I've told this one before, but the guy had his platform bought with a promise of partnership. they kept stalling the contract, and he would repeatedly ask when he was gonna get paid his share, and eventually they said "we never promised that". he deleted everything from the team's computers, revoked all access and left. since there was never a contract, they didn't do anything about it

At a former job, the company decided to replatform to Salesforce. The entire dev team was laid off. But it would take an outside agency a year to build the Salesforce site. The company wanted the devs to stay for an additional year.

The only severance was something they called a stay bonus. It was 30% of our gross income but it was still contingent on performance. And if they decide to let you go earlier, it gets prorated if you still qualify for the bonus. Not a good deal.

Each month a dev left. By the time I secured a new job and left, all that remained of the dev team was a junior frontend dev and two team leads (one FE and one BE) with no team to lead. Well, there were contractors, but they were only brought on after the Salesforce replatform announcement. I’m pretty sure the company had to hire even more contractors. No idea how much that cost them.

For me, I think it was serendipitous that I gave notice during their busiest time of year. They actually tried asking me to extend my notice. Karma was coming back to bite them. Not just for the Salesforce thing. But also for their lack of support when I was blindly accused of being both insubordinate and incompetent.

Best co-worker quitting story?

"T" I've refereed to in previous rants knew he was close to being fired, so he jumped ship. 'T' sent the usual "I'll miss you guys" email to the department, except me (and a few others that didn't fall for his BS and not scared of him). His mistake was he sent the email out a day early (buddy forwarded me the email) and left the stuff (box of pics, books, etc) he planned on taking with him. One item in particular was a new company provided laptop bag, which technically wasn't his to keep (supposed to leave/turn-in any company provided equipment), so I grabbed the bag and hid it.

The next day I heard him slamming drawers (looking for the bag) and a loud cursing. Other devs peeking over the walls asking what's wrong.

Dev1: "Dude, what's up? Whatcha' looking for?"
T: "Nothing...fuck!...damn it...nothing...assholes...fucking assholes!"
Dev2: "Who's the ass? What's wrong?"
Dev3: "Need help looking for something?"
T: "No..no...nothing...I'm fine...making sure I don't forget anything."

'T' never found out who took the bag and I've had that laptop bag underneath my desk ever since.

Had a stupid sales dude. Lost his driver's license due to reckless driving (and this was a few in a row including drunk driving) for 6 months. As it was his job required to drive around he got instantly fired.
So he had to leave laptop, iPad and phone with us (IT). His next stop was finance for the lease car but he was pissed, left the building and drove off.

Apparently rules are super shitty for the theft of a lease by the registered employee. So we could not really mark it as stolen. We alerted the police anyway and he was caught next week for driving without a license. So he went to jail and we got the car back

My favorite is when they just don’t come in one day (don’t give notice, just see ya!). If that happens more than once in a few month period, that tells you more about the department than the individuals.

Best co-worker quitting story? A co-worker quit, another co-worker quit, and eventually I quit, too :-)

Still happy to be my own boss ever since!

That day we had the weekly meeting with my boss to tell him what was new since last week.
We were 2 developers, I did the backend and the other guy did the frontend.
I tell him we had nothing new on the frontend. Literally not even one more line of code.
He tells me he gave the other guy some money the day before to encourage him to engage a bit more on the project.
The meeting is about to end when we receive a message in the development group, the guy said he wasn't going to continue in the project.
Not like that, dude.