I was told to crosspost my comment in another subreddit here as folks may appreciate it here. Got a solid response with the folks talking about an a-hole boss demanding an employee work over a pre-booked vacation. I'll add a bit more context here, but this was about 12 years ago when this all went down. Since then, I went back to work for a previous employer where I was unceremoniously let go for reasons (maybe another post), but have since been working for almost 10 years at another company (folks of this subreddit are not a huge fan of them but they have probably treated me the most humanely and respectfully as I've ever seen). That said…on with the story!
In 2010, after the wonderful failings of the job market leading to salary freezes and sub-par raises, I had gotten my 3 year performance evaluation at my employer at the time. After having been promoted twice, but not getting salary increases due to freezes, I received a whopping 5% increase and told “this was an amazing increase for doing so well”…Sufficed to say, I was not very happy and started shopping around. My manager was sad, but his boss told me to “do what you gotta do, no other company out there will pay you what you're saying is market”. Being young, motivated, driven, and damn smart, I went out there and in under 2 weeks I had secured an interview, gone through the process and had an offer in hand. I actually got more than I was asking…nearly a 35% increase in base salary. Took the offer, stuck to my guns of not dealing with counter offers, put in my notice, worked right through to my last day and left on good terms (important later).
The new job was great, I was working in a similar role as a L2 Support Technician but for a different class of product than what I used to work on at my previous firm (middleware). Turns out it was a bit of a bait and switch because 3 months after I joined, my new employer transferred me to the sister team of the support group I was on to support the new version of their middleware product. Prior to this version, the middleware was a free service and as such, received a free service's level of support…No SLA's, Best Effort Service with a small but knowledgeable support team. It seemed like a good opportunity so I didn't complain much.
The new product ended up being really popular. Jokes and snark aside, it was actually a good product and a big improvement over the previous offering. The problem was, it included much stricter SLA's and response times, and also came with a 'white glove' type integration service where integration specialists and support specialists would migrate and set up new customers based on their requirements. Sounds great…in theory…but in reality, the integration staff didn't exist yet and were still hiring, and the support desk was sized for non-SLA free service…
Within 3 months we were getting overrun by tickets, chats, and calls all day every day…I'm smart and fast and on a good day I could close 25 tickets…which is almost 3 an hour for complex issues…we were clocking 40 tickets a day per rep which 1 hr acknowledge, 8hr update and 48hr resolution SLAs…you can do the math, no way to keep up even for the senior reps. By the end of the 7th month we had 3 senior techs leave…now it was me, my manager, 1 other senior tech and 3 fresh-faced L1 support techs who moved into our team as 'promotions' on the US Team. I had also received a fairly sizable raise and promotion despite only being there for 6 months…which I should have taken as a huge red flag…Our Asia team was down to 2 people and having serious staffing issues due to the real need to take breaks and step away like humans…So my manager started scheduling me and the other senior tech for alternating 'double shifts' to help support APAC hours and 'reduce our ticket backlog'. We were assured that 'help was on the way…just a few weeks'. After a few weeks, the other tech complained because he has family and kids, and now it was just me working doubles…Literally would work from 830am to about 530pm, take an hour or 2 off, and then work from 730 to 430am and then repeat the next day. By the 11th month, I was pounding 5 5hr energy's a day, rolling into the office around 1030am and getting home at 5am each day…and I looked the part.
My manager at the time was over double my age…by the time of the story. I was working doubles for like 2 months straight due to the staffing issues but I thought it was a light at the end of the tunnel since I had a 2 week vacation coming up. My manager had it out for me as the next promotion I could get was for her job…If I had not been so worn down and tired…I probably would have gotten it and been able to fix the issues when we got staffed up…I was closing more tickets on a daily basis while covering more of the junior staff training than she was, and it was getting noticed by the higher ups…So she felt fairly threatened since she didn't quite have an out to move to another team at the moment… So she had it out for me regularly by denying my vacation requests or planning her time off after I'd put mine in. Her rationale to put on the evening and night shifts was in her words “you're a young man and it's more productive to work and advance your career than go out partying and drinking while the rest of us have families and children to spend time with”. This time though, since I hadn't been on vacation for months, and my hours worked were racking up she begrudgingly agreed because it was about to start raising flags to higher management that I hadn't been on continuous leave for a while.
Excited for this, I had booked flights, hotels and a bunch of other things to relax…I was originally planning on going with my girlfriend, but the work hours and stuff pretty much killed that relationship…so another friend was interested in tagging along and she was to take my ex's place. The night before my flight there was a major outage and series of issues, and as a Senior on the team, myself and a few others had to come in at like 3am. Despite being really new, most of the former folks quit, leaving me the most senior asides the boss after a few months.
8am rolls around, I'm packing up to go home after fixing the issues and the boss walks up and says “I've cancelled your leave request due to the issue, we're going to need you in to cover for the next week or 2 and you can look into taking time off next month.”
I say that, “no, I'm going on vacation…this is non-negotiable”…which she did not take well…she flips out saying “I have the next 3 days off, and that means you are required to cover. You do not negotiate. What I say, goes. Go home, you can freshen up but you need to be back in the office by 11am so I'm not late for my bookings.”
I don't really know what came over me…something just kind of broke in me. So I just said OK. packed my bag up and went home. I got into the shower, washed up, shaved, combed and gelled my hair and pounded a 5 hr energy. I hadn't ironed my suits in months and most of my shirts were either wrinkled from being worn a bunch or had the crisp fold wrinkles from being pulled out of the package from the department store across the street and immediately being put on so that I could have a different short on from the day before. So I pulled out a clean shirt, and ironed my best suit and threw it on. I hadn't slept in over 36 hours but I never felt so goddamned awake and locked in in my life.
I got on the subway and walked into the office and landed at my desk around 10:59am…I intentionally spent a few minutes in the lobby getting some tea to make sure I got to my desk at exactly 11am.
Fun fact about this company…they are very much paranoid about competition, so if you quit…you immediately get into your exit interview and then get sent home with 2 weeks PTO/Severance + payout of any remaining vacation time. Usually no counter offers, just exit interview, pack your stuff, and enjoy your 2 weeks PTO.
My boss had a smug grin on her face, packed up her stuff on seeing me sitting down and left for her 3 day vacation. I waited a few minutes, told my 2 junior co-workers that I was sorry for leaving them hanging and then proceeded to print out my resignation letter, walked over to her boss and requested an immediate skip-level and requested if we could get a conference room to talk. When we got into the room, he was asking me why I was so late and that he had been checking my morning badge ins and was concerned that I was routinely coming in 2 hours late and that our working hours were 830am to 530pm. Upon hearing this I told him he probably doesn't have the full story and that before I went into it, that I needed to tender my resignation. He was shocked to say the least, but wasn't even remotely prepared for when I told him to check the “out of hours” badge ins and badge outs which is when he realized I had been working 18+ hour days for the past 2 or 3 months straight. Every “Day” of PTO only counted for an 8 hour shift…to take a full day off I had to burn 2 'days'. But every double shift earned me 8 hours of comp time which was tracked under a different allocation…His jaw dropped when he saw they owed me almost 80 days of Comp Time.
After calming down, he let me know that he apparently didn't know half of what was going on…and begged me to stay on and that I could immediately take time off as soon as she returns. I just said, “I'm done…i'm burned out, and i'm exhausted…and it shouldn't have gotten to this point.” Once he realized there was nothing he could do, he said, “hey…do you mind if we order in lunch and do your exit interview and you can just lay it all on the t able? I'm willing to listen, and we can have HR in to make sure your concerns get addressed.” I just said sure, he ordered us take out and called HR up to witness the interview and that was that.
After the 3 hour exit interview where I proceeded to throw my boss under the bus about how poorly managed the team was and why there was so much attrition, they tallied my severance and I went home with effectively 3 months worth of pay from all the PTO/OT they owed me. HR asked why I didn't raise this sooner, and offered paid leave and counseling if that would help keep me, but I noted it'd be best for me to go…since I no longer had a favorable few of the company. They had me wait a bit because I said I was flying out that night so I wouldn't be available to sign severance papers the next day, so I received my severance contract and to their credit, it was exactly what was agreed upon, with dollar amounts and pay periods listed with benefits expiration dates all matching so we were golden.
I left, made my flights for vacation that evening and laid out on a beach for a while and more or less just slept when i got back from vacation. I went and got drinks with my old boss who got me a position back at my old company for almost the same amount I was making at the new company, and tbh I took it. It was a bad idea in retrospect, but I wasn't really the same after that.
Before I go into the karma part of the story and what happened to my manager when she got back from vacation. I'm going to talk about the long term ramifications of letting myself work that hard and burn myself out. It's been almost 12 years, and to this day, I don't feel the same. I kicked my energy drink dependency and despite being a fully functional human and still being very smart, I am not nearly as motivated or driven. My passion, especially at work is dampened compared to before that job. I think weary is the best term for it. All of those things reflected on my performance when I went back to my old job…while there were major cultural shifts there and they made some asshole moves when they fired me a few years later…it was not wholly unwarranted because old me and the me they got when i came back were very different.
That said…I'm in a healthy and recovered space now. I've been at my current job for 9 years with a number of big promotions, I make over double, almost triple what I was making at those jobs and I have a management team that encourages us to take time off and has not denied a vacation or time off or even a mental health day request in those 9 years. I also only work 40 to 50 hours a week. compared to 80, 90 or 100hr weeks I was doing…
But that required me to take the steps to say “no” to my bosses and managers and setting boundaries. Good management will respect those boundaries and work with you if there's a conflict.
Anyways, enough proselytizing…what happened to my manager?
Well, within 2 weeks of me leaving, she was demoted. I didn't get too many details but she was pretty much trying to maximize her bonus by getting stuff done with as few staff-hours as possible. She found a loophole that she could allocate comp time which was not being tracked and was using that to bundle staff hours into…almost like a overtime ponzi scheme? I don't know how she didn't get fired but I can tell you this…it's been 12 years and she still has the same title…the equivalent of a 2 or 3 year employee getting their first promotion. So Get Wrecked i suppose?