This is my situation right now. I held off on quitting because I wanted to hold out a year so I didn't have to pay them back the money. However, the situation just kept escalating. So put in my resignation last week (should have just done it back in June, but I thought if I could get HR involved things would improve. I was so so wrong).
I have the cash to pay it back, but it does make things tighter for me on looking for a new job, now I have to find something within 2 months instead of 6.
Yeah. HR exists to protect MANAGEMENT from lawsuits, not humor the employees. I'm an IT professional who supported HR departments....so I'm not making that shit up. I have a co-worker at the current job who just now discovered that.
So....how are you fixing it. This is a thread of epic stories, not "oh man, I suck so bad...."
Ok, here is my semi-epic horrible story:
I started at this job at the tail end of February/beginning of March.
Right of the bat there were problems. The person who had previously done this job was still there and training me. His "training" went a bit like this:
Trainer: So I pull this number into this spreadsheet -
Me: Wait, where did you get that number and how do you know to put it there?
trainer: I just know.
Further prodding gets me nowhere. So I basically receive NO training, despite having a trainer. The trainer also gives me a workbook of things that are behind that need to be done ASAP. Some of them are tax returns that are two years past due. Others are things still not done that are related to a merger the company went through the year before I started. I get so sick the first two weeks I'm there that I collapse and am rushed to the emergency room.
Meanwhile, my boss keeps dropping more and more duties on me. My first week I took over all cash forecasting, all the fixed asset stuff, Construction licenses, and became their key user for the new EPR system that was supposed to be going live May 1st.
By April I was in charge of:
- Cash Forecasting
- Construction Licenses
- All Fixed assets, including Construction in Progress, gathering backup documentation for all FA purchases, and disposals
- Approval of all FA invoices before they are paid and reporting on all outstanding FA Purchase Orders
- Depreciation Forecasting
- Depreciation monthly entries
- Monthly prepaid allocations
- Reconciling all Inter-company accounts at the end of each month (this place has about a dozen different offshoots in Europe, Asia, America, Africa, etc)
- Sales tax for all 50 states including registration, renewals, and filings
By the end of May, go live had been pushed back to October 1st. Meanwhile I was given new duties on TOP of all the duties listed above:
- all the User acceptance testing assignments
- all the system master data validations
- writing all the procedures & documentation
- the assignment to train everyone in finance on how to use the new system
By June I had the following duties ADDED To my plate, and remember I'm STILL in charge of everything above as well:
- Credit Card management of all corporate credit cards
- Registering fleet vehicles with the Dept of Motor Vehicles
- Signing off on all outgoing ACH and WIRE payments
- Filling out the monthly Financial Statement package
- Management of all corporate insurance
In the middle of June one day I get so stressed out that I basically have a complete meltdown at work. I go to my boss, begging for help where I'm told I'm just 'not working hard enough.' I walked out of her office, went in the bathroom and cried for an hour. I was VERY VERY tempted to just walk away that day and never come back, but the aforementioned 'golden handcuffs' convinces me to stay and try to get things under control. At this point I've not even been there 4 months and had two breakdowns.
In July I have another meeting with my boss where I tell her I'm overloaded, and ask her to give me priorities. She refuses, tells me 'everything' is a priority and reiterates that the reason I'm behind is that I'm not working enough and not working hard enough. Also, she gives me a list of more duties that she's going to be transferring over to me in the near future.
I begin to cope by literally dropping every task that someone is not asking me for right at that moment, but I'm enough of a stickler that the undone tasks are stressing me out.
At the beginning of Aug I go to HR, and ask them to moderate a meeting between me and my boss. During that meeting, I'm VERY honest with the fact that I haven't been doing a lot of tasks on my list simply because of the lack of time. She FREAKS OUT about the merger related tasks that still aren't done, and insists I do them NOW. She does finally agree to take ONE tasks off my list of duties, but since it is one of the things I hadn't been doing it doesn't affect my workload in any way.
Later in the month she uses the excuse that she took that one task off my list to try and give me three more tasks.
I write a resignation later, and on August 26th go in with the letter in hand to try and have one more conversation with her about my workload.
Now, remember, it is a month before go live. Because of my crazy task list above I've had time to do zero training and written zero documentation and zero procedures. I'm the ONLY one in the department that even knows how to log into the new system.
She doesn't budge so I hand her the letter with my last day as Sept 11th. She FREAKS OUT, but finally calms down long enough to ask if I'll stay until after go live if she takes everything off my tasks list except the training, documentation, and procedure documentation.
So it all works out for me. I have a job for 2 more months, time to job hunt, and since the amount I have to pay back is prorated it means that I'll only have to pay back about 1/4 of the starting bonus.
After the announcement went out that I was quitting, IT (whom I'd been working closely with on the new system implementation - BTW their jaws hit the floor when I repeated my bosses claim that I wasn't 'working hard enough') offered me a job with them for $25K more a year than I'd been making in accounting. I declined, because F*** this company.