So I get a meeting invite around 4:40. It says “skip level 2″…thats it. Hmmm..I ask my co-workers…what do you think that is? Everyone frowns…I ask my direct manager…he says he never heard of it..must be a mistake.

Fast forward to a corner meeting room with someone I have never met. She makes a call..and before she completes it she says..”Now I want to warn you, some of what you hear may be unpleasant.”

No shit.

5 years working up to a salary of 90K per year as a programmer…gone in 5 minutes.

This post was submitted by ken.

I started a new job in a new industry in July 2009 after months of unemployment. I went through 3 months and 3 interviews to get this job. In retrospect, that was probably a huge warning sign.

I was trained haphazardly by co-workers. They’d squeeze in 15 minutes before lunch to show me how to do X and then hand me documentation. Or I’d have a half a day of a co-worker complaining about how useless dept processes were under the guise of “training” After a couple weeks working, a co-worker just wasn’t there. I was told that he wasn’t happy with the job and had moved on. In a recession sure… I wouldn’t quit shoveling horse manure in this crummy economy! Then the manager who hired me left the company so I had a new boss.

This new boss was never around, didn’t understand her own department’s processes/reports, and had really horrible social skills. I had maybe 3 meetings with her in 6 months.

End of December a couple co-workers and I were made aware of a huge mistake I had made. In my defense, I wasn’t aware or clear on how to perform the task and had been trained once in July. So, we scrambled to correct my mistake and it looked like most was correctable. So, I thought the mistake would go by unnoticed and didn’t say anything to my boss.

End of January 2010, my mistake turned out to be huge and cost the company a lot of money. I came in Monday morning, none of my computer passwords worked, I had a meeting with my boss and the VP. I was back home with a bag of my stuff within an hour.

I was officially let go three days later. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand the whole process of how this mistake became so huge. It also didn’t matter that a new hire was given such an important task with no check-up at all for six months. The bottom line was that I didn’t notify my boss. When I was let go, I suggested better training in the future to avoid such problems.

This post was submitted by AnnaB.

Wow, how good choices can have bad outcomes these days. I went back to school for accounting. I figured it was one of those careers that would not be touched in good or bad times. I have been working until recently and have two years of experience. Accounting has such a need to maintain an image that we kept hiring regardless of workloads going down. We recently hired two staff, and I though to myself that it could not be a good idea because less and less work had been coming in. My industry was not hit at first because of outstanding engagements, but as those played out many clients decided that an audit was not at the top of the priority list. This was especially true for smaller companies that were not required to have an audit.
So what does my company do. They decided that in order to maintain an image they should let go of experienced accountants in order to allow new hires to have the job. I am so angry these days because I threw away a growing career in IT for what I thought would be job security. I have no clue where to go now. I have a skill set in a market that is becoming more and more flooded.
If I could do it again, I would have gone into health care. the only thing certain in our country is that the baby boomers are getting older. Well, wish me luck. The unemployed thing is new to me. I have generally done very well at anything I set my mind to.

This post was submitted by Matt.

I took a job with a new company, formed by a couple of private equity interests with parts of an old company. Soon after I started, various warning signs appeared that maybe this wasn’t the ideal job for me, or anybody else, for that matter:

—a few weeks after I started, I was given three more departments to manage, thereby doubling/tripling my workload. This was a classic “bait and switch”….you can’t tell me management didn’t know about this when I went through the interview process only a couple of weeks earlier.

— “old guard” management made it their business to make my daily existence miserable. They did not like the idea of a new position in their company that ate into their “power base”. I was constantly fighting fires for what these folks did with my staff, e.g. hired them, fired them, gave them work to do and never told me, etc. Appeals to my higher ups fell on deaf ears….obviously, they didn’t want to upset the good old boys.

— apparently, the “good ‘ol” way of doing business in this company included a lot of fraud/crime. In the space of six months, I found the following:

— OSHA fraud
— sexual harassment
— software piracy
— workmens compensation fraud
— payroll fraud

again, I reported every instance to the higher ups….no response, other than one instance of the equivalent of a wrist slap.

I could see the writing on the wall…these folks liked to go about business by doing anything and everything they wanted to do; no regards to the right way . “Morally bankrupt” is a term that comes to mind. I started looking for another job early this year.

One day in April, the boss called me into his office, and actually told me to my face that I was “too professional” for the job, and he needed someone who was “loose and accommodating”. It takes a lot of arrogance to say that basically he wanted a crook in my role. I was given 20 minutes to pack/leave, all under the supervision of one of the “old guard”.

Morale of the story: stay the course, and leave folks like this behind…they’ll get theirs, sooner or later.

This post was submitted by Dave.

So my husband and I opened a small construction business in October of 2007, yeah bad timing doesn’t even begin to describe it. We had a booming first year thanks to a few huge projects, however as the economy sank lower and lower our company just wilted. We could never get a small business administration loan because my husband had a record from 17 years ago when he was a teenager, so we used our personal credit borrowed from family…

The banks kept telling us “once your company has been open for 2 years you will have no problem getting a business loan from the bank” So we counted the days and when we had two years in business we showed up with our business plan and loan application in hand and were quickly denied! No one wanted to give us a loan again!

We borrowed we used our own credit and we cut the company down to nothing trying to wait out the recession but finally after not being paid for 6 months straight I had my husband officially let me go just so I could get unemployment.

So now that we have racked up a whopping $175,000.00 in personal loans and credit card debt and we are bringing in a grand total of $1,700.00 a month thanks to the state of Texas unemployment we are faced with not only having to close the company but also follow it up with a super fun personal bankrupts woo hoo!

We gambled and we lost…
Or did we?

Now faced with the aftermath we are considering moving to Bonaire and working on a resort or dive boat, why not our credit is shot for 7 years and we always wanted to run off to a tropical island but we had so much to lose if we did it, now we have nothing to lose!

Hello Sunshine, see you guys in 7 years, hopefully by then the economy will have turned around

This post was submitted by mmj.