You can count me in as one of the participants in the Great Resignation. I might be fucking up here because anyone who reads this and knows me will probably instantly recognise me and I haven’t yet moved into another position so I might be jeopardising my reference if word gets around. But fuck it. I will preface this cautionary tale by saying there were some great people at this company including some of the managers and senior engineers (you know who you are) who I still have tremendous respect for and always will. But this company has some serious ethical problems in the way it treats employees.

Got on a grad program in the fall of 2020. First ever dev job. Height of pandemic. Company makes all devs work on site despite it clearly being feasible for us to work from home because half the developers are contractors living in Eastern Europe. Literally 100s of devs in the same room. It’s clearly a breach of the covid rules but whatever, its my first dev job, I’ve got my foot in the door to a better life, don’t rock the boat.

Graduated grad program after 2 and a half months to become “Junior Developer” on £23k/year. Got minor promotion four months later after a bunch of pissed off devs leave after getting low balled in pay review. My official job title is now “Developer“. I’m leading a team of devs and doing scrum master duties because they’ve also just fired all the dedicated project managers. Despite these extra responsibilities, I’m apparently still a junior developer because “they’ve just done away with the junior title for this pay band but it was previously one of the junior pay bands”. I am being paid a whole extra £3k for my troubles for a grand total of £26k. Ok, whatever, it’s my first dev job, foot in the door and all that.

A few months later the company then hires some devs with more experience and allocated a few of them to my team. They’re getting paid significantly more than me. I should have demanded a pay rise there and then or quit but didn’t. Again, first dev job and needed the money. I’ve got debts to pay after having been stuck in dead end minimum wage jobs for years. Oh and by the way, it’s now autumn 2021 and the pandemic restrictions have been lifted. At which point the company issues all devs with laptops and tells us we can work from home. You could really not make this shit up.

Over the next three months, I lead the team in building a feature that automated away the biggest reported user pain point and that was considered by other devs to be a very difficult technical challenge. We achieved this in just three months and a couple of days ahead of schedule. We also did this in the face of a lot of aggravation and deception from the business department product owners that even caught the attention and wrath of some of our higher level IT managers for being so out of order.

In the next four months, I then went on to single handedly rewrite the feature, improving its performance to under a second in benchmarks (was previously 18 seconds) whilst simultaneously extending the functionality of the feature to cover pretty much all realistic scenarios. Amongst other achievements, I also spotted improvements in our DevOps flow that had been missed by senior engineers and which improved our build speeds by over 3 minutes.

During this time period, the war in Ukraine starts. All of those Eastern European contractors I mentioned earlier? Every single one of them fired within days of the war starting. Many of them were from Ukraine.

Salary review comes around. My offer? £30k. A whole £4k more than the previous year. With 10% inflation taken into account, a real terms pay increase of £1400. This salary would still have been less than what they were paying other devs on my team over the past year not to mention the same devs were also due a pay rise themselves later that year. Apparently I was meant to be grateful because it was a 15% increase. Please bear in mind that this was not a small or medium enterprise struggling for money. This was an international privately owned company worth over a billion pounds and opening new stores every month.

Enough was enough. I told them it was a disrespectful offer and that they left me no option but to quit. I had my perms revoked that evening and had to email my official resignation letter the next day from my personal email account. I sent my laptop back through the post as the only other option was to leave it with security at the gates. I was put on gardening leave for a month and that was that. I didn’t get to say goodbye in person to any of my colleagues with whom I had spent the last 18 months of my life working with.

I started working on an iOS app for a month or so after this but my head was not in the right space and I needed a break. I took a couple of months off to enjoy life again and I’m now grinding my way through the neetcode 150 whilst reading “cracking the coding interview” and “system design interview”. I don’t know what company I’ll end up at next, but one thing is for certain: I will not work for abysmal wages ever again.