This company was great at first, but slowly became too toxic for one employee. Cultivating a professional and pleasant atmosphere in a workplace takes effort from every person in the building. If employees are happy, they'll probably be friendlier, which will make collaboration easy. When employees are dissatisfied at their job, though, cliques start to form between different branches of the business, and employees might harbor resentment towards management . After all, if management is in char…

There's no greater sign of a toxic workplace than having a coworker looking over your shoulder at all times, waiting to see you mess up. Oftentimes, these are the folks who are threatened by someone else's presence, especially someone they think is the competition. However, just as it was in this situation, the employee did virtually nothing wrong and the coworker was just seeing what they wanted to see. To me, this phenomenon feels reminiscent of high school behavior. I remember when a classma…

Who hasn't messed up an interview before? I'm sure we can all agree that everything is a learning experience, and sometimes you have to learn by making mistakes. We all know that mistakes can build character, blah blah blah, but really? If I could go back, I would erase all the mistakes I made in job interviews. I don't think those mistakes led me to where I am today. I think that this line of thinking borders on delusional. The truth is that sometimes, you don't think before you speak and you…

Some managers spend way too much time micromanaging than getting anything productive done. We all know what it's like to have a manager who seemingly has made it their only job to watch you like a hawk. Perhaps that intense vigilance is just in your head… just kidding, you're probably not wrong. Most people with authority like to spend more time flexing that authority than using it for good. In fact, when I have found myself in a position like this employee, I don't even care if the manager use…

Supervisors should always be careful what they wish for when providing instructions to employees. This is especially true when it applies to college students with minimal work experience, who absolutely will follow everything their supervisors tell them word-for-word. I remember in my first internship I was getting coffee for my boss and had gotten so used to his very specific order that I literally froze at Starbucks when one time, they did not have his order. I simply could not function or th…

There's no better gift to get from a company than a Christmas bonus at the end of the year. Well, a bonus is nice at any time of the year, but since December can be an expensive month, it's extra nice to get a little bit of help around the holidays. I know not all companies can afford to give out bonuses at Christmas, and that's fair, but what's not fair is what happened to this OP.

A terrible coworker can completely ruin your year. So if you feel neither here nor there about the people in your office, let's just say that you have quite a lot to be thankful for, and if that's not apparent, look no further than this collection of nightmare anecdotes compiled from Reddit's r/coworkerstories subreddit. Some of these stories range from coworkers with no boundaries to coworkers who keep shirking their responsibilities to the ones who you discovered get paid more for doing the s…

If you feel taken for granted more than anyone else you know, you're probably the parent of a teenager or you work in IT. Even worse, you might be both. Now, I have never worked at a company big enough to have an official IT person, but I know how grateful my coworkers and I would be if we did. One has to wonder where this lack of proper gratitude comes from considering how lost we would be without the technologically competent folks in our lives and especially in our workplace environments. No…

We all look forward to payday. Whether by direct deposit, check, or cash, depositing the hard-earned money and seeing your banking balance go up is extremely satisfying. You put in the grueling hours of work, so you deserve to finally be compensated. But has your place of employment ever failed to pay you? Or what about this: they gave you a check for the hours you put in, only for the check to bounce when you go to deposit it.

Who doesn't love a classic “you don't know what you've got till it's gone” story? Here, we have a server fresh out of school who was constantly manipulated and treated poorly by her Karen and Kevin bosses. While I have never shared the particulars of a story, I do empathize with the situation as someone who has worked for ungrateful clients. In this case, I was working in a client-facing role and was already swamped that I did not need this particular person's business. When he started making u…

Some employers refuse to hear the truth, and if you're lucky, they will have to experience the consequences of ignoring your constant warnings. We all know what it's like to be a disregarded employee. Sure, most bosses say that constructive feedback is welcome no matter what your position in the company is, but in reality, you are likely to be ignored if you are at the bottom of the food chain. When this happens repeatedly, it soon becomes exponentially clear that the problems you are noticing…

It's not that employees should be careful around bosses with tempers; it should be that bosses with tempers should be careful around their employees. Those who throw tantrums and who have a habit of unfairly threatening employees should not only be fearful that they themselves might get in trouble for their tirades, but also they just might lose those employees forever and not of their own volition. I once had a friend who willingly took a job with a temperamental boss who had a known reputatio…

They say to never trust your employer, but we always need a former employer for references so do we have much of a choice in the matter? The truth is that we do not. Even after you leave a company, you're still beholden to your former employer in some way. If you have minimal work experience, you might not have another employer to use as a reference. It's the cyclical nature of the working world. Even when you leave one place, you're never really free now, are you? Sure, it's possible to frame…

The relief of taking two whole weeks off, after working 100 hour weeks , must be incredible. Humans aren't designed to work that much. Yet there are numerous career fields that require 16-hour days and working straight through the weekends. Doctors, nurses, and lawyers are among the groups of employees who tirelessly devote themselves to their jobs. But running on caffeine and energy bars isn't enough to keep a person going in the long run. This person shared their own story of when they worked…

Narcissists will always find a way to make everything about themselves, especially when the narcissist in question is your boss. We have all had the experience of working for someone who is just a bit too into themselves. I remember being warned about specific rules of formality around my first boss back when I was stuck in an unpaid internship in my late teen years. All this kind of behavior did for me was it taught me exactly what kind of work environment to avoid. However, sometimes it's com…

It's always fascinating when bosses decide to get petty right before one of their employees walks out on them. They have absolutely nothing to gain from being savage and they're probably risking their already lukewarm reputation, yet sometimes folks in authority cannot help themselves. This boss had a habit of taking credit for other people's work, and he even did so when his employee (now off to bigger and better things) fixed a major tech issue at work. Not only did he get petty, but he had t…