This was years ago but I still think about it sometimes.
I got my first full-time career position at a tech company right out of school. When I told the recruiter that I had another offer he said he didn't believe me, low-balled my salary, and then at several points told me “you're lucky you're getting an offer from us” and “remember you're replaceable” when I tried to negotiate. Although that was a huge red flag, I took the position anyway because it was my dream job. How naive I was.
The actual job was fun, but the team dynamics were all over the place. I didn't have a manager because the last one quit before I started and they simply didn't replace him. I ended up working with a designer who regularly stole my ideas and presented them as his own. Women were generally excluded from company travel and company-sponsored outings because we “weren't needed.” Once a colleague brought in his friend to interview for a job, and the candidate asked me for a coffee during our group interview because he assumed I was the receptionist. Then after 10 months, half of my engineering team was laid off without an explanation. Coincidentally, around that time our top competitor reached out to me and offered me a similar job with a 60% raise over what I was making. I took it.
When I gave my supervisor my notice, I mentioned that I could leave right away if needed because I had seen other employees escorted out when they quit. She was not happy. First she threatened to blackball me from the tech industry if I left with less than 2 weeks' notice, so of course I agreed to stay the full 2 weeks. She also said that our part of the team would never be laid off so it was stupid to be scared by that. Then she asked if I would stay if they could match my offer, but when I told her what my new salary was she got mad and said “we can't pay you more than I make!” So in the end she didn't even try to make a counter-offer. (I'll give her credit that she was a pretty good supervisor before this, but for some reason seemed to take it personally when I quit)
The worst part was yet to come. I was explicitly told that I wasn't allowed to tell anyone on my team that I was leaving. But then another manager told me they were still discussing whether they should just kick me out, so I should be prepared to be escorted out at any moment. This was so frustrating because I had to keep working on projects as if I wasn't leaving, as well as secretly doing the added work of making transition documents, and it was impossible to know what to work on. HR and my supervisor declined to have an exit interview with me. My final day arrived, and I expected them to finally announce my departure at our all-hands meeting because they did that with every employee who left the company. But no, the meeting came and went and there was no acknowledgement of me leaving whatsoever. I waited until 4:30pm and then finally sent out an email telling everyone it was my last day. Two senior designers immediately came over to my desk to tell me that I was a sell-out for leaving “just for money.”
Fast-forward 1.5 years. My old supervisor tried to get a raise based on my new salary and was denied. My old recruiter was arrested for fraud because he had created contracts with fake recruitment agencies and embezzled money for years. Then my entire team at my old company was laid off, and four of them reached out to me asking if I could help them get jobs with my current company.
I don't miss those babies.