Good question. I know you're trying to go for the vicious attack here but it isn't going to work out.

The job I held towards the start of the pandemic, I had been there for almost four years. The CEO and a Director at the company directly asked me to join the 120+ person company. I jumped ship because the job paid way under market rate (game development, natch), I was working really long hours with a hellish commute and the company laid off about 40% of its workforce at the start of the pandemic so it could control costs. I wasn't going to stick around to find out if I was next. There were other problems with that company, but this is going to get long without any extra asides.

I walked out of that job straight into my next one. I got hired on as Lead Firmware Engineer, and I was hired as full-time remote, that was explicitly in my contract. The job paid just below market rate, but we're three months in to the pandemic, the work sounded interesting and a friend, who was a head of a division at the BigCorp, directly reached out to me and asked explicitly for help because we had worked on previous projects together and he knew my abilities.

So this job, I was lead engineer of a team of a dozen developers which we grew to around 19 over the course of about four months. The higher ups decided that there would be no cost of living increases for anybody below the level of director and all bonuses would go unpaid for anybody below the level of director for the next N quarters, meanwhile the company posted two most profitable quarters in its very long life and was well on its way to a third.

In June of 2021 it came down the pipe from the higher ups that everyone was to RTO on July 15th. No exceptions. Don't care what your contract says. We didn't even have a decent vaccine at that point. Most of my team, and the two other teams in my division said "Hell no" and lodged formal complaints. I did not. Within two days everybody (about 80 people) had one-on-ones with a very nice lady from HR and a director, and I log in on Thursday morning to find out they had fired everybody who had said "No." I was left with one developer on my team. The other two teams were left in similar numbers. The only reason I didn't get fired was because I would have a claim against the company for breach because it said in my contract "permanent remote." The environment was mired in process - I had 19 standing meetings per week and was still expected to get 30 or 40 hours of software development done. There was a reason they needed help. Management believed that in one of the hottest job markets in industry in history that they could fire all the dissenting software developers and just rehire new teams at below market rates with required in-office presence. I also went from having two direct managers and a team of 19 developers below me to five direct managers and one developer below me. Hell on Earth. I had been there a little over a year by that point. 14 months or so? I'd have to check my LinkedIn. The past few years have been a bit of a blur. Checked. Almost 17 months.

My friend, the director, came to me and said "But you're going to stick around, right?" I jumped two weeks later. The BigCorp closed the entire division and laid off any remaining staff. My friend went to Google. I had lunch with him just the other week where he probed about needing some help.

I jumped to a start-up, whereby a friend, who was CTO, said "we could really use your help." I had offers from six companies, one included a FAANG, that all paid well above market rate. I spent a while happily working at the start-up, but it was stressful, it was long hours (I logged several back-to-back weeks of 110 hours per week), but there's a big recession coming, funding is getting cut left & right, including ours. I wasn't willing to do 90+ hours per week every week but they kept demanding it, and I was burning out, this company is at least two years away from shipping a hardware product with no revenue and VCs tightening their belts. We decided to part ways after 9 months.

And now I am at a new start-up. My last job hunt was three casual conversations with three companies, lasting a total of three hours that resulted in three solid offers of around a quarter of a million base compensation each. The start-up is less than a year old. We've got an ARR of around $2M+ and enough runway for the next three years. I've been there two months, they just gave me a 10% raise. I work exactly 40 hours a week and I don't turn my computer on over the weekend. Everybody's happy with my output and productivity. I spend time in my workshop on the weekends building furniture and enjoying my Summer.

It's not that I am a bad employee. My "interviews" usually consist of "This is our company, this is how much we will pay you, when can you start?" The interview is almost always a casual conversation over coffee, and then an offer is made.

But sometimes...

Sometimes I pick shit companies to work for.