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I’m a student and I’ve been working as an AI Engineer intern at a tiny 6-person wrapper startup that just a gpt wrapper. The founder is a non-coder who "vibecoded" the product using Lovable, out of 6 four people handle sales, and the entire technical stack is just me, one backend guy, and the founder. I was hired on a peanuts stipend for a 6-month term, with an explicit promise in my contract that we’d review my performance and revise pay at the 3-month mark.
They threw massive tasks at me with zero guidance, but I basically built their entire Small Language Model (SLM) infrastructure from scratch. I deployed the agents, optimized latency, migrated them away from expensive GPT APIs, cut their inference costs by 95%, and even got them 7+ clients. When the 3-month review came up, I pointed to these metrics and asked for a steep percentage hike. I knew it was a high anchor and it’s my fault for expecting more, but my only intention was to start a negotiation and settle on a reasonable middle ground that fit their budget. I even explicitly said I was flexible and open to negotiate.
Instead of negotiating, things went completely sideways. My manager panicked and got incredibly defensive. She claimed a hike that big was impossible for a student, downplayed my work by calling it "just test campaigns and test clients" that weren't used in production, and acted like me working independently was a complaint rather than me being self-driven. I'm sitting there thinking, I literally reduced your API costs to nothing and got you clients, but she abruptly "paused" the internship anyway. A couple of days later, I got a cold email saying my internship was concluded due to a "mismatch in expectations." They literally fired me for a negotiation text, completely disregarding 4 months of heavy-lifting code when they could have simply said "we can only do X amount" and I would have happily agreed.
Then, 5 days later, the CEO called me into a meeting just to lecture me for 30 minutes about "startup culture." He told me I was assuming my own impact, called me "money-minded," and said I "broke the manager's heart" because my text sounded too authoritative. He told me if I wanted to continue, I had to convince the manager to let me back in. I already sent a highly professional text apologizing if my phrasing caused any misunderstanding, but she’s reacting like I committed a crime and isn't even responding to my messages.
I don't want to beg for a low-paying job under managers who treat standard business discussions like a personal betrayal, so I’m planning to just send a final email demanding my formal experience certificate and walking away. Has anyone else faced this kind of toxic behavior at an early startup? Is it a massive red flag, or did I completely ruin my own chances by asking for what I thought my work was worth? Did I make a good decision?
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TL;DR: Fired from my internship over a single WhatsApp text for asking for a raise at the 3-month mark like my contract promised.
I’m a 20M student and I’ve been working as an AI Engineer intern at a tiny 6-person wrapper startup that just a gpt wrapper. The founder is a non-coder who "vibecoded" the product using Lovable, out of 6 four people handle sales, and the entire technical stack is just me, one backend guy, and the founder. I was hired on a peanuts stipend for a 6-month term, with an explicit promise in my contract that we’d review my performance and revise pay at the 3-month mark.
They threw massive tasks at me with zero guidance, but I basically built their entire Small Language Model (SLM) infrastructure from scratch. I deployed the agents, optimized latency, migrated them away from expensive GPT APIs, cut their inference costs by 95%, and even got them 7+ clients. When the 3-month review came up, I pointed to these metrics and asked for a steep percentage hike. I knew it was a high anchor and it’s my fault for expecting more, but my only intention was to start a negotiation and settle on a reasonable middle ground that fit their budget. I even explicitly said I was flexible and open to negotiate.
Instead of negotiating, things went completely sideways. My manager panicked and got incredibly defensive. She claimed a hike that big was impossible for a student, downplayed my work by calling it "just test campaigns and test clients" that weren't used in production, and acted like me working independently was a complaint rather than me being self-driven. I'm sitting there thinking, I literally reduced your API costs to nothing and got you clients, but she abruptly "paused" the internship anyway. A couple of days later, I got a cold email saying my internship was concluded due to a "mismatch in expectations." They literally fired me for a negotiation text, completely disregarding 4 months of heavy-lifting code when they could have simply said "we can only do X amount" and I would have happily agreed.
Then, 5 days later, the CEO called me into a meeting just to lecture me for 30 minutes about "startup culture." He told me I was assuming my own impact, called me "money-minded," and said I "broke the manager's heart" because my text sounded too authoritative. He told me if I wanted to continue, I had to convince the manager to let me back in. I already sent a highly professional text apologizing if my phrasing caused any misunderstanding, but she’s reacting like I committed a crime and isn't even responding to my messages.
I don't want to beg for a low-paying job under managers who treat standard business discussions like a personal betrayal, so I’m planning to just send a final email demanding my formal experience certificate and walking away. Has anyone else faced this kind of toxic behavior at an early startup? Is it a massive red flag, or did I completely ruin my own chances by asking for what I thought my work was worth? Did I make a good decision?
​
TL;DR: Fired from my internship over a single WhatsApp text for asking for a raise at the 3-month mark like my contract promised.