I am now a key asset to them and my question is should I hold out and save money so my coworker and I can build our project and leave or ask for more pay and receive more work.
They also pissed off all of our customer base by rushing products and generally having no idea how to build them and ignoring us or putting us in dumb places like fixing a printer or reading an email.
Additionally, Each time I get more tasks they bring me closer to running the company myself and not recognizing the talents our employees have.
My coworkers recieved the same, we pay you more so do more outside of your job titles and its no longer titles its just do everything to save the company and by company their business is how it feels.
So we all just work at a minimum and they cant find people to replace us and appease us with pizza and “family parties”. Are we the assholes?
I’d like a personal opinion from people who work for small family businesses. Should Keep on keep doing what I do, or start heading for the hill. I am currently paid $27.50 and kinda crap health but its “free”. The company makes very niche products and it made quite a bit related to covid. Yet all we got was a shitty bonus and pizza parties and all my coworkers i enjoyed got fired.
So a little background, I have been working here for a little over 2 years and I was originally hired to build machines and help set up their IoT/ Engineering being my first job out of college I accepted the role at $15 because well i needed a job/experience and they-bumped all the way to here now.
Let me explain how the company is structured and very poorly at that. You could say its owners vs the employees in shipping, manufacturing and assembly. Except were short staffed and they’re not making nearly as much.
When I started they were taking in millions in sales and now 2 years later it has returned to pre pandemic levels of maybe 200-400k per quarter vs millions per month. I have access to all their sales.
During that million spree they hired a ton of people and moved the company to a newer city because they spent all their profits buying a building to run the company and promised moving packages and all. Granted none of it in writing and almost everyone that moved didn’t get shit.
Fast forward 6 months after the move everyone they hired is gone or let go. Our original team had 6 now were down to 2.
Our overall team went from 20 down to 8 with occasional help from owners kids who think they’re better than us pleb-employees. Now why am I writing this?
Well as the team dwindled I got more roles and less roles in engineering. Right now my co-worker does all the engineering related electronics design stuff remotely from home. I run the floor, IT, engineering and mechanical and basically the facility when they all go on vacation.
Both me and my coworker know they need us and we can see he declining sales. They want us to create stuff to save the company but I have no real say and anything we suggested gets shut down.
They told me learn our way first then improve it. To which i argued in my head if it was working i would.
My coworker and I are formulating plans to start our own company unrelated to theirs and learning from all of their problems from micromanagement to caring less about goals and making us work because they pay us hourly or salary.
I walk and talk to every employee and the ones that actually do heavy work and generate the products and they all hate the owners and management with the exception of me. So I am starting to realize I can lead fairly .
So now i have a bit of money saved my question is I am basically running the company since i have knowledge of all the departments. Which is leverage because if they fire me no one else will do it.
There is heavy nepotism. The whole family works there. All of us are biding our time because we realized we have leverage.
Fun fact we are based on electronics manufacturing and they started a concrete company and took one of our assemblers.