I quit three jobs in 2021.

Job #1

This was the first job I got out of college. I’d been there for over 2 years. Sure, I was SEVERELY underpaid — when I told recruiters the money I was making at this job, one of them gasped and said, “How do they get away with that?” — but it was a chill, youthful, diverse environment with co-workers and managers that I got along with really well. So even though being underpaid had me surveying the landscape for higher paying jobs, I wasn’t in the biggest rush to leave.

In March of 2021, on one Wednesday morning, me and a few other members of my team received a mysterious meeting invite from HR. And not from our HR department… the parent company’s HR. Given that our company had already gone through several waves of layoffs and furloughs and the finance department hadn’t been touched, we had viewed ourselves as indispensable. But this meeting invite, from the HR department of the parent company, didn’t necessarily inspire confidence for any of us. It certainly was not a meeting to talk about salary increases.

When I logged into the virtual meeting, and I heard those fateful words — which basically amounted to “we’re letting you go” — I froze. I really didn’t know how to respond; it was just a really cold, awkward silence until I let out a wimpered “…wow…” The department director then handed the dialogue off to the HR specialist who did the standard rundown of details and whatnot. One silver lining was that I wasn’t being pushed out immediately; I had about 3 months to find another job.

Me and about seven other people in the department were included in the “department restructuring”, including every member of my team except for my manager, who was on vacation when all of this went down. Needless to say, they were not happy to hear upon their return from vacation that their entire team had been fired. So it was absolutely no surprise that a few weeks later they themself had left the company. Others in the department followed suit, including those whose jobs were safe (for the time being). Laying off a big portion of the team just inspired other people to leave. By the time a couple months had passed, I was ironically one of the only original members of the department still left.

The parent company’s plan had backfired badly; they unwittingly decimated almost the entire finance department of their biggest subsidiary, which was one of the only stable units of the entire company. Not only that, but they were struggling to find qualified people who were interested in these new job openings. (Their LinkedIn job postings were up for months but had only garnered measly amounts of views and applicants.) That is when their tune changed. Suddenly, I was being asked to stay. Suddenly, I was being told that I was an incredibly smart, valuable employee. A couple months ago, I was dispensable, but now, I was a dying company’s last hope.

So I approached them with an offer, assuming that I had gained leverage. Obviously I wanted a good salary increase, given that I basically was the whole team now. However, to my surprise, even while on the brink of collapse, they claimed they couldn’t meet the demands. They still wanted me to stay though.

Not long after, I put in my two weeks notice.

Job #2

One of my former coworkers from the previous job, who had also been laid off, referred me to the manager at this new company he was working at. It was a small company, but it seemed like an interesting opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a growing business. The manager, who was idiosyncratic in many ways, seemed to be very sympathetic to what we were going through, and we shared many of the same employee-centric, anti-corporate ideals. I was intrigued by the job description, the salary amount, and the prospect of working with someone I already knew. So I accepted the offer.

I realized very quickly that accepting this job was a mistake. There were red flags even before I stepped into the office that, retrospectively, I should have taken more seriously. I definitely should have done more research. I banked way too heavily on the testimonial of my co-worker, who hadn’t even been working there long himself. So in some ways, my involvement with this company was sort of my fault. Nevertheless, my experience at this company was a nightmare.

Without getting too specific, I’m 99.999% certain that this company was involved in criminal activities. I didn’t have a lot of set responsibilities the first few days, so I created work for myself and did a lot of digging — perusing the company’s website, examining bank and credit card statements, studying the clientele…everything looked sketchy at best and completely fabricated at worst.

On top of that, everything I was told about the job by the manager in the interviews was a complete lie. The platform I was told we were building? Didn’t exist. The clients, as I mentioned before, were basically fake. Internal controls were non-existent and ethical red flags were everywhere. We weren’t doing anything even remotely close to the work I was promised in the interviews.

The manager was a narcissist and a sociopath. He put on a nice face and charmed us with his llittle “stand up for the little guy” shtick just for us to find out that he was deceitful, unhinged, and unapproachable. I’m not kidding when I say literally everything he told me in the interview, down to the very last detail, was a complete, utter, bold-faced lie.

I didn’t even make it a week. I quit after 4 days.

Job #3

After another month of job-hunting and working with a recruiter, I landed another job. (Shoutout to my recruiter for negotiating for an extra $5000, I feel like that was the universe balancing itself.) The company was legitimate and pretty ambitious, the pay was great, and I’d be able to work 4 out of 5 days of the week remotely. I figured, “I bet I’ll be here for a while.”

Nope.

I knew within three days that I wasn’t going to be there long. It was an IT services company with a culture that was heavily sales-centric, which I despised, because it meant that other units of the company, such as Finance and Accounting where I worked, were quite underdeveloped. Communication between departments was abysmal. Within our department specifically, we were overworked and stressed as hell. It wasn’t abnormal for people to work damn near all day. Even when I logged out for the day, I could get messages late about something that had to get done before an executive meeting in the morning…which meant logging back in and continuing the work day late into the night.

Turnover was high; within a month of me being there, two of the high-level managers I interviewed with quit. The billing specialists were micromanaged by the managers, and those managers were then lorded over by executives. I had never been in an environment where you could literally feel anxiety and tension in the air. Every little thing that I did, which most people would consider the basic tenets of teamwork — helping someone out who’s struggling with their workload, defending each another in meetings — were interpreted as saviorism. Which made me upset because that meant that many of these people had almost never been treated with basic human decency.

It was depressing. This atmosphere had my mental health at the lowest it had been since I was an undergraduate.

I quit after 4 months.