A little background. I am a husband, father, artist, and professionally I am a software engineer, and I am aware that living with abuse for 2 years is ultimately my choice for not leaving. But let me give the back story and you can see why I felt trapped.
I started my career at a company that I was with for 7 years. In 2015 I was abruptly fired, my performance had dropped, but I had communicated to everyone, including HR, that I was very very depressed and working through it with my doctors. This compounded many issues:
- I no longer had insurance
- No insurance means no meds
- No meds means no mitigation for anxiety, depression, and worst of all my severe ADHD
This sent me into a depressive cycle that I am still feeling reverberations from to this day. Spent 7 months trying to find a job. I don’t have any traditional schooling, and as a software engineer with only one professional reference in the field on your resume it’s very hard to even get interviews. Once I had a job it was located 50 miles from my home and the position required that I work 9am-6pm, without exception. Factoring traffic and dropping children off at school I left my house at 7:50am and wouldn’t get home until 7pm on good days and as late at 8pm or 9pm on some days. My depression didn’t improve, but I was medicated for my adhd which helped me maintain this job for nearly two years. I ended up having a very dark moment that nearly robbed me of the rest of my life, and expressing this to my employer prompted a scripted process they require themselves to take, which included 4 weeks unpaid leave to seek psychiatric help, and then review and plan limited work once signed to go back to work or, I could take a 3 month severance. I took the severance and found out my wife was pregnant with our third child, first together. I found a job for a month or two then corvid hit, position got dissolved and I was again searching.
In comes my current job. It’s a startup in the insurance tech field. I was hired as the 13th employee, and the senior most engineer at that point. I took ownership. I took my duty very seriously. I had colleagues who were here on visa and if we failed they would likely have to go home, which is heart crushing for them as they have worked for this opportunity their whole life. I took on two leadership roles on top of my engineering position, and worked uppers of 60-70 hours a week for 16 months straight. Multiple times I was told by my boss, the CTO, that “if this work doesn’t get done I’m not sure we’ll have paychecks” which prompted not only me to work from 9am-2-3am multiple times, but ask it of my team, my colleagues, my friends. My life became work because if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to feed my family. All of this during the first year and a half of my new born daughters life.
Last September the company experienced a hostile take over from one of the investors. Wednesday evening I had one CEO, Thursday I had another. They gave little explanation initially then slowly fed us morsels until their hand was forced because they had to inform investors, of which all employees were based on contracts when we were hired. To sum up, the old CEO was committing fraud, and the old company had to become the straw man that we burn and bail on because it’s criminal history. Our stock options were diluted at a ratio of 1:1,000,000 (not exaggerating), what was worth $10,000 is now worth $0.01. As you can imagine this causes 30% of our R&D to leave. They haven’t backfilled any positions. I was hired to the newly founded company in February, with the promise that they were doing “market research” so that our “salaries could reflect businesses around us” and my salary didn’t change, even a penny, and my insurance is more expensive (better for sure) so I essentially got a pay cut. I asked my boss for a meeting to discuss my salary about a month and a half ago and nothing came of but a platitude “yeah we’ll talk”.
Three weeks ago I got on a call with my boss, and 4 others in my position to discuss a roadblock we had run up against. As I’m explaining the situation from my perspective my boss tells 2 of the others to leave the call, leaving me, my close colleague, and my boss. He started to criticize my perspective and as I defended it (this is typical for my career). He interrupted me with some pepper, with some tertiary, but largely unrelated, criticism. I hand waved it saying we could talk about that later and tried to continue on topic. At this point he lost it. He started yelling bringing up critiques that were completely new to me. I sat silently. He continued to become increasingly angry, and slowly he started to scream. The kind of scream when your voice gets higher pitched and you can hear spit on each syllable. During this five minutes of belittling and berating he said “find a new job! I’m sick of your shit” along with a number of questionable statements at my expense.
I took a deep breath, and shakily said “I don’t know what to say” he replied “neither do I” so I hung up.
The next day when I sat down to work in my home office my heart rate skyrocketed to 140~ and I started to sweat and breath heavy. Many of you will recognize this as the beginnings of an anxiety attack. So I requested a sick day (I can do that) and he immediately text me asking if I was “using sick time to avoid conversations” and I replied that my heart rate was through the roof and I couldn’t work for health reasons, attached a picture of my watch showing my heart rate at 145.
The next day I got on a call with him, he was very apologetic, tried to give rationalizations for what he did, and asked me for forgiveness, to which I replied “I understand where you’re coming from.” Later he mentioned that he “didn’t expect me to accept his apology” so the message was sent. I told him I was burned out and they I’m done being creative for them, I will become an automaton and follow all of his directives exactly.
Little did he know I intended on following the “find a new job” directive as priority 1.
I got the offer call for my new position and I will be getting a 30% increase on my salary and will never have to report to this man ever again.
Just wanted to share a victory.