Hey Everyone,
Although I’ve been sitting in the back, reading your personal stories, I have never participated in this sub. But today I finally can say fuck the US work culture.
After working an average of 55/week for the last year as a manager at a marketing agency, I can’t convince myself to do anything more, my motivation has been destroyed. The work culture is better than most agencies and offices but I don’t think I can slut my skills another day to ensure the work gets done, and bosses get paid.
In the last year, the company has not replaced 4 production jobs whether web dev, digital media or seo. They have hired project managers that cannot actually do the work, and then use those PMs to pressure us to get things out the door. They realize the bottleneck, but instead of hiring they have given us 3rd parties to leverage that have consistently let us down. When the 3rd party lets us down, the work falls on us. We have no fired all the additional resources we found…. Without hiring anyone else.
Now this is where it gets sweet, I am the only person in the 30 person company to know and accel in my field. We have updated the reporting process which now takes 2x longer, and I’m the only person who knows the program in and out.
I’m officially done giving a fuck after being constantly slammed with work, marginalized because there’s too much to do, and overall setup to fail between both doing production work and leading the production.
In 16 months, I took a one week vacation and four other PTO days. I was told I cannot take time off for at least 8 months earlier due to client obligations. During my vacation, I went to an island with no cell service just so I didn’t have to work. I then got on a call with the owners 9 pm Sunday before I returned, standard operating procedure to always be on call.
They are dumbfounded that I would quit when offered a client side job with 7 weeks PTO and 12 weeks paternity leave. I’m actually happily taking a pay cut to migrate over.
For anyone that works in business services, you understand the need to deliver no matter the time or resources. I’m so glad to find a European company in the US that rewards it’s workers.
I can’t wait to start, but my current job asked me to freelance in the transition period, however my rate will be $100/hr to make up for all the extra overtime and hours I wasted overworking while on salary. Because of the extra work, my effective hourly wage decreased below my raise and promotion.
It’s either pay me, or have no one ready to step in. Hopefully I will be black listed as a freelancer as soon as possible but still be able to make back all the wages I lost out on due to be a salaried employee.
Best,
Your antiwork cheerleader