A company I used to work for touted their profit sharing program as a major incentive when I was hired. Basically, any profits over X% in any giver quarter, a portion of the profits beyond X were shared proportionally with the employees. Simple and effective.

Well my first quarter there apparently I was not included because I hadn’t worked there the full quarter. Okay, whatever. The next quarter I did indeed get a modest bonus, nothing crazy, but nice.

After that, the market surged and we were working on what would definitely be one of our best quarters in years. Well the ownership saw that and at our quarterly recap meeting, they announced “upgrades” to the bonus formula: going forward, they’d share an even larger percentage of profits over X%…but now instead of X being a fixed percentage, it was a variable moving target that they would set at the beginning of each quarter based on projections.

Projections that, by the way, they didn’t share with the class until halfway through each quarter.

Conveniently, from there on out, their projections were always so accurate that the bonuses basically completely went away.

The second-to-last straw for me was one quarter when the market was really bad, yet our people worked hard and somehow in a down market, our company surged against the tides and had an amazing quarter. We were all proud of our work and looking forward to that bonus.

Well in the fucking meeting where they gave out the bonus, they announced that it was such a unique situation that they revised their projections a second time, once at the midpoint of the quarter…and again just two weeks ago. For me, that meant that a bonus roughly estimated to be about $1,500 ended up being a check for $33.

I was so tempted to just throw the check in the trash on my way out of that meeting.

Thus I refreshed my resume and started looking. Found a great role in government work and began the months-long pre-employment process. In the quarter that happened next, morale was utterly shot and our company had a down quarter. We still did well, mind you, and better than our competition and the market in general, but we only had slight growth (in a quarter where many competitors had contraction). Of course we missed the pie-in-the-sky projection and got no bonus that quarter.

Then, as it worked out, I was set to give my 2 week notice, and my boss scheduled my annual review for that exact day.

Went in, was told I was doing a great job, helping the company, blah blah blah…but that in the next year moving forward, they wanted me to take half the workload of another worker they’d recently terminated and didn’t plan to replace. Additionally, the new ERP system, that I’d been asking to be trained on for months…well they weren’t going to train me on it, but instead, I’d be expected to learn the old system, to help pick up the workload of other employees as they learned the new system. So my workload was set to more than double, while not getting the training I’d requested (not even like paid courses, just let me sit in on the meetings and have access to the material)…and of course in this market, the best they could do for me was a 1.3% annual raise. Boss said he was sorry and wished he could give me more of a raise but even he was only getting a 6% raise.

Then he asked if I had any feedback for him before we wrapped up and it felt incredible to say, “Yeah, well…I’m not going to be doing any of that extra work you just told me about, because two weeks from now I’m not going to be here anymore. Consider this my 2 week notice.”

It’s these damn kids with their loud music, and their Dan Fogleberg, their Zima, hula hoops and pac-man video games, don’t you see? People today have attention spans that can only be measured in nanoseconds!

Damn lazy immigrants, stealing all the work!