Yeah, Ubisoft. I applied as a Sr Engineer. Did the interviews, including a “Sr programmer” HR interview.

I got the offer, Sr engineer, signed the papers. Started. Not even 3 days into starting they said they made a mistake I wasn’t supposed to be a Sr role, redacted the title, but didn’t touch my pay.

I still tell people I was a Sr there. I don’t care, lol. Apparently they did the same to my boss, he was supposed to be a VP. Dropped to a TD

One place sold itself as a managed hell helpdesk. Customers would call in for help, you would do level 1 troubleshooting and escalate if you can’t fix it. Which it was for the first week.

What it turned into after the first week: cold call residents and sell desktop AV

Worked construction. Was told I would be an excavator operator… they neglected to say that it was a manual excavator. Nearly wore that shovel to a nub that summer.

The only time i experienced it was in the job advertisement. The posting was for an office assistant and it was a presentation on selling time shares.

I walked out in the middle of it.

I had it happen twice. First time I was applying for a front desk position. I get to the interview and it’s a group interview for selling insurance. The second time it happened it was aflac. I was applying for an office roll and when I got on the interview call it turned out to be a group call for positions selling their god damned insurance. Before they could get deep into the presentation, I typed in the group chat that this was clearly a bait and switch, and dropped out of the call.

Oh boy. I had a crazy experience as a coop student (software engineering). Written on mobile, so may have some typos/styling quirks, sorry.

Term X: I worked for company Y, it went well, they wanted me back.

Term X+1: I get the automated message from the university job system saying I have an offer from company Y for the upcoming term, do I accept? I do. 3 months later, urgont email from university’s coop office. The offer was glitched in the system. Company Y got a rejection from me, hired someone else. I have about a week to land a job from the dregs that nobody else accepted.

There’s no CS related jobs left, but luckily I can speak french at about a B2ish level, so I look at a few french-english translator postings. Get a job doing translations for a mobile app. It’ll probably suck a bit, but at least its something.

Fast forward to first day on the job. They say “we saw on your resume that you can code, one project you made was an android app. Here’s our competitor’s suite of 7 android apps (SAP). We want you to ‘translate’ them and make us our own versions. Here’s a link to our API document.” So I guess I got a CS job anyways. I’m put in a cubicle with Mr Doe. My supervisor, Mr Smith says Mr Doe will show me the ropes.

Mr Doe tells me “its a pretty casual place, no real fixed hours, just try to get your work done, no big deal.” he then pulls out his lunch and starts eating at his desk saying “I’ll just be here if you need anything” I ask about the dev team. He says “we’re an HR consulting firm, we don’t have a dev team” So I guess I’m on my own. 7 apps in 4 months isn’t really feasible, but I’ll try to make at least a quality MVP for one or two of them that they can use as a starting point.

Fast forward again, 2.5 months into the 4 month term. Mr Smith barges into Mr Doe and my cubicle. He yells at Mr Doe saying we run a tight ship here, I told you before our hours are 8 to 4 and you keep coming in at 10. Plus our corporate policy is clear about taking your lunch at your desk. You are fired. Mr Doe protests a bit, but ultimately ends up being let go. Mr Smith says he noticed that I’ve been late and eating at my desk too and he’s going to send a letter to the university that I am violating company policy and am now on probation. I tell him this is the first I’ve heard of this, but he insists it was in the employee manual. I never got any manual. He insists that Mr Doe must have given me one, but relents and gives me a ‘new’ one.

Next he asks to see how the apps are coming along. I tell him one is almost ready to test as a minimum viable product and show him it, also show a second work in progress and demonstrate that it can make writes to the database (I started with the easiest app that only needed read access).

He is furious. Saying I should have at least 3 full apps done, not 1 partially complete app and 1 completely broken one. I told him that without a dev team or even a senior dev that was unreasonable. He says “they’re just mobile apps its not like we’re asking you to make full programs or anything, just copy the ones SAP made” I tell him that a mobile app is still a full program, and they really should hire a full dev team for it, but he’s not having it.

Anyways, I finish the term the best I can. When I get back I of course get called in to the coop office and the dean of my program is there. They got a letter of complaint saying I couldn’t speak french, I was always late, I was a slob, etc. The university has a reputation to maintain, I was representing them and made them look bad…

Luckily when I told them the whole story, plus showed proof (which I was documenting extensibly ever since Mr Doe was fired), they took my side, unlisted that company, and gave me a free pass on my next coop term (so a 4 month vacation).

That HR consulting firm took 3 years to send me my tax forms btw… Yeah, they’re out of business now. Good riddance.

“unlimited PTO”

*looks inside

”4 weeks of PTO unless you have VP approval except you’ll never get it”

I went to a paid seminar on how to earn extra income. They were hawking bubblegum machines made of wood that I could supposedly put in dentists and doctor offices on a route that I establish, and their gumballs were the only size that fit the machines. Everyone in that seminar was my competition. We ran out the door.

I got hired as a Linux Technical Analyst by a company that was re-writing all their old mainframe code for modern servers, three weeks later they told me they were moving me to Site Reliability Engineering.

I do not have the attention span for reliability engineering. They fired me six months ago for not being good at a job my ADHD makes it impossible for me to be good at.

Not exactly bait and switch, but a long time ago I was looking for a job, had an interview that I aced, I can’t overestimate how much I aced it:

• There was a “coding challenge” that was supposed to take half an hour and I finished in 10 min
• They asked a question and my answer was so complete that I could see them turning pages and skipping the next follow up questions
• One of the few times they got to ask me a follow up question which was very related to the work I would be doing the answer was "I would just do the same I’m doing for my master thesis, and proceeded to explain how I have solved that problem on my thesis and later I found out it was roughly the same way they had solved it on their use case.

Then they told me “our initial salary is X, but that’s for Juniors, which you clearly aren’t, we’ll finish this round of interviews and contact you”. They contacted me a week later and offered me a Junior role paying X. I can’t really said they baited and switched since they didn’t change the offer, and what the other person told me was more informal. Since I needed a job and they have accepted me part time while I finished my masters I accepted thinking that once I went full time I would get a raise. Nope, they said they only did reviews and raises annually, and I had started right after that. I worked my ass off for that year, proving to them that I was worth the raise. Got to my annual review and was told everything is excellent, we’re bumping you to Junior 2 with a whooping 5% increase in salary…

That’s when I decided fuck them. They want a Junior, they’ll get a Junior. I started to listen to podcasts and YouTube videos during my work and dragging my feet, taking weeks to do what I would have done in less than a day before, and still outperforming all other juniors. I quit before the next year for unrelated reasons, and went through training a replacement who, let’s just say, was really a Junior.

Worked at one of my jobs for 8 years. Around the 4th year mark they made some decision to add a higher paid training oriented role into it that was essentially meant as a manager role, but you had no actual underlings because your goal was to go area by area and supervise or say where they could possibly do better. I was told I was the perfect fit, and honestly I love training and helping people so it was right up my alley.

I officially trained for the position for almost a year, got the credentials needed for the position and even extra permissions system side to be able to run the position, fully expecting that I was going to be getting the position. Then suddenly radio silence, the training sessions stopped with no followup, I stopped getting invites to meetings.

I eventually asked “hey what is going on” and they said “oh parent company decided that we weren’t good enough to actually get that role”. So much time wasted for getting that position. The only real positive (and why I feel it was a “switch” as well) that came out of it is that they never actually took away the additional security permissions I was given, so I was the only one with my title to have basically full access to anything system side so any issue that came up I no longer had to escalate to a management level or rely on finding someone to have to escalate for me.

I missed my brother-in-law’s rehearsal dinner toast to answer a call that was to rescind an offer for which I was already in the process of making arrangements to move to a different city ~2 hours away. If you’re going to be a shady asshole employer, may as well also do it at 8pm on a Friday, right?

Hired for deli. Deli is a different union and pays better than say, cashier.

Which is what they moved us to immediately.

Asked if they were going to pay our hired wage or not. They did. I think they thought we knew it was a bait and switch. Didn’t until later, but they were careful to not lower the wage cause then yeah. Go to the board.

One job that told me I’d get a beginning hourly wage, and then a raise after passing a training and evaluation at the end of my second week. Didn’t get that raise after working there for 4 months.

Another job that hired me part-time as an educational assistant, and then fired the educator I was assisting and the website/server maintainer, then told me I’d fill both of their roles while also designing new courses and building demo robots. They strung me along for months, offering me a full-time position, all the while having me log my 60-hour timesheets internally, but signing off on falsified 20-hour timesheets. Finally, I was told to write the job description for a new full-time position that was tailored for me, so they could “quickly” fit me into that position. Then, they immediately hired someone else without even interviewing me. Through a number of monumental fuck-ups on their end, I was able to make a strong case to the Texas Workforce Commission stating that I was wrongfully terminated and in a hostile work environment, for which the employer had to pay me every single unpaid hour.

Once I joined a company with “unlimited paid time off” and turned out it was more like “no time off and maybe check some things on the weekends”. They also fired me day before my equity should have hit then had the audacity to ask me to organize macbook return - it’s still gathering dust on my shelf lol

Either way I still got paid a lot of money and it was a good learning though more in life lessons rather than professional experience.