I should preface this by saying I was motivated to make this post after hearing some of the horror stories here and constantly being able to relate. I'm going to be a bit vague about the industry and job title.
Anyways, mid pandemic I had gotten laid off from my tech related job and figured I'd take some time off and ended up deciding that staying in the LA area probably wasn't for me. Before making a final decision though, I got bored and figured I could find another job and learn some new skills. I ended up getting an offer from a small company designing product that I am personally passionate about so I accepted.
First red flag was during the interview with the owner. They mentioned that they are the type of person to “call it as I see it”. I foolishly brushed this off as maybe just a warning that they are up front and could come off as rude. Big mistake. Second ted flag was when I learned there were two people hired for my position within the last year. None of which made it past 6 months.
The position itself had me constantly interacting with employees at every level of the company in order to complete my projects. This quickly exposed me to just how bad the company was truly ran.
The owner was an absentee micro manager. They would regularly assign a new project, give vague contradictory instructions then leave without a reliable way to contact them. This isn't a problem for me except that if you somehow didn't do exactly what he had mentally planned then you would get yelled at. Or if you had the audacity to bother them for clarification then you'd also get yelled at.
I figured out that the easiest way to get around this was to just complete the task and provide no update to the owner unless asked since they'd normally forget they even assigned it anyways. If they ever asked id inform them of the result and they were typically happy. Within a couple of months all the department leads were relying on me to fix major issues since I was able to effectively get different departments to work together I became the go to person for any issues that involved multiple departments. Before I got there they normally had to rely on the owner, which led to finger pointing, which led to a lack of trust between the managers. They liked me because I mostly didn't care about who to blame, just how to solve the problem and move on. Mind you my original job was to manage my own development projects.
These are some of the things that made me quit: the constant berating of other employees by the owner. Multiple strained relationships with suppliers because of previous actions by the owner. The owner would also spend quite a bit of company resources on personal projects.
The straw that broke the camel's back was when I was working directly with a partner and very closely with the owner. Specifications and timelines were tentatively agreed upon. Immediately I pointed out various issues and get dismissed. Later I bring them up again with the owner, get dismissed again. For one particular issue I get told and I'm paraphrasing “fuck what they want they're going to get this instead”. When it came to final product validation the partner was obviously pissed and the owner began yelling and blaming me for not making them aware of the issues when I had made them aware multiple times.
After that I put in my resignation much to the dismay of the people that relied on me. Meanwhile the owner never acknowledged the resignation so I didn't prepare any hand off documentation.
The cherry on top was that the power was one of the “nobody wants to work anymore” people.