Ask Lemmy

Yeah, Ubisoft. I applied as a Sr Engineer. Did the interviews, including a "Sr programmer" HR interview.

I got the offer, Sr engineer, signed the papers. Started. Not even 3 days into starting they said they made a mistake I wasn't supposed to be a Sr role, redacted the title, but didn't touch my pay.

I still tell people I was a Sr there. I don't care, lol. Apparently they did the same to my boss, he was supposed to be a VP. Dropped to a TD

One place sold itself as a managed ~~hell~~ helpdesk. Customers would call in for help, you would do level 1 troubleshooting and escalate if you can't fix it. Which it was for the first week.

What it turned into after the first week: cold call residents and sell desktop AV

Worked construction. Was told I would be an excavator operator... they neglected to say that it was a manual excavator. Nearly wore that shovel to a nub that summer.

I had it happen twice. First time I was applying for a front desk position. I get to the interview and it's a group interview for selling insurance. The second time it happened it was aflac. I was applying for an office roll and when I got on the interview call it turned out to be a group call for positions selling their god damned insurance. Before they could get deep into the presentation, I typed in the group chat that this was clearly a bait and switch, and dropped out of the call.

Oh boy. I had a crazy experience as a coop student (software engineering). Written on mobile, so may have some typos/styling quirks, sorry.

Term X: I worked for company Y, it went well, they wanted me back.

Term X+1: I get the automated message from the university job system saying I have an offer from company Y for the upcoming term, do I accept? I do. 3 months later, urgont email from university's coop office. The offer was glitched in the system. Company Y got a rejection from me, hired someone else. I have about a week to land a job from the dregs that nobody else accepted.

There's no CS related jobs left, but luckily I can speak french at about a B2ish level, so I look at a few french-english translator postings. Get a job doing translations for a mobile app. It'll probably suck a bit, but at least its something.

Fast forward to first day on the job. They say "we saw on your resume that you can code, one project you made was an android app. Here's our competitor's suite of 7 android apps (SAP). We want you to 'translate' them and make us our own versions. Here's a link to our API document." So I guess I got a CS job anyways. I'm put in a cubicle with Mr Doe. My supervisor, Mr Smith says Mr Doe will show me the ropes.

Mr Doe tells me "its a pretty casual place, no real fixed hours, just try to get your work done, no big deal." he then pulls out his lunch and starts eating at his desk saying "I'll just be here if you need anything" I ask about the dev team. He says "we're an HR consulting firm, we don't have a dev team" So I guess I'm on my own. 7 apps in 4 months isn't really feasible, but I'll try to make at least a quality MVP for one or two of them that they can use as a starting point.

Fast forward again, 2.5 months into the 4 month term. Mr Smith barges into Mr Doe and my cubicle. He yells at Mr Doe saying we run a tight ship here, I told you before our hours are 8 to 4 and you keep coming in at 10. Plus our corporate policy is clear about taking your lunch at your desk. You are fired. Mr Doe protests a bit, but ultimately ends up being let go. Mr Smith says he noticed that I've been late and eating at my desk too and he's going to send a letter to the university that I am violating company policy and am now on probation. I tell him this is the first I've heard of this, but he insists it was in the employee manual. I never got any manual. He insists that Mr Doe must have given me one, but relents and gives me a 'new' one.

Next he asks to see how the apps are coming along. I tell him one is almost ready to test as a minimum viable product and show him it, also show a second work in progress and demonstrate that it can make writes to the database (I started with the easiest app that only needed read access).

He is furious. Saying I should have at least 3 full apps done, not 1 partially complete app and 1 completely broken one. I told him that without a dev team or even a senior dev that was unreasonable. He says "they're just mobile apps its not like we're asking you to make full programs or anything, just copy the ones SAP made" I tell him that a mobile app is still a full program, and they really should hire a full dev team for it, but he's not having it.

Anyways, I finish the term the best I can. When I get back I of course get called in to the coop office and the dean of my program is there. They got a letter of complaint saying I couldn't speak french, I was always late, I was a slob, etc. The university has a reputation to maintain, I was representing them and made them look bad...

Luckily when I told them the whole story, plus showed proof (which I was documenting extensibly ever since Mr Doe was fired), they took my side, unlisted that company, and gave me a free pass on my next coop term (so a 4 month vacation).

That HR consulting firm took 3 years to send me my tax forms btw... Yeah, they're out of business now. Good riddance.

The only time i experienced it was in the job advertisement. The posting was for an office assistant and it was a presentation on selling time shares.

I walked out in the middle of it.

"unlimited PTO"

*looks inside

”4 weeks of PTO unless you have VP approval except you'll never get it”

I went to a paid seminar on how to earn extra income. They were hawking bubblegum machines made of wood that I could supposedly put in dentists and doctor offices on a route that I establish, and their gumballs were the only size that fit the machines. Everyone in that seminar was my competition. We ran out the door.

Worked at one of my jobs for 8 years. Around the 4th year mark they made some decision to add a higher paid training oriented role into it that was essentially meant as a manager role, but you had no actual underlings because your goal was to go area by area and supervise or say where they could possibly do better. I was told I was the perfect fit, and honestly I love training and helping people so it was right up my alley.

I officially trained for the position for almost a year, got the credentials needed for the position and even extra permissions system side to be able to run the position, fully expecting that I was going to be getting the position. Then suddenly radio silence, the training sessions stopped with no followup, I stopped getting invites to meetings.

I eventually asked "hey what is going on" and they said "oh parent company decided that we weren't good enough to actually get that role". So much time wasted for getting that position. The only real positive (and why I feel it was a "switch" as well) that came out of it is that they never actually took away the additional security permissions I was given, so I was the only one with my title to have basically full access to anything system side so any issue that came up I no longer had to escalate to a management level or rely on finding someone to have to escalate for me.

Not as bad as people here, but I was hired as sysadmin/data analyst. Fast forward a year and a half and get asked to develop a secret spyware to continously screenshot anybody in the company 24/7 (which I'm convinced is illegal, but idk). Refuse to do so for 3 weeks, and just resigned today :)

They had the audacity to announce the rest of the team they fired me as I told them at the last minute that I was unwilling to participate. Fucking clowns.

Not exactly bait and switch, but a long time ago I was looking for a job, had an interview that I aced, I can't overestimate how much I aced it:

• There was a "coding challenge" that was supposed to take half an hour and I finished in 10 min
• They asked a question and my answer was so complete that I could see them turning pages and skipping the next follow up questions
• One of the few times they got to ask me a follow up question which was very related to the work I would be doing the answer was "I would just do the same I'm doing for my master thesis, and proceeded to explain how I have solved that problem on my thesis and later I found out it was roughly the same way they had solved it on their use case.

Then they told me "our initial salary is X, but that's for Juniors, which you clearly aren't, we'll finish this round of interviews and contact you". They contacted me a week later and offered me a Junior role paying X. I can't really said they baited and switched since they didn't change the offer, and what the other person told me was more informal. Since I needed a job and they have accepted me part time while I finished my masters I accepted thinking that once I went full time I would get a raise. Nope, they said they only did reviews and raises annually, and I had started right after that. I worked my ass off for that year, proving to them that I was worth the raise. Got to my annual review and was told everything is excellent, we're bumping you to Junior 2 with a whooping 5% increase in salary...

That's when I decided fuck them. They want a Junior, they'll get a Junior. I started to listen to podcasts and YouTube videos during my work and dragging my feet, taking weeks to do what I would have done in less than a day before, and still outperforming all other juniors. I quit before the next year for unrelated reasons, and went through training a replacement who, let's just say, was really a Junior.

I got hired as a Linux Technical Analyst by a company that was re-writing all their old mainframe code for modern servers, three weeks later they told me they were moving me to Site Reliability Engineering.

I do not have the attention span for reliability engineering. They fired me six months ago for not being good at a job my ADHD makes it impossible for me to be good at.

I missed my brother-in-law's rehearsal dinner toast to answer a call that was to rescind an offer for which I was already in the process of making arrangements to move to a different city ~2 hours away. If you're going to be a shady asshole employer, may as well also do it at 8pm on a Friday, right?

Once I joined a company with "unlimited paid time off" and turned out it was more like "no time off and maybe check some things on the weekends". They also fired me day before my equity should have hit then had the audacity to ask me to organize macbook return - it's still gathering dust on my shelf lol

Either way I still got paid a lot of money and it was a good learning though more in life lessons rather than professional experience.

Hired for deli. Deli is a different union and pays better than say, cashier.

Which is what they moved us to immediately.

Asked if they were going to pay our hired wage or not. They did. I think they thought we knew it was a bait and switch. Didn't until later, but they were careful to not lower the wage cause then yeah. Go to the board.

One job that told me I'd get a beginning hourly wage, and then a raise after passing a training and evaluation at the end of my second week. Didn't get that raise after working there for 4 months.

Another job that hired me part-time as an educational assistant, and then fired the educator I was assisting and the website/server maintainer, then told me I'd fill both of their roles while also designing new courses and building demo robots. They strung me along for months, offering me a full-time position, all the while having me log my 60-hour timesheets internally, but signing off on falsified 20-hour timesheets. Finally, I was told to write the job description for a new full-time position that was tailored for me, so they could "quickly" fit me into that position. Then, they immediately hired someone else without even interviewing me. Through a number of monumental fuck-ups on their end, I was able to make a strong case to the Texas Workforce Commission stating that I was wrongfully terminated and in a hostile work environment, for which the employer had to pay me every single unpaid hour.

When I got hired for the cruise ship I worked on, the person who actually gave me the job made it sound like I was going to be trained to operate the radio system. I get to Maryland, where the training facility was, and I'm just a fuckin' janitor. I wasn't even allowed in the bridge room. 🫩

Marketing. My responsibilities involve funneling online leads into sales through online campaigns.

The owner (not my boss) wanted me to walk around knocking on doors and giving fliers because "that's how we always do it".

I laughed and went back to my desk, doing what I'm good at.

Owner hated me in the first 6 months and then left me alone because I'm good at my job.

Absolutely. I applied for months out of college and FINALLY got a response. It was a sales marketing yadda yadda, this, that, and the other thing. Whatever. I needed anything. On my first day it became apparent that it was indeed door to door sales to businesses. So not private homes, thankfully. The people who were good at the job were some of the scummiest people I've ever met. The job basically taught you to prey on the elderly and foreign people who did not know what we were doing. It was for fixed rate electricity. It's not necessarily a scam, but the way we did the job was scammy. Bonus was the managers, two of them, were a young husband and wife. Imagine crypto-bro jerkoffs but RIGHT before that nonsense took off. The single sale I ever made was to a very nice elderly Korean man whose daughter immediately canceled the sale. I lasted two weeks and one day. It was fucking miserable. OH, and it was 100% commission and you used your own car to drive around. I lost money working for them. And then covid hit. There's no way they survived that.

Stock options. I was working in a startup and got hit with the downsizing axe. Luckily, I thought, I had had been there just long enough to vest in the options. So I bought them on my way out the door, spent like $100 on 200,000 options: they were worthless at the time but if the company ever did go public that small investment would quickly turn into a fortune. Lucky.

Two weeks later I got the legal notice that they reissued options so all non-founder options were cancelled.

When I was still in college one of the many jobs I held was a door to door sales gig for an exterior home remodeling company. Initially it was promised that any appointment I set I received X amount of money, I think it was like 10 bucks. So on a daily basis if I set 3 the money doubled for all prior and future appointments that day. I was setting appointments for a "closer". Seemed like an alright deal and I tried to only set appointments with legit customers. I set a ton of appointments and did pretty well. End of the week comes and I'm shocked at my tiny paycheck. They then explain "well you only get that money if the closer is able to make the sale". I was planning on quiting anyway because door knocking is horrible but that really sealed it for me.

I left my union job when a toxic manager started becoming .. toxic. The new dot-com job was a really great fit.

So I quit on a Friday, hopped a plane, flew about 6 hours, found a hotel overnight, stayed at a really shitty AirB&B for a day because the first apartment was rented out from underneath me, found ANOTHER apartment, and thankfully close to work because, yes, it was a foot commute in December at -40c/-40f until the wife sold our place, paid movers, gathered the two cats and flew out.

Started work that Monday. They'd changed the job description while I was on a fucking plane. Those fuckers. But there I was, 4,000 km from home, no job, and while this was before the house sold, the job market back home was absolute shite. No going back.

Hired for a "warehouse supervisor" position. Not a huge warehouse but not a big deal. Probably 5-10 drivers. I was a truck driver with a degree. They took me on routes to see what they could do. I would "supervise" them once I had learn how they operate. Come to find out it's a married couple that runs the joint. The wife was the main supervisor and dispatcher. The husband was the most senior driver and the cushiest of routes.

Needless to say I stayed 2 weeks and left.

Better question: has any job ever not bait and switched me? No.

Moved to a new town, applied to work at a kitchen inside of a bar. Was called and asked to work 1 shift to see how i liked it, and was payed for that day in cash on the way out as they told me when i could work next.

The following work day as i was leaving my apartment the bar manager called and said they filled the position i had applied for and told me to not come in.

So i went back home 🤔😅

I think it was like a mlm scheme of selling stuff. Not really a bait and switch but when I figured out anyone can get hired it didn't feel so great.

Hired by a company that was circling the drain, with a promise of a huge investment ready to be signed. My department was to double in size and I was brought on board to make that happen. This is a startup where that big investment could have been true. But it wasn't. Management kept believing and trying to sign that investor. They're still hoping, while the company crumbles beneath them. Here I am, higher management of burnt out employees waiting for retirement, while all the capable and motivated employees left. There's no way out of that hole without serious cash

I got hired to do "research". I maintain legacy crud web apps and file movers.

Not really bait and switched, but ghosted several times. You know, that thing HR people keep complaining about being done to them? Haha.

I did a sort of swotch and bait to an employer once. I was a delivery driver. I drove through all of western europe, based in the Netherlands. I did not drive a truck, but a Mercedes Sprinter. If I had driven a truck, tgere would've been laws for me to drive normal hours. This was a cowboy job. I had to do day-trips to southern france, a twelve hour ride, do quick nap before I do my route there, than drive back to prepare for the next one.

I had been doing that for close to a year and it was getting to me. I had a contract for a year, with still a coupke months remaining, but I had found a new job that wanted me to start asap. So I went to my boss and gave him an option. Either he let me go, or I call in sick with a burn-out and he'd have to pay for my sick leave for a long time. He was pretty pissed, but accepted the deal and I started the new job two weeks later.

During my two weeks off, I realized I was actually starting to get into a burn-out. The feeling of "a weight fslling of my shoulders" was very profound. I think I even cried for no reason at some point. So maybe it wasn't really a switch-and-bait, but it felt like it at the moment. The whole experience taught me alot about looking out for myself and listening to my body.