This one is really long, please bear with me. I joined a US tech consulting company as a Mexican citizen working remotely (working as a contractor, this is common when you work with US companies from Mexico) I was going to handle all tech interviews for this company for all roles, most of them being highly skilled (everything from mobile dev to machine learning) and do some coding on the side to not lose my edge and a promise of equity if I stood out.
I loved everything about this company. I met the CEO who had built a unicorn and a decacorn and he agreed to mentor me by having a call once a week. After 2 months in this company the head of HR was let go together with the complete HR team of 8 with the exception of 2 people, one of which was promoted to head of HR. Suddenly the CEO was going to take over a more active role in HR and guide the software that I was building for HR internally. I thought, “Great! I will get to work with him even more closely and learn a ton, plus he’ll see my skills in action”. A couple of months pass and I’m being praised both on glassdoor by people I interviewed and by the CEO on all-hands meetings, I was so happy that I didn’t care about overtime work, I spent hours working on this software outside my usual interview time which was always full from 9 am to 5 pm (8-9 we had company meetings).
Around this time I got married, I invited the CEO to my wedding in Mexico thinking he would probably not come since he stopped having mentor calls with me, was always busy and I’ve only been in this company for 4 months. But to my surprise he did, It was incredible and I genuinely liked this company, his leadership was inspiring.
Once we reached 9 months I was confident I would be getting the equity and a good raise at the end of the year, but something happened before that, he offered to help me move to the US where he lived and adjust my salary to a US based one. Before saying yes I decided to visit him in the US to get to know the city and then everything went wrong.
I contacted the CEO to arrange for the week where I would go there and spend some time in the city. This would be my 10th month of work in the company and I had already spent all my vacation time on my honeymoon. I asked him if it was truly ok and he said there was no problem. I decided to just go and work in the afternoon until late at night during that week.
He provided for me and my wife a place to stay, everything else I had to pay for, which was a little weird to me, even more so after going to his house and seeing the guy had quite a few ferraris and ducatis. The flights (me + my wife) plus car rental ended up costing me quite a bit but it was an “investment” in my mind. Around halfway through the week my system (which was in beta) had an issue, there had been no bugs up until this point because of how much time I spent working and testing this system, the CEO told me it was a mistake of us to not use PTO for this week and told me “don’t be cheap”. I was confused, but we were already getting in the car and I did not want to argue with him. I went back to the hotel and fixed the bug that same day.
A week passes and I’m back in Mexico after having accepted his offer to move to the US. The plan was to move after he told me how much my raise would be but I already had the idea of moving around January of 2023. Once I got back though our morning meetings changed, every piece of my work was strictly analyzed and every mistake was a chance to throw insults my way in front of everyone in the daily meetings. I’d make a math mistake when saying something then be corrected to use a different formula, I’d use that one and then I would be insulted for using it even if he was the one who made the correction. I had no clue what to do at this point so I just worked harder and harder until I was working from 4 am to 8 pm nonstop. My body could not take it and I started to get sick. My wife noticed but I had already sold her the idea of moving to the US so much that I just pushed it down. I simply thought I was not enough for this job.
After two weeks of working like this one of the 2 people from HR (which had the task of doing the work the other 8 had) noticed something was wrong with me and I simply broke down telling her I was stressed and had been working every day to not make any mistakes. To my surprise she broke down and told me what she was going through, she was under the exact same stress and worst of all, they had helped her move away from her country and raised her salary, but once she moved they lowered her salary back to what it was. This is when I realized I was not the problem.
I decided to have a talk with the CEO and asked him for some clarity in the whole situation, that I had paused my plans to move to the US (sell my car, my furniture, rent a place there, etc) and that I was starting to break down due to stress. I expected many things except what happened. He told me he knew what I was doing, that I was trying to use them for my own benefit and acting like I wasn’t enough, but he said that wouldn’t roll with them, that managers in the US are way smarter than managers in Mexico and they would not fall for it (keep in mind I’ve mostly worked for US companies for all my 12+ year career). That I was not smarter than them and I should shut up and start learning. I just answered “yes, you are right”, “yes, you are smarter” because my mind already decided to quit the next day. After all that, he said and I quote “But don’t worry, we’ll help you get out of Mexico both physically and mentally”, I had no words, that same day I called my old workplace (another US company) and they hired me back on the spot, we both were so happy. I sent my resignation letter the next day.
Quitting was a whole other ordeal but they basically took 2,000 USD out of my pay for “stealing vacation time” going to that city, they also withheld that payment for a month until I delivered back a laptop that I was helping them store from an old employee that quit. I didn’t care, I wanted to be done with them. It took me a while to process all of this and write it down. It still hurts me because I really loved the company and wanted to work and learn from the CEO. I know companies are not your friends, but this seriously has brought me trust issues. I had to pay around another 1,000 USD just to fix the medical issues this job got me. At least it’s in the past now, there were a ton of redflags but I ignored them, even the glaring “We are a family” one.
I would love to leave a review in glassdoor since I personally know how much it affects their hiring, but for that same reason I think it can be traced back to me.
