First post about my situation here. The short version: I was hired in July making $15, spontaneously raised to $16 three months later, then found out in November that my team was hiring three new employees at $17 an hour for the same role with no experience. After a phenomenal performance review, I was told to expect fifteen cents extra, but my “exceptional effort” garnered me a whole thirty cent raise. This rant's a long one, y'all.
It’s been two and half months of making $16.30while constantly fixing my new coworkers’ mistakes. I’m talking HUGE mistakes: white label breaches, sending the wrong information to clients, deliberately not notating mistakes to cover them up, copying and pasting account details from four months prior that had already been done, etc. We have clients calling in angry all the time. We gave them detailed instructions for every task we do at work, I wrote them 25+ page personalized training docs, they can search the group chat history for the questions they've already asked, and they use none of their resources.
By February, I was losing it. It’s like the new hires are arsonists and the rest of us are firefighters. I messaged the head of finance to try and schedule a meeting about pay equity. She said there were some delays–the person she needed in our meeting was on vacation, our schedules didn't overlap, etc–but I had some kind of hope she would actually meet. Then another position within the company opened up with a $17 minimum and I figured screw it, my manager is what sucks but the company itself is still nice (if you're suspicious, you should be; it gets worse). I went above him and applied. They approved me with a 10 minute interview and I accepted because I wanted the raise.
Three things happened all at once.
- The head of finance immediately dropped the act and said the need to discuss pay equity was “obsolete,” even though half of the team was simultaneously older and underpaid.
- My teammate and best friend who referred me to the position was approved to transfer to another team as well.
- I brought a detailed list of incidents to my boss's boss, who was stunned to know my boss had drastically downplayed the last few months.
My boss and his boss are scrambling now. They finally fired the first of our new hires. It turns out that she was doing less than 20% of the work as the senior members of the team every single day. She would clock in, sit on tickets assigned to her for more than a week, and do next to nothing. And they waited until 90 DAYS OF MISTAKES, all at $17/hour full time, to do anything.
Worse than that? An employee that's been at the company for about four months was approved to transfer to my position…making $17.50 an hour. They gave her a raise from the new minimum for her “months of understanding of our company's responsibilities.” Less experience than me, but more pay for the same position, including weeks of training. How do I know this person's new wage? Because HR sent this person's offer letter to my best friend instead. HR. SENT A CONFIDENTIAL LETTER. TO THE WRONG PERSON.
The final fucking straw was learning that my team isn’t the only problem. There are other teams losing managers and handfuls of team members all at once. Of the teams that are staying, the training processes are so inconsistent that they’re causing fires left and right. Fulfillment keeps blocking our work tasks even though they have all the information they need, research is ignoring our explicit instructions, and the audit team is skipping necessary steps and setting us up for even more angry clients. I'll have to deal with all these issues in my new team too.
The only reason I haven’t walked away is because I have almost two weeks of PTO approved in April. I’m gonna squeeze every last dollar out of these bastards before I walk away. And I don’t even care if I have another job lined up afterwards. I don't give a shit about leaving my new team high and dry–I’ve met with a crisis therapist to make a “stay safe from yourself” plan and I’ve had to use it four times in the last five weeks all because of the stress of this company.
Fuck corporations. Fuck this job. Fuck my manager. What a joke.