Can you tell me about a time you left your job well aware how it would mess up the place you left?

[Liz1tummypain]

I did this once before, when I could well afford the loss of income and I'd been bullied and couldn't manage or wait to find a new job first. Have been considering it again recently, which I won't go into now but just realised others must do the same.

I know we are all replaceable but I think we reach the point when we like the thought of making it difficult for certain people, ( not necessarily all) those remaining in post when we go. What were your circumstances when you left and you knew it would cause major inconvenience?

No, but I can tell you that in the last 4 jobs i've worked in, with shitty managers, the managers have left quite soon after me.

Yep and no regrets whatsoever. Horrible place, horrible people and they were breaking loads of employment laws with no fucks given.

Yeah I deleted my how to guides that were just my own notes not actual SOP’s. deleted most of my e-mails and heard from a colleague that panic ensued a week later when the dickhead that called himself a manager couldn’t run the required client reports. I also took out all the formula on the previous reports and saved them just with the returned data.

Kind of

my boss was incompetent and using my work to get through

she resigned six weeks after I left and they called and offered me her job and salary.

but having tried to draw their attention to it and been ignored, I had no sympathy and liked my new job. The salary gave me pause but my suspicion was I'd only seen part of her incompetence. The new place was well run.

I did a handover to my replacemebt but she was bound to struggle with the incompetent boss. Hopefully they got a good person in.

I saw from LinkedIn that incompetent boss took a big step down for her next job. I suspect she just thiught she'd get the big salary while she could. She was really pissed off at my resignation, unsurprisingly.

First job, they were on my back about my "falling performance" when I could demonstrate that various forms of processing had increased by about 20-50% in the ten months I'd been there (it's almost as if it you double the size of a business the admin will double too). Let alone the personal errands for the bosses, and the fact that my manager (who co-owned the business) went on frequent holidays, and would skip explaining things to me in favour of saying "all fine" - then berating me when I subsequently made a mistake.

My manager barely spoke a word to me and skipped my leaving lunch. I'd told them they'd need a second person soon. They ignored me, and my manager made a lot of pointed fuss about 'vigorous recruitment' this time.

Their 'vigorous recruitment' resulted in a woman who worked PAINFULLY slowly. I tried to warn them. No dice.

Six months after I left, my replacement had been replaced by two others!

Only once but I don’t regret it. I started at a new secondary school and was treated like shit from day 1 just because I had originally trained as a primary teacher. 2/3 of my 20 year teaching career had been spent teaching secondary! I took the full 6 months sick leave in the midst of practical exams and didn’t return. I have no regrets. There were around 6 other replacements during that 6 months, all treated like shit too apparently.

I was leading a project that was bringing in millions and had a team behind me way larger than my grade warranted. I was passed for promotion so I resigned. They replaced me with a person at my grade and another one at the grade above. I prepared a 30 page handover document that neither of my two replacements bothered to read before I left. No idea how it all turned out, but I'm sure they managed in the end.

I won't go into detail, but when I left one job I knew it would all fall apart, but it was that or I would fall apart. My replacement didn't last long. I heard that she was repeatedly seen weeping as she walked along the corridor. I can't say I was surprised.

Not me personally but in a previous job a disgruntled employee deleted a critical file. I'm fact he overwrote a lot of data and then deleted it. We were able to recover a previous version on the shared drive so it was a nasty move that backfired. Needless to say he didn't get a verbal reference later in life.

I prepared a 30 page handover document that neither of my two replacements bothered to read before I left

^

You were probably kinder than others would have been

Wanker boss and colleague constantly criticised me and dumped more work on me to the point I left.

First person who replaced me was sacked as they apparently weren't good enough bollocks. The next three all resigned within weeks of being hired. They had to split the role into two people to get it stable again. My friend who still worked there was highly amused reporting it back to me.

How I laughed at the department being a mess for months. Gutted I should have been paid a hell of a lot more than I had been though.

I taught A level and GCSE groups. I decided to take early retirement at 58. I handed in my notice for Feb half term to leave at Easter. My school found a replacement for when I left. She came into school
and I went through schemes of work with her and left her many resources and all lesson plans. Her DH died unexpectedly and she rang school and said she was no longer able to take the job. School asked if I'd stay until they found another replacement. I wasn't pleased but I agreed to stay for another half term. My school didn't advertise very quickly and no suitable candidates applied. I told them I had put off my retirement for an extra half term but I was leaving at May half term because I had an expensive holiday booked in term time which was the first time I'd ever been able to do so. My students had exams in early June GCSE and mid June A level. I left at the end of May and felt bad students had to make do with a sub until they recruited for September.

I was badly bullied by a wanker boss, one day three directors got me in a meeting and genuinely for no decent reason were screaming at me while I cried. I was 21yo, first job.

I got another job literally that day for a partner firm that we worked with, they knew me and loved me. I handed my notice in the next day and then went off sick for my notice period. I was the only one in the whole company who knew how to use a certain computer system so yeah that fucked them over big time. 😆👍

@caringcarer sounds like you took them pretty much up to the exams so at least they got their teaching in for that last half term. It was good of you to stay for that period.

Relatable! I was also passed over for a new job. The set up was that I belonged to a team that was managed centrally. Most of us were physically based in the departments we worked with, but not line managed there (asking for trouble).

My line manager knew I was finding the demands of my job far in excess of what was reasonable and way beyond what I was being paid. He had done nothing effective to try to sort this out. I saw that our team had a new post advertised in a different department. I told him that I was thinking of applying for it because the job description and person specification seemed like a very good fit for me. A substantial part of the job involved setting up something which I had extensive experience of in my current post, unlike everyone else in the team. He nodded, in a non-committal way. I applied.

I got an interview. I heard on the grapevine that there were two other internal applicants. One was based in yet another department and had only been with us a short time. As far as I knew she had no relevant experience of the thing that needed to be set up. The other was a temp who was covering part of the duties of the new post and still getting to grips with that. She knew nothing about the area that needed to be set up at all. I knew this because we'd had a pleasant chat about what she'd been doing in her career to date.

I thought the interview went well. One of the interviewers was my line manager. Later that day he phoned and asked me to come to his office. He told me I hadn't got the job because someone else had just been considered a slightly better fit. It was the temp. I was absolutely gutted. It was such a slap in the face.

The following week, however, something happened which really was in 'laugh or cry' territory. The temp phoned me and asked if she could come and see me to talk through what she would have to do to set this new project up. She had been told to ask me by my line manager because he knew I knew all about it. Poor woman, she was absolutely mortified by the whole thing. She told me straight out that she couldn't understand how I hadn't got the job in the circumstances. I gave her a thorough briefing, as it wasn't her fault, but I redoubled my efforts to find a new job and I left shortly afterwards. Not a backwards glance! Should have gone years before.

Not me but someone who had left just before I started. Did 6 months working in a head office of a national chain of clothing shops. Each type of garment was managed by a team consisting of a buyer and merchandiser and ours were horrible. Each had a sidekick who kissed arse constantly but the rest of us in the team were treated like shit, not taught anything, barely spoken to except to demand a coffee or do an errand. The guy before me had gotten into the system and sent the entire national stock of one particular garment to one shop. And he cancelled all the other items to that store. So imagine a Next or M&S (it was neither of those) with only one style of beige jumper for sale. I wonder if the sidekicks were just biding their time until they could also be arseholes.

Twice.when you leave you leave, it’s not your responsibility anymore.

@Hotflushesandchilblains, cripes! I take it he'd already got a reference and a new job before this was discovered.

Yes, last place I worked. Terrible salary but they funded my qualification (I worked in a college so it didn't actually cost them anything I just went to the lessons). I was the only one who knew how to use our training platform and various other systems, in the middle of onboarding a bunch of new starters and planning an induction. After months of promising me a promotion following qualifying and getting me to do some of the new job role with no pay rise, my new director then told me she was restructuring the department and id have to interview for the new role. I said what if I don't want to do that she said you can take redundancy. The next day I messaged to say I was working from home, she replied to say I can't, I said I'm going off sick then. Never went back in and got a redundancy payment at the end of that month. Fucking cow

Yep, and was told my job was really only a half job as I made all my targets, on time, at a profit etc so must be easy. The Accountant at each monthly meeting took great pleasure in saying "this never happened when xxx was here"

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g I am currently in a similar situation, got screwed over for a job I’d been doing on secondment because they preferred to give it to an external candidate so they wouldn’t then have to try to recruit again to my post (they really struggle to recruit). Now I’m leaving, so they’ve already got a new person without experience to train up and now they’ll also lose someone with a decade of experience in the job, so they’ll find that hard in a small team.

It’s so short sighted.

I kind of think he was young enough and had been there for not very long that it was not so important. In my memory he went off to temp - which is exactly what I did when I quit 6 months later, there were loads of temp jobs around us and you could make quite good money at that time.

After many months of collaborating on "best practice" docs my entire team were made redundant after 15 years as part of a cost cutting exercise and our work moved to offices in the US/Far East 2.5 years ago. The new teams were all recent hire postgraduates with little or no experience in our industry. We gave detailed handover notes for our numerous projects but everything went into a big black hole. The shit apparently hit the fan within a month as no-one else could run the detailed monthly project reports nor access/retrieve our archived emails. Only last month a supplier contacted me out of the blue via LinkedIn to ask me if I knew what had happened with the project he was working on! I know I'd handed this over to my successor and forwarded him my handover email that I'd luckily copied to my gmail. No idea if the company offices are still running! 😁

In 1995 as a youngster newly arrived in London I worked for a dodgy little company who hired me following the departure of my predecessor to go travelling. It was not a temp job but I was on probation for six months, one week’s notice. Fair enough, that suited me. But I overheard a private conversation through an open window between the office manager and the owner one day that made it obvious that when my predecessor returned, they’d get rid of me. There were also loads of other issues - the arrogant owner referring to me as “the girl” and clicking his fingers to get my attention. Dodgy dealings too.

One day I agreed to post a number of letters containing original documents to important clients on my way home. I put them in my bag but when I got to the post office it had shut a couple of minutes prior. Never mind, I’d do it the next day.

Got into work and was immediately let go. What they didn’t know was that I’d got a better job elsewhere anyway and was going to give notice later that week. No big deal as it happens, but they didn’t know that !

I found the envelopes in my bag that night and binned them. I did get a few faux-friendly “let’s catch up” voicemails on our flat’s answering machine (it was 1995) a week later from the office manager - the clients were obviously complaining and he was probably after the certificates of posting. I never rang back.

The company eventually went under when the owner was prosecuted for fraud.

I've left a few workplaces in the knowledge that it would take them a long time to recruit another person to take on my role, let alone someone who produces work of equal quality. The longest so far has been 2 years of continuous adverts - at 2k each, that was a wasted 48k. I felt very sorry for my former manager, who had truly been left in the proverbial, but I did not get on with the big boss at all.

I would never advise anyone to delete data or otherwise try to manipulate a former workplace. You never know when you might need a reference or work with each other again. Burning bridges is only ever a good thing in movies.