This happened a couple of months ago, but I still feel I want to share this story.
I had a nicely paying job as a developer ( it's all the rage now ) for a small-mid sized startup company in the EU ( just putting it out there since most posts seem to originate from America ).
Anyway, work was going great and my manager spoke highly of me on the quarterly reviews. But his manager was a dick. He was the Head of Technology, overseeing every tech team's manager, and was in general, just a douchebag. He'd often clash with other people, and in the end his opinion mattered over everyone else's, “I'm right, you're wrong” kind of attitude. Through some staffing weirdness, HR issues were to be dealt with him as well, since we didn't have a proper HR department.
So, here I am, working as a frontend developer ( for those who don't know, frontend is the more 'visual' part of websites/applications, like coding the layout and making buttons work, in eli5 terms ). Long story short, I'm working on this new feature that after launch will open up a new market, and there's already a “beta” version running for some users. But someone, somewhere, changed some code which impacted the layout I was building. It still worked though. What happens next is that after I leave for the day, I get a slack notification from this dick manager, saying that something seems weird and needs fixing. I ignore it because it's not really urgent and I can deal with it when I'm back at work the following day. So he sends a few more slack messages, before sending emails to my work and personal addresses, text messages to my personal number, and trying to call me a few times. His messages were basically saying that things were unacceptable the way they were (??) and I needed to try and fix things asap. Before I got to bed I send him a quick text “I didn't have my phone with me, I'll look at the issues tomorrow.”. He doesn't reply, but I notice I a notification for a meeting with him ( virtual, as I'm WFH ), for 8.30 the following morning, which is exactly the time I start working.
Next day comes, I get to the meeting and sit there for about 10 minutes, alone, noticing he's offline in slack. So I exit the meeting, and send him a message about it. He replies about 30 minutes later saying something along the lines of “It was a placeholder meeting, just needed you to be here”.
I felt absolutely disrespected. Not only he spammed me during out of hours over something minimal, as he made me look like a fool by attending a ghost meeting. And I can't even go to HR, since he is the HR. So I take things a step further. Since this is a small startup, the C level people are easily accessible, and encourage you to do so. I reach out to the CEO, explain the situation, and hand out my 1-month notice, as it is the law. Dick manager reached out to me shortly after, trying to clear up any misunderstanding that might have happened on my side ( ofc he was never at fault, right? ), and to understand if my decision was final. It was. And since I had plenty of available time off, that meant I would only be working 2 more days from the date I handed out the resignation, which was just enough time to gather my shit and go.
Two months later, and I can see they still haven't launched the feature I was working on – after all I had the most knowledge about it too, and training someone new can't be that easy.
Since then, I've been looking for a job and figured I could easily get 10-20% raise at a new position. Got two offers within that range, asked for both for some time to think, and one of them bumped the offer by a lot. So now I'm sitting comfortably at about a 55% raise from previous job. Last I've checked on linkedin, my direct manager also quit shortly after me. Disrespect your workers and you have a falling apart team on your hands.