Hi everyone! I wanted to say I find this Reddit super positive. I wanted to share my experience with my so called “quiet quitting”, and how I broke the curse to find a job that actually respects me, which is a wild first for me
First off, I’ve worked as a QA Engineer/Tech Support for going on 6 years now. I’ve experienced all sorts of terrible jobs, with the highlights being a company that would take away your quarterly raises for “having to take too many sick days (I took three in an entire quarter)” or, I shit you not, “for complaining about not getting the previous raise”.
The job I did want to highlight is a company I worked at for about 2 of these years. I started great, worked 7 months to work my ass off and was posting the best numbers in the department for number of tickets worked. Then they laid me off along with 40% of the department. I kinda free-falled for the next month trying to find work, but my manager managed to convince me to come back and offered a promotion to do so (he was not the one who made the decision to let the department members go, corporate “experienced some shortages money wise” which was code for they were trying to acquire another company and fired all of their recent hires)
Coming back the next 7 months were actually great! Moved my way up to a high position on the team and was helping train new members of the team. Then my manager got fired. They replaced him with what can only be described as a doormat who let everyone trample all over her, and corporate started to expect more without hiring more (we did the job of 30 people with a team of 14).
This new manager would cry at the drop of a hat if anything didn’t go her way or we expressed frustrations. A Team Trainer position opened up. Since I had trained roughly a third of the team already, seemed like a no-brainer. She didn’t hire me because a friend who had previously worked with us said I was “demonstrative”, which is code for me asking questions on how to properly do something.
I was initially upset on the call but calmed down after 20 seconds. A Team Lead position opened up. I was passed up for a guy I train. Her reason was “I freaked out on the last job interview” (which I really didn’t, I said “wait really?? Wow that sucks” and calmed down after a short bit where she told me I was allowed to express my frustrations”)
This manager would proceed to hire all of her friends to her positions of power, pass me up a third time for a person the entire team disliked. All the while I was expected to maintain insanely high case load, train people, and help one of the Team Leads since he had no idea what he was doing.
I thankfully got out about a year ago. My new company actually values my opinions and I am able to discuss conflicts with my manager. Meanwhile my former manager has driven her team into the ground, gotten most of the team let go outside of her friends, and has effectively killed that Support company with her decisions. Thank God I’m out of there.
I say all this to express that, if you feel trapped, please look elsewhere. It may take a while to get to where you need to go, but you really shouldn’t be putting up with the shit you are experiencing. Hang in there and look forward!