My experience and perceptions. I share for authenticity and my healing. Corporations and people I thought were my friends in reality they were my teachers of many teachings of expansion and clarity of my life and alignments. I share in a revealing of the lies, deceit, fight or flight survival and sharing of a story of love, life, pain, suffering, struggle, manipulators, liars, cheats, clones, dead people walking and a whole whirled of clarity and cognition.
This will-could be in many writings same title.
In this sharing I cover 2016 - mid 2022, this post may contain some anger and healed anger vibrations. My volition is peaceful and neutral as I share a more heartfelt and healing portion of my journey.
2016: corporation - we cannot give you a raise because you make more than the other employees. The other employees work on easier products, work less hours, have easier projects and their teams are fully staffed. Even though you work on the biggest product, in the most difficult asset type, manage the most developers and projects compared to any other team in the corporation we cannot give you a raise. Maybe next year.
2017: corporation - we cannot give you a raise as we are still calibrating other employees. Employee purchase stock options program eliminated 30k loss to my compensation.
I ask for more employees so I can work less hours (I was working 90-100 hours a week) and have less stress. I was constantly sharing I was overwhelmed and had too many projects and too many people dependent on me for their work, other easier products had 1-1 or 1-3 and I was managing 1-13, it was just insane and I had pushed myself to keep doing it. Internal transfers not interested due to increase in working conditions and since the pay was the same, why take on so much more work for same pay?
— I started thinking too.
in this year I was also denied expense reimbursements for meals in NYC on a stay where I worked seeing clients and conferences from 7 am to 10 pm and I ordered room services and was denied reimbursement as that was against company policy (this was not a problem for years prior - previous company before take over by larger corporate entity) - the expense was eventually paid after I had to raise it to the CEO of the company - for which I was then labeled “entitled” and was not being a team player with the sacrifices we all have to make as a team in order to make our numbers We must make our numbers and keeping costs low is a way we do that - I was told.
2018: me - I am considering moving to another state, I emailed HR to confirm my pay would be the same. I already was a work from home employee. I received in email the confirm from HR that I was good to move. I put an offer in on a home, started the process and my reporting manager contacts me to let me know the company evolved and saw this as an opportunity to look at my pay and adjust it for cost of living and that my pay would decrease if I moved, so I canceled our home purchase and went to negotiate with the company. I had to negotiate where I could move to a different city in the same state and I would forfeit any raises for 2 years minimum and then we could discuss if raises where possible at 2 years. I found a different property and moved. The irony was the cost of living was more where I moved versus the city. The cost of food and basic goods had more competition in the city versus country so the price of food and gas and goods went up for me. My pay stayed the same.
2019: no raise no discussion.
2020: no raise no discussion. December - I tell my manager I am going to quit and would like to work out a 6-9 month exit plan Even though I felt abandoned and betrayed by a company I had given most of my waking hours to since 2012 and I loved my job when it was a small company compared to the take over by the large company and whirl wind of lies and deceit afterwards, I appreciated and cared for my colleagues and many of which I felt were friends and lovely beings I enjoyed working with, learning from, and building amazing and intelligent advanced software and they were all working so hard and so many hours. The culture was a heavy stressful and long hours environment and the US employees needing to be available 24/6 given the US/China/UK/India working time zones.
Corporation - wow were are surprised, can we do anything for you to stay…. Yes, pay me more money and hire more people, we need help and it has been years of being short staffed. Our product is the most profitable in the entire company, our product has the lowest cost - I am exhausted and care about our clients and employees and it feels like this company does not care at all. We do a good job and increase profits for the product and get no raise, and then asked to do more with less resources each year. The systems are slower, the hardware is cheaper, the clients are noticing the quality change. So many colleagues with strong knowledge have left and we have not replaced them and it continues to grow and we are exhausted trying to hold this together. I have provided solutions and it appears this company is no longer interested in anything other than hitting the numbers for profits in increase each year.
we agreed I would work 50-60 hours a week to help reduce my stress and workload. We also agreed we would hire more people.
Around this time, the company removed Paid time off and moved to flex time. Marketed as unlimited time off, but if approved by manager and all work is complete, but the work was always behind and if someone could handled a 5 hour project, that person would be asked to do 6 quantity 10 hour projects. This removal of vacation to flex time off was met with mass upset and yet an additional benefit - removed and marketed as something “good”.
The company had masterful deceivers who could market horrible things and word salad the marketing to try to make it sound good. Most employees mocked anything from the company at this point - especially 1-1.
Additionally, in 2020 the hardware I was forced to use for work was not compatible with the product I built, in other words the laptop could not handle the software. My laptop crashed and the company had lost all back ups so I lost all my work and emails. The IT department was a disaster and could not resolve the issue. I was in panic, I lost much valuable information and lost months of work. This put me into a deep depression, it took months to resolve and clean up, I spent hundreds of hours, in addition to working time, figuring out how to gather 30 percent of what I had lost.
One may ask why endure….. because I cared about my word to customers of building a good product, I cared about my colleagues and wanted to be a voice for them too - though I felt the white flag of surrender and defeated by a whipping beast of insatiable greed and in horrible and mean working conditions. I had given clients my word I would build particular projects for them and I wanted to complete my agreements, though the company had spiraled into an arena of constant fire drills of emergencies and the quality of our ability to produce a product I would associate with was diminished to something I did not want my name associated with.
2021: 2 percent raise and that was a very high raise we are giving out. Asked for inflation adjusted raise and the response was maybe in may of 2022 but I just got a 2 percent raise and the company acted like that was a billion dollar reward for which I should smile and be grateful - I felt as though I was being seen as a brat by the company for asking for more money when the ~ 23 percent profit was not enough and the insatiable rise of the numbers was all that mattered. The irony was, the cheap hardware and slow systems made working significantly slower.
2022: Things did not get better, and they actually got worse. The manager who was my buffer to the company had decided to leave the company. At this point I was barely hanging in their, I was daily physically sick when I would get on conference calls as I could feel the stress and anxiety of the team, everyone on the team was miserable and the managers were powerless to help, the top company executives had iron clad control and the managers no power to change things.
In April of 2022, I quit and gave a 5 weeks notice. I had reached my completion point. I had learned of the company hiring someone in a similar role as me for 50 percent more than I made. In addition the person hired to replace me was paid 30 percent more than me. One may say, maybe they wanted me to leave, I would have happily done so, and since 2018 I had asked my manager 2 times a year minimum, do you all still want me here? I am okay to leave if I am not wanted. I kept asking because of the pay issues, system slowness, hardware cheapness, etc… I was constantly replied to, that I was definitely wanted and needed and that the management team does everything within their power (which diminished every year to less and less say and authority).
This company I write of (and in most all companies and schools I found most dislike their lives and live in fear of survival), in 1-1 conversations not a single employee, including HR liked the company or had much of anything nice to say. I experienced most people hated the company, yes hated, yet they perceived themselves trapped by paycheck, knowledge, kids in school, debt, life style, etc…. It became extremely sad and physically painful on my body to interact with my colleagues. I cared for them and wanted them to be happy, lovely beings and they all deserved it, the people I worked with were amazing and smart and dedicated. I watched as the life appeared to drain out of the colleagues as they worked themselves tirelessly and into despair. The moral of the group declined over time as the company policies continued into a dead spiral of less less less and asking of much more more more and hardware and system continued to decline. It was apparent to me, the company was headed to an AI driven fully run company and the company did not care at all about employees and viewed employees as cost centers for which can constantly be replaced for less and more easily controllable beings, the younger and educated were more easily programable to work work work - in the company perceived goals.
I encountered millions of times, people as employees speak to a group or audience with a smile and speak lovely things of a product, fund, company and then fully say the opposite and speak to how evil said things really are in 1-1.
A fractal of my personal perception.
Namaste,
Gage
A side note - are these companies really building products or are these companies building slavery and fear - I know my answer.