u/lug-cookout-7u

I was on a graduate scheme at an infrastructure management company a few years ago. The department had a very bleak culture, where being available on weekends was treated as normal, and unpaid overtime was practically expected if you wanted to appear "committed".

The field was full of people who were either afraid of technology or had no interest in learning it. If they could use a mobile phone and make a simple Word document, that was pretty much the limit of their technical ability.

My degree was in Computer Science, and I also had commercial drone qualifications, so I could handle data capture properly, mapping, analysis, and all the things they did not even know how to ask for.

I converted huge amounts of their physical site maps into digital versions covering work all over the UK. I created custom Google Maps for subcontractors, which made planning and site access far easier than the usual mess of PDFs and printed drawings. I carried out drone surveys using my own kit, and produced photo and video evidence that helped them bid for and win additional work. I trained other graduates on handheld GPS units and mapping software. In a short time, I became their unofficial technical person inside the company, while still doing all the normal graduate scheme tasks I had been hired for.

I was out scoping a new set of utility routes with the department director when things started to click in my head. Over dinner, after a fair amount of wine, he told me he regularly worked around 72 hours a week. He said he had been held back from a director role for 4 years because of internal politics. He also admitted that the job had already ruined a marriage and left him with almost no social life.

That conversation genuinely shook me. I remember sitting there thinking: if this is the path to "success", I do not want any part of it.

The graduate's salary worked out at about £12.50 an hour. I had accepted it at first because I did not have much industry experience, and I had been told there would be performance bonuses. But after I led important projects and did specialized technical work that no one else there knew how to do, it became obvious that I was being paid very little compared with what I was delivering. The bonuses never appeared. I was not developing, I was being exploited. And the director was repeating the same empty lines that had been used on him years earlier.

When I raised it with my line manager and the department director, they told me that the other graduates were adding the same value I was. That, of course, was completely untrue. Several people also gave me the classic advice: keep your head down, do not make a fuss, and the rewards will come later.

I told HR I was unhappy, and shortly afterwards they spoke to me about a role in another department. It involved similar technical work, but it was much closer to what I wanted to do long term. I applied, interviewed, and the other team wanted me. A few days later HR called me and told me the transfer had been blocked by the utility department director. His reason was apparently: "He is too valuable to our operations, I have big plans for him."

So I confronted him about blocking the transfer. At first he pretended not to understand what I was talking about. When I kept pressing, he eventually admitted it and said the other role would not suit me anyway. Then he said he wanted to make me "more than just a clown with a drone".

That was pretty much the end for me. I started applying elsewhere, got interviews, and HR started receiving reference requests. It became clear to them that I was not going to quietly stay where I was and keep doing specialized work on a graduate salary.

In the middle of all this, I was still in a 5-month probation period. In the UK, you can be fired during probation without them needing a strong reason. I received a probation review letter on a Wednesday afternoon, and the meeting was scheduled for Friday morning. I went into the review and was told my performance had been unsatisfactory. Then they fired me on the spot. The line manager said I had until the following afternoon to get my affairs in order before they took the company car, laptop, and equipment.

Honestly, I felt like my career was over. Who was going to hire a graduate who had already been fired? They used my skills, stopped me from moving into a better role, and then got rid of me because I asked to be paid fairly? Who did these people think they were?

That night, I removed the dependencies from the mapping projects and broke the linked files. I had put dozens of hours into those projects, and if my colleagues were going to rebuild them, they would need at least a month. Some of them could not be rebuilt at all without a proper understanding of the software. I changed the permissions on my personal cloud storage to private, so no one could access the drone footage and images they had been using to win contracts. I deleted the custom Google Maps from my personal account, which instantly killed the planning tool they had started relying on. In less than two hours, I erased 8 months of specialized work.

Nine days later, my old line manager called me and asked whether I had transferred everything onto the company servers. I told him I had not had time, given that I had been fired with barely any notice. He then asked me for the laptop password so he could recover the files himself. I told him company IT should have that in their records and that he could ask them. I later found out they had a data protection rule saying that when someone leaves, the laptop gets wiped regardless of whether anything has been backed up to the servers or not. Even if they had someone capable of rebuilding everything, they had already lost the machine data.

The last thing I heard was that they were in complete chaos and trying to recreate the projects from scratch after firing me, to the point that they were postponing and cancelling interviews for my replacement. A Comp Sci background is rare in that industry, especially with drone and mapping experience. They are not going to find another version of me anytime soon.

I've been with my current job for about four years. Recently, and especially in the past few months, the workload has increased significantly, and I've taken on many new responsibilities. So naturally, I thought this was the most appropriate time to discuss a salary raise, especially since I haven't seen any increase since day one. I asked my manager about it, and he told me he would look into it.

A little while later, he called me in. What was his explanation? Simply, there's no 'bandwidth' in the budget for my salary to increase. And then he hinted that if I had accepted a lower salary initially when I was hired, there might have been more flexibility for raises later on.

Mind you, I'm not earning a huge amount here. I just found the whole situation incredibly absurd, so I had to share it somewhere.