The proverb “A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush” postulates that you're better off with what you have or are able to get now rather than what you might be able to get in the future. Reson being that While working for an emergency telecommunications company, this worker fell into the all-too-common trap of taking on additional work with the promise that it would eventually lead to more pay. Spoiler alert: It didn't. With the proverbial carrot dangling just in front of them indefin…

Sometimes you can't just tell people things—they won't listen. It takes actually experiencing the negative result that you were warning them about for them to admit they were wrong. Predictably, this happens all the time with unreasonable egotistical bosses who are eager to prove themselves… This developer, working for a financial services company, developed various tools and scripts to compensate for the company's other shortcomings, sometimes inadequate customer solutions. This saw them worki…

This employee worked in the contracts department of a major software company, which they refer to as “MidSoft Inc” Continual foolish decisions that thought of nothing but the bottom line and cost-cutting measures, driven by the ravenous interests of private equity investors, reduced the company's senior development team from 12 to one soldier, “Sam.” While the ledger might have looked better for a time, the immeasurable loss of institutional knowledge and literal lifetimes of experience would g…

It's common knowledge that you'll often never be appreciated for your job when things are going well—or even great. Your boss and employer assume your high performance is just a given and merit to their management rather than a credit to your own talent and efforts. But, as soon as something goes wrong, they won't blame themselves, even though that will make the most sense based on their logic. No, they'll suddenly come around asking questions, trying to figure out what went wrong, and looking…

This web designer was responsible for managing and maintaining a collection of websites that their organization maintained for clients, but their organization had a particularly strange policy where requests from clients always needed to be considered with their boss telling them that they couldn't say no to requests, regardless of whether or not the requests actually made any sense, were actually good ideas“features” or would bog down and ruin the performance and interface of the web sites. Gr…

Management doesn't have any idea what you do; let's just get that out of the way.

Tsk, tsk, CEOs and their antics. On the one hand, you're remote because it suits the needs of upper management. On the other hand, you're not remote because of the same reason. Well, which one is it? You can't have your cake and eat it, too. This micromanaging CEO was the type of human I stay away from. Anxious and suspicious of his employees and unable to make an informed decision or directly say what he wants. Always flip-flopping back and forth. The programmer who was working under him had h…

Being a manager is all about knowing people, and believe it or not, in order to be a good manager you also have to care about people. Of course, you have to protect the business interests too (if you want to keep your job) but there's a balance to be struck here—and the best managers strike it true. See, the thing is, having a motivated and cohesive team is actually the best asset a company can have—heck, even if your morals are based on a balanced checkbook, it stands to reason that the best i…

There's this thing that happens in life that you'll see time and time again, where you meet someone in a position of authority and can't help but wonder how in the heck they got there. Maybe they're not necessarily cruel (though that's usually the case), but they'll be so obstinate and incompetent that you can't help but be surprised that no one else noticed.

I should be able to repeat a few well-known sayings in my sleep by now. My favorite phrase, and the one I have to swear by—are you ready for it? ‘live within your means’. In case you haven't noticed already, the theme of this delightfully intriguing tale will be money—perhaps the most despicable topic in history. However, I guess it gets less painful, and possibly even funny, when we talk about other people's money. The story below is an account of a cynical tenant who has come up with a very c…

There are few people you can truly trust in this world… and none of them are real estate agents or landlords. Two groups of people who make a name and a living for themselves by carving the flesh off of the unsuspecting. They'll stop at nothing to ensure they always walk away on top and with some extra coin in their pocket. So, it's unsurprising that a real estate agent who also landlords their own properties might be a little unethical and uncaring when it comes to profit-seeking and the fatte…

While this story may not be as spicy as some of the other stories we've seen come out of this particular subreddit, without a doubt, it's a good bit of revenge against an arrogant employer that doesn't reek of an “and everybody clapped” sort of ending.

Sometimes, getting too good of results will only prove to your boss that you're a threat to them and will earn you the honor of being the target of their ire and infantile rage as, rather than up their own game, they try to politically hamstring you in order to prove their superiority. After all, whenever their ego is involved, you can trust someone to make an irrational decision.

Being a ruthless cutthroat certainly has its advantages. Being unencumbered by the usual social requirements like empathy, mutualism, and reciprocation really frees you up to make some agile and dastardly moves. Still, the only friends you'll make will be “yes men” and sycophants, who are really only there to ride your coattails and feed off your scorched-earth rampage to the top, hanging around begging for scraps like a dog at the dinner table. When the house of cards eventually topples, these…

If you consider yourself to be smart and clever, you might think that you can get away with gaming the system, and it's only when it blows up in your face that you realize how much you overestimated your intelligence. Congratulations, you played yourself. Maintaining one full-time job is a lot of work, so it really makes you wonder how some people have been, reportedly, managing to work two at the same time. Every now and then, you see a story pop up online about someone who has been holding do…

There are a lot of confusing things happening in this story, like how this night shift worker became integrated with their company's development team, contributing significantly to the point where the higher-ups were using their reporting dashboard for their reports. Yet, at the same time, there was somehow no one willing to stick up for them when their head was placed on the chopping block for seeking increasing compensation for their constantly-increasing responsibility and contribution. Stil…