I'm currently living it and it's made worse by the fact that the owner of the company is an idiot who doesn't know what we do and frequently makes ridiculous and shitty decisions because "invalidusernamelol will just figure it out, I'll just crowd him and breathe down his neck until he does".
If I didn't like all my co-workers so much it would be easier to leave, but now they kinda rely on me and I just have to put up with the shitty boss or they're all losing their jobs.
invalidusernamelol will just figure it out
What a toxic feedback loop. They dont have any idea what tools are in your toolbox to solve their problems and instead just default to having you solve everything that seems impossible to them.
Yep, end of the day that mentality has led to me having 100% unassailable total control over all aspects of the company though. So eventually I'll just organize a walkout and start my own firm. He might be able to try and sue us, but he has some compliance things that could tank his company of revealed so that would be the nuclear option.
Only difficulty is our primary client is family of his. Though we do so much work for them that if they dropped contracts with us they be years behind, they basically outsourced all their R&D and project knowledge to us when their boss (my boss's brother) decided the best was to grow his company was to fire everyone who knew what they were doing and sue anyone who tried to get another job.
Luckily I prevented that from happening on our end so we ended up absorbing all that brain drain.
really hard to strike a balance between becoming important enough that people pay attention to you and unimportant enough that you'll be on the chopping block during the next layoff.
had this happen to me around the same time our kid was born. I actually thought I was gonna get fired. My department got destroyed and we all got scattered to new roles. I got put in something I am frankly not qualified for but I wasn't exactly going to complain because unemployment is bleak. Stress is tremendous. Still, "first world problems." At least I'm not in an asbestos mine 12 hours a day or some shit.
