#WorstCompanyEver: Have you ever had a job that made you want to run for the hills? 🏃♀️😱 Tell us about the worst company you’ve worked at!
I remember asking this question a while back and was shocked to see how many people had horror stories about companies I had applied to myself. 😬 It got me thinking, what makes a company truly terrible to work for?
Have you ever had a boss straight out of a nightmare? Or maybe workplace drama seemed to be on the daily menu? Share your stories and let’s commiserate together! 😅
So, spill the tea ☕️: who deserves the title of the worst company out there? Let’s hear it in the comments below! 💬 #HorrorStories #WorkNightmare #BadBoss
Don’t be shy, your story could save someone else from making the same mistake! Let’s help each other out and share the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. Let the venting begin! 🔥👀
Some companies i work at were bad but usually it was just because they didn’t make a lot of money
Careful with this question. You need to take other peoples stories with a grain of salt. Especially when talking about something like their negative opinion of a company.
I remember reading Glassdoor reviews for my previous company before I joined them. There were several stories of nepotism, and it being a “boys club”, and if you aren’t buddy buddy with the CEO you’re never going to get good raises/promotions/work.
I didn’t get that vibe at all when I interviewed with the HM, a SWE on my team, and the CTO… so I ignored those negative reviews and joined the company.
That ended up being the *best* company I’ve ever worked at. I’m not social at work at all, I’m not “friends” with anyone, I certainly wasn’t buddy buddy with any of the executives. I minded my own business, and did my work. That’s the company I got the biggest raise I’ve ever gotten without job hopping, 15%. A 10% raise followed that one as well. I got tons of high profile challenging work, based on my merit and ability to deliver, not some nepotistic relationship with an exec. I stayed there 5 years.
Those reviews were likely from salty ex-employees who were poor performers and got poor reviews, so they coped by blaming something out of their control like nepotism. If I had taken their word as gospel I would’ve missed out on the best job I’ve ever had.
Companies and teams can also *change*. A company that was terrible to work for in 2019 might not be terrible to work for in 2024. Always form your own opinion about companies based on current state. Don’t let stories here deter you from applying somewhere.
All that being said, none of the companies I’ve worked for have really been name and shameable. I guess the worst anecdote is Cisco did mass layoffs when I intern’d there, and a few interns had their *entire teams* laid off. Interns were safe from layoffs, so those people just twiddled their thumbs all summer and did busy work. Sucked for them, but I had a fine time there.
I am contractually unable to say due to a non-disparagement clause.
Useless post
I’m just gonna use the initials, you could probably figure it out if you cared enough (CSA).
It’s a small rinky dink company in <smallTown> MS, I got fired after 3 months just outta college, I repeatedly asked to have a meeting with my manager, he came in late, left early, and still considered himself a dev despite doing no actual dev work, kept saying we’d “have a meeting next week”…for months.
Their task for me became <task that required documenting their entire codebase for customers> when I finally got a meeting with my boss, I showed him what I had, what we needed, and asked for more resources or people to get this done in less than the years this would have taken to do correctly alone.
He said no, I got a fairly serious injury soon after, then I got fired while trying to recover.
<StandardJobSearch+3> months and the 3rd most awful time in my life later, I got an offer for *three times the salary* CSA were paying me, code I’ve implemented has secured the medical information of millions, millions of uses of that endpoint occur monthly.
And a small shitty company in the ass backwoods of Mississippi had me fired because my boss was beyond incompetent, they had me at a steal, then wasted my time and talent. Made me doubt myself, my own intelligence, my own ability, all because my boss couldn’t be bothered from talking about his new <stereotypicalBoomerPastTime> to actually take the 30 minutes to talk to me.
Fucking morons.
There is one I have in mind, but I’m quite certain it was just my team’s manager and their manager that was bad. It doesn’t make sense to name and shame the entire company due to the actions of 2 people
Walmart
JP Morgan Chase. I think the was specific to my department as no one else had the issues I had. Basically, we stopped having a scrum master, so we had to come up with our own stories for the scrum board. While this was fine-ish, it became a problem when they’d give me, a junior dev, the task of creating all the stories for a project I’ve never worked on. This would cause a mess sometimes when it came to making sure projects were being worked on properly. There was also a real lack of explanation when it came to WHAT we were working on. I write everything down, but no one would ever take the time to explain my position to me properly. This is important because I was only ever trained and worked on JAVA applications. I knew nothing about data. Instead of giving us a few days or weeks training on data engineering, they just had us work on things while not explaining them well. The being cherry on top was my manager was just an asshole. If anything was every done wrong by someone, he’d bring it up during our stand ups and tear a person down in front of everyone instead of taking us aside to talk about this issue calmly. It was just a lot of unnecessary stress for a stressful job. I quit after a little under 3 years. From the people I still talk to, out of the 12 people I knew on that team, only 3 are still there. Everyone else either quit or transfered to different departments.
I won’t hold my experience at Chase as the standard for all departments, but if they ask you to be a Data Engineer, politely decline.
Amazon Web Services
My severance prevents me from naming or shaming. Any mention of the company who shouldn’t be named on social media results in a lawsuit. Even a tepid review on glass door results in a lawsuit.
Club Med.
It’s literally a brothel/sex resort. The chef de village straight up told me to *be with* the guests. All my coworkers who had been with the company a while said sex with the employees was part of the attraction for the guests, and I was at a “family friendly” resort. The 18+ only resorts in the Caribbean are absolutely filthy, from what I heard.
I actually kinda want to go to one, just to see what it’s like on the other side.
Charter school
Not IT, but mid level marketing sales job.
I worked for a small company that was under Globe Life, a life insurance company. Most of their sales/customers were existing customers we harassed enough to upgrade their existing plan. It was called American Income Life and I worked 50 hours a week for 3 months and made $3000
Honestly, as much as were told to hate capitalism and embrace science and government and stuff, my worst job, by the longest mile, was my PhD student role under a high performing professor at a top institution
Worked for an ATM company whose main strategy in profit was going after poor folks with bad credit or some other reason why they can’t open bank accounts to deposit money into. The ATMs could cash their checks in exchange for huge fees.
https://dendisoftware.com
A small NC-based medical tech startup that found some ground during the pandemic.
I was hired from a developing country and the whole mindset of the execs were “we bought their cheap asses and will force them to work until they die”.
There was no culture or engineering excellence—only eternal grind to push out the next big feature. 100k lines of code with zero test coverages, horrible coding structure, and 24/7 on-call emergencies.
I did pretty good there and tried to increase my pay. So did a few others and when the pandemic was over and people found out that healthcare tech isn’t that sexy anymore, the exec started to replace the existing engineers with even cheaper labors from India and South America.
Smelled the bullshit and got the fuck out of there in time. Heard from another ex colleague that they aren’t doing that well and are firing even more folks to stop the bleeding.