My boss at one of the first jobs I ever worked refused to give me time off to see my dad on his deathbed. It was odd because she was a very nice, laid-back lady and we never had any problems, but she suddenly snapped and started berating me after I asked for a few days off to spend time with my dying dad. She told me to “plan my vacations better.” I quit on the spot.

A director of a firm I worked for was a “boy’s club” kind of guy. He never outright said anything sexist, but it was clear who his favorites were. He’d have casual chats with the male team members, taking them out for drinks after work, talking shop with them. Meanwhile, the women on the team? Ignored. I’d give feedback in meetings, and he’d barely acknowledge it. Then one of the guys would say the same thing, and suddenly it was a great idea. I left after only a few months of working there.

The COO of a manufacturing company I worked for a few years ago was terrible to work for. He managed everything from behind a desk, miles away from the team, and would pop in once a quarter like a celebrity visiting his fans. He’d frequently ask for reports on things he knew nothing about, and then we’d spend hours digging for numbers to appease him. It became this ridiculous cycle where we’d stop actual work just to feed him the data he wanted. The worst part was that he had no idea what challenges we were facing and had no solutions or feedback. He would have understood better if he was willing to spend even five minutes with his team, but he acted like we were a waste of his time and beneath him.

I got my first job at 18 working as a waitress in a restaurant. The owner was a literal nightmare, and his favorite pastime was following around the waitstaff and screaming at us in front of customers for every tiny mistake, to make it look like he was the angel saving the customer from his terrible team. Who even does that??

The first CEO I ever worked for was at a small startup company and almost made me give up on the field entirely. She was all over the place. I would wake up every morning to a flood of emails and new projects, most of which were vague and confusing. She had me in charge of emails and scheduling, but would randomly pop in to make changes and undo the work I did. Half of my days were spent trying to clean up her messes. Even outside of my working hours, she would bombard me with texts and calls and get angry when I did not immediately answer her. She fired me after only a couple of months for “not meeting her very simple expectations:”. Fortunately, my next CEO was lovely and the experience helped me set personal boundaries in my work.

Once upon a time I had a boss who truly only communicated by yelling at everyone around them. It was like walking on eggshells, waiting for bombs to go off. My entire team was jumpy, scared of loud noises in the office, because we were all waiting on the exec to come in screaming about something else. My team was in charge of putting out fires and solving problems, so everything brought before us was a mistake that needed to be fixed — which was fine, that was our job. Our boss, however, would consistently belittle us, question why the mistakes were even made in the first place, panic if they weren’t handled immediately, you name it. It was hands down the most toxic and upsetting workplace I’ve ever been in.

My manager is horrible about handling any kind of criticism or push back. We’ve had several occurrences of large projects being mismanaged and completed as cheaply as possible under his approval, but will push accountability off to other team members when there are issues with the projects. Recently I witnessed a situation where a technician performed a task improperly on purpose to test viability, efficiency, and cost for another department. It only cost a few minutes of his time but the manager only saw that he did something “incorrectly”. Instead of communicating, he argued with the tech and went so far as to threaten him with termination, which has lowered morale and confidence in leadership.

There was a point in time where I was on a project team for a university I worked for with four other people. It was an event management project for alumni of the university and it was of the highest priority, had lots of budget, and needed multiple stakeholder sign-offs throughout the process. Halfway through the project one of the team members was reassigned and not replaced. The rest of the team picked up the slack, working longer days, some nights, and even weekends. This project desperately needed the full team and once we realized the member wasn’t going to be automatically replaced, we submitted a formal request together to our manager. We were told that we obviously had the time and resources to manage thus far and didn’t need to spend the resources at this point in the project to replace the team member. As a team, we were exhausted, overwhelmed, and had zero trust in our leaders from that point on. We pulled off the event, were “lauded” for completing it without the extra member, and then I promptly quit the position to the immediate shock of my manager. I refused to let them take advantage of me anymore. I hope the rest of my team got out of there quick.

Working at a startup, small team of about 20 people, and our COO stated that working from home was "millennial nonsense", couldn’t believe that our CEO allowed hybrid work situations, and demanded that we all needed to work from the office. He didn’t last very long after that.

I was making $XX amount of money at my job and wanted a raise (it had been years since I had asked). My manager replied “if I could pay you less, I would and refused my raise. I quit the next day.