TL:DR
Bosses's boss tried to strong arm me into working on a project I'm morally against. This will result in me finally getting out of this job I hate, and making me $11,000 plus severance.
My company creates forklifts and I work as a software tester. I work specifically on telemetry which includes a bunch of safety features as well as some other big data stuff.
Last week my manager (I'll call him A) asked me to test an automated forklift system, which I am morally opposed to since it is designed to take jobs away from blue collar workers.
Our conversation went something like this:
A: Hey I need you to test this automation stuff in a couple weeks
M: Oh you know, I would like to avoid testing that because I have morality issues with it. There's plenty of other projects that need work done so it shouldn't be hard to find work for me to do instead.
A: Oh okay I'm glad we figured that out now before any testing was planned.
Now the things you need to know about A are: he has no idea what he's doing, doesn't take meeting notes, and has virtually no power.
So a few days go by and I get invited to a meeting with the director labeled “Testing Plan” and he tells me he'd like me to explain more on the conversation the week before. I say pretty much the same thing this time and I kinda knew this was coming so I specifically avoided saying “I wouldn't do it” only that I would prefer not to.
So after maybe 2 minutes of explaining the director says “well we consider this insubordination, so you can take the rest of the day off and reconsider” then he took my laptop.
All this sounds like I'm getting screwed over right? Well I was actually just hired on as a direct employee instead of a contractor back in October, this came with vacation days for a nice little winter vacation as well as $11,000 in signing and relocation bonuses. I've wanted to quit for months but if I resign I have to pay that signing and relocation back. I've read that contract very well and I will not have to pay a cent of it now that I'm getting fired.