slowing down and everyone was worried they would call everyone back into the office permanently. Little by little people started getting notices to come back into the office and people were obviously upset. Everyone believed an1 alternative motive existed in that our company owned like half of the buildings downtown and needed to get them filled up and we were the guinea pigs to do it. Management sent out an email that stated essentially come back to the office or quit and lo and behold hundreds of people quit. Why waste time in traffic when you can now get a remote job with a company located anywhere in the world? They quickly back pedaled but the damage was done.
Fast forward a bit and we are now struggling. We can't hire anyone and our team shrunk to about a third the size and lost a ton of tribal knowledge of how systems worked and we were just struggling to stay afloat. I decided I'd give them a few months to try and correct things but they were never able to and even simple to fix things like providing working equipment were still an issue since my laptops battery was dogshit and the key oard malfunctioned all the time. All the while having quarterly meetings bragging about profits.
I decided to put in my 2 weeks notice. My managers manager called me because he was my hr report while my actual manager was on paternity leave and he emailed me back wanting to talk. He called me and said he was shocked which I responded that I'm not sure how given the amount of people who have left in the past year. He then wanted to essentially get in an argument and called all of my reasons for leaving essentially dumb and said I would need to be baby sat at my next job. I said that this conversation is basically over and hung up the phone. Then he sends out an email to the team notifying them of me leaving and of course it was nothing but nice.
For reference this is a man I've maybe had 6 conversations with in my life. I end up leaving giving my full 2 weeks and wait for my last check. Noticed that my payout wasn't there and called up hr. Turns out he said that I wasn't due one even though I had accrued 65 hours and even the hr report told me that but they couldn't do anything g because he has the final say. I explain to her that he's retaliating against me because he didn't like what I had to say and they forwarded me to employee relations. It's since been 4 weeks and after calling my case manager at employee relations almost daily asking for an update she has never picked up or called me back. I've also since heard that he has talked bad about me to the team that remained since I left stating that the reason I left was because I lacked character which is an absolute joke.
In short if you are ever thinking about working at bank of america as a software engineer I'd suggest just not doing it because they preach that they care about their employees but the reality of it is that they will force you to come back to the office in unsafe conditions, give you some of the worst equipment ever to work on and then steal money that you rightfully earned and allow managers to retaliate against you because they didnt like that you quit.