I have rage quit two jobs.

A long time ago I worked in a supermarket as a personal shopper. It was a pretty decent job, early start (4am) but an early finish, so it felt that I had the whole day to do whatever I wanted, though I was tired.

Skip ahead to Christmas eve, where everybody apparently has left their huge shops until the very last minute. Not only through our online service, but also in person.

Imagine this: You are being pushed to complete orders as quickly as possible and being called out for being slow, not only that, but every aisle is so full of people that you literally cannot push your trolley through them. I literally couldn’t move or do my job. I’m fairly embarrassed to say that I walked out, didn’t even tell anybody, and to my surprise I never got called out for it (I think it was too busy to notice) and the way the system worked, one of my colleagues would have just got the order and completed it without me.

The first job I ever quit, I must have been 16 years old. I was working as a promoter for a bar in a small town, essentially walking around with a sign, hanging out flyers, etc. ironic that a 16 year old is advertising a place they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed into, but it was cash in hand and pretty dodgy.

On my first night I was promised $50 for my work, but ended up being given $25 because they said it was a trial night. Suddenly my nightly salary is $25 and as a 16 year old, I’m a bit too scared of this dodgy guy in his car that was paying me to ask for the full amount.

Skip ahead a couple of weeks (I work maybe 3-4 nights a week, hours are like 10pm-5am) and tonight, it is pouring down with rain, I’m freezing cold, my uniform involves a t-shirt, and it is genuinely just a horrible experience.

I go to my boss, and tell him that I’m gonna go put my coat on and he says that’s not part of my uniform. I get a bit ballsy and tell him I want the extra $25 for the night before, and he said he never promised me anymore money than $25. So I walk home, in the rain, feeling hard done by but also like I learnt a valuable lesson. I never worked for less than I was worth after that.

Tweakers in the welding crew

I work as a gameplay programmer in the games industry. A few years ago we were making a mix of top down PvP hero shooter and Counter Strike. The company got cought up in the crypto bubble and decided to pivot the game and company to become a crypto gaming company (and later an AI gaming company, just following the trends). Anyway, I didn’t have to touch that shit for a while, but after some time I was asked to make NFT loot boxes. I handed in my resignation the next day.

Getting an average review while the client I worked for (and I was the only one full time assigned to them) gave us a 9/10. Colleagues and my direct supervisor were not asked either.

When I told my manager that I was leaving, she said “yeah, I thought so”. 0 retention. HR was pretty damn apologetic and angry at the manager.

The whole HR department quit there same year from what I heard.

Thank you foe helping him. You did great.

I quit my job and have been jobless for a few weeks now. There were no career progression, everything was a shitshow and firefighting, and getting approvals to anything took months to years. I made a request for a salary raise to match market statistics. It went on for more than a year and was only approved more than a month into my resignation.

Half of our department were jeopardising the company by keeping incidents and risks to themselves and were not playing ball when we were asked why the TSO (government entity responsible for balancing the energy grid) were suddenly on our arses. Either that half of the department will be fired this year or the company will not exist in 2027.

When I told my manager he knew I was gonna quit the moment I made a catch-up meeting in the morning on the first day back from his vacation. Hardest part was keeping my decision secret for an entire week. He was facing all of the same issues as me.

I decided that was not worth my lousy pay and quit, spending thousands of $ on a project management course so I don’t have to touch development or operations ever again.

More funny than rage inducing.

Worked as a Senior DevOps engineer at a startup. They have no proper automation for deploying their code. Manually updating config in a GUI type situation. This takes a crazy amount of time, there are many errors, and it generally slows down development progress. There are 300 people working there, at least five dev teams, its hundreds of work hours every month wasted by this.

So I start writing a system to automate it - what is called Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery or CI/CD. Issue is, they have many projects, they are all a little different and managed by different people. No problem, I write the thing super configurable and write another system that will automatically deploy this thing to all the hundreds of repositories, taking into account their local config. We start rolling it out, when I suddenly get a new boss.

They are very smart but the kind of person that wants to do everything their way. So they did all the architecture and just delegated the most menial implementation details. At my previous company I pretty much rebuild every system from scratch. Yet now I was super bored and underutilized, while they were pretty overworked and stressed out. All while the company was held together with duct tape.

While this boss was really good in certain areas, I was more experienced in others, and they kept making errors that could have been easily avoided if they just asked me earlier. And they did not like when that was pointed out. Thing is, I was hired as a senior engineer. It is my entire job to be more experienced and point issues out, especially security related.

So this new boss is being super careful about this CI/CD system that I wrote. They are scared that deploying my system may break things - understandable. So the entire project grinds to a halt. I keep pushing for it but give up after a while.

Then, one day, my boss says “alright, today we deploy the CI/CD solution to ALL repos. By hand.”. I’m a bit puzzled by this: has the reason for being careful suddenly disappeared? Why not use my automated system to deploy it? Doing it by hand is super repetitive and annoying. Also, if there is a bug in our solution, we would need to roll out the fix manually as well. That’s why I wrote automation for that.

So I ask to clarify: " so you’re sure we should deploy this to all repos now? You always wanted us to be careful about that". Answer: “are you incapable of reading?! New information > old information!”. I laugh, think about it for 15 min and put in my resignation, suggesting they hire a Junior instead. Bit of a shame, the place was pretty cool. Just the boss was a dolt. Also they quit a month later.

Was asked to clean up jizz of the walls (plural!) of a TKMaxx (TJMaxx) changing room with a stack of blue roll. I was supposed to be working loss prevention at the changing rooms that day so pretty certain the weirdo was thinking about me cleaning it up as he cracked one off. Potentially had a couple rounds judging by the amount of jizz on the walls.

Should have quit on the spot but there were children/families in the changing room and felt like I needed to try to prevent a larger incident if a family barged into the poorly sealed changing room, or even just got bothered by the smell. I did quit that day though. One of my co-workers had a go at me on my way out the door for being a primadonna because she’d “had to clean up shit before”. Retail is hell.

I worked for a reasonably successful startup in IT, and quit around the time when investors started calling for their returns. It went from the focus being providing good service to selling something, anything, whether we have it or not to boost the books before the end of next quarter. Every quarter. Our sales team who used to be part of the product design process and knew more about our product than some engineers were getting replaced with people who didn’t even know the name of features. They just made up things to potential customers and straight up lied, once the paper was signed they were done.

It was demoralising to see and go through this, I was a tech team lead for one of our core products and the requirements were mad. Every customer started becoming their own product because of all the overpromising, and it was all the absolute bare minimum. Anyhow, I was on good terms with the remaining few old sales people as we had worked together a lot prior to this mess.

I remember sitting in a meeting with some higher management and one of these older sales guys where he was saying he does not know what to do anymore and needs help or we need to change something as it’s impossible to do his job well anymore with these expectations that we just abandon customers as soon as they’re signed and chase new business. He broke down crying during the call while he was explaining how soul crushing it was to have to do this to people - build up a relationship, convince them to pay us and then ignore them immediately. There was an awkward quiet in the room when he finished and the “top dog” in the room just said “try to detach yourself, it’s just business” and then we moved on.

I saw myself becoming that man in a year, maybe 2 tops. I started interviewing the next day and found a new job in about 2 weeks (luckily this was when IT was booming and recruiters were lining up for anyone with engineer in their title). The company has since been sold multiple times and completely exhausted to a husk. The last sale I’m pretty sure was just a large enterprise acquiring staff and some tech.

I had a part time job at a UPS warehouse in Tennessee when covid hit. We got a new manager, and so they gathered everyone in the warehouse together into a small break area, everyone was right next to each other and nobody was wearing a mask, and the manager gave us all a speech about how much he cared about our safety. There were TV screens in the break areas that had been set to display information about covid safety guidelines that were being blatantly violated.

The same day, my supervisor informed me of a new policy: they’d had too many people “faking” being sick and calling out, so from now on you have to come into work even if you’re sick, and they’ll decide if you’re sick enough to go home. I with I had gotten it in writing because what she told me was definitely illegal, I actually called OSHA afterwards but it was my word against theirs. This was the only time I’ve quit a job with no notice, I remember it clear as day, I told her, “People are dying” and she replied, “I have a business to run,” and I said, “I don’t care.”

I wanted to set the damn building on fire. I was fortunate to have saved enough to take time off work because I lost all confidence that there was anywhere around me that would be a safe place to work.

At the last hospital I worked at, a nurse was badly injured on the job for something totally out of her control. Probably shouldn’t give more details than that so I don’t dox her or myself.

Instead of giving her worker’s comp and helping her recover, the hospital fired her over some completely unrelated frivolous bullshit (along the lines of "a patient overheard you using profanity while talking to a co-worker). This was also like a couple months away from her becoming vested in their retirement program.

I’m just a tech, but it was abundantly clear that giving my time to that company would be an incredibly risky move - fuuuuck that. I put my notice in the next day.

I hope she sued the absolute fuck out of them.

Didn’t cause a rage quit, more like rage being fired.

The CTO couldn’t keep his hands off his employees (I just like to tickle people, it gives them happiness!) and I couldn’t keep that to myself

The CTO fired me and then got fired himself and a few months later ended it.

I was a freelancer for about a decade, and only ever walked off of one job site. It was because of safety concerns and one asshole. I was a stagehand, setting up lighting, decking, and audio gear for a musical in a local megachurch. I was in charge of a crew for this job, through a local labor company; Church hired the company to provide labor, who hired me as a subcontractor to make sure things went well, track workers’ time, etc… The load in was set to last three days, with them rehearsing in the evenings. Then they’d open that weekend.

I ended up attaching myself to the lighting crew for the first day, because decking and audio crews already had people who knew what they were doing. Plus if I’m in the catwalk, I can usually keep a pretty good eye on what is going on around the room. Some catwalks are easy to get to. They’re designed thoughtfully, with the expectation that crews will need to access them regularly. Other catwalks are… Not so easy. Maybe it was designed to be easy at one point, but then engineers added more structural beams, HVAC installers added air ducts, electricians added panels and conduit across doorways and walkways, architectural lighting got added in walkways, etc… Basically, the construction was a bunch of different crews, and none of them talked to each other to keep the catwalks accessible.

This church’s catwalk was unfortunately in the latter group. Getting to it involved a combination of a six-story-tall spiral staircase, army-crawling under an air duct, climbing over some electrical conduit, and squat-walking on a steel mesh grid to avoid some overhead beams. Needless to say, we made the trek up there once, and immediately decided that we weren’t going to be carrying our lights the same way we got up. Hell, lots of our lights wouldn’t even fit the same way we came up, due to the army-crawling section.

So we throw a rope down from the catwalk. Our lights are heavy, and it’s about a 7-story-tall lift to get from the audience to the catwalk. But many hands makes for light work, right? I ask who knows their knots, because we need someone on the ground to tie the lights onto the rope. One of the newbies (who I had never worked with before) raises his hand, so I send him down to act as ground support. His job is simple. We send the rope down from the catwalk, he ties the light to it, and then we haul the light up while he watches from the ground, making sure we don’t knock into anything or scratch the ceiling of the theater. Lather, rinse, repeat. This dude has the easiest job in the entire goddamned building, because all he has to do is tie a knot every few minutes, then watch the rest of us work.

So we send the rope down. A minute or so later, he calls back up that we’re good to lift. So we haul this light up. It’s heavy. It sucks. Many hands makes for light work, but we can only get a few hands on the rope due to the way we’re positioned in the catwalk. But we muscle this light up. One down, only 90 more to go.

But then as we set the light down on the catwalk, we realize that the “knot” we had lifted it with was basically just a bunch of loops with the tail pulled through. It fell apart as soon as the tension on the rope was released. Apparently our knot-tying ground support lied about being able to tie knots, and just went with the “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot” method. Except his “tie a lot” part wasn’t even safe, because he ended up just making a tension knot that completely fell apart as soon as the tension was gone. So I send someone else (who I have worked with before, and actually trust) down to the ground, and they send him back up.

All of this was simply to say that we were already a little bit on edge regarding this lighting install, because if that “knot” had come undone midway through our lift, we would have dropped a thousand dollar ~120lb light onto the audience seats, from about 90 feet in the air. So I want you to keep that part in mind when I bring up this next part…

After we get thirty or forty lights lifted, we’re feeling the strain. These lights are heavy, and my guys are smoked. The catwalk is hot (because hot air rises, this is in Texas in the summertime on a sunny day, and we’re basically pressed against the roof,) and we’ve all soaked through our shirts with sweat. For every light, once we get to the edge of the catwalk, we basically have to manhandle it up and over the railing to avoid scratching the decorative ceiling panels that are below us.

In the meantime, the church’s audio guy has shown up. He is sitting in the audience, chatting with another church employee. He apparently brought his son to work today. His son was like 5 or 6, and was suddenly running around in the audience, directly underneath us as we’re lifting these damned lights. Again, we’re already worried about dropping one of these lights. Even if we have the best knots in the world, accidents happen. I have seen clamps, handles, and hard points break off of lights before. I have seen ropes break. I have seen steel cables break. So there’s always some measure of “this could all go wrong and there’s nothing we can do but watch it fall” in the back of your mind with every single hoist. We already watched a knot fall apart that morning. And now there’s a fucking child playing underneath us.

So I call down, something along the lines of “Hey, can someone get that kid out of the way? We’re working up here!”

The sound guy almost immediately shouts back “how about you parent your kids, and let me parent mine!”

Like I said, my guys were already needing a break. We had already told ourselves that we were going to take a water break soon. As soon as that dude’s response had stopped reverberating around the (now dead silent) auditorium, I called out “Okay {company name}! Make it safe, then tools down! Take 20, then meet me on the dock!” Simultaneously, all ~40 crew members got the exact same glint in their eyes as they realized what was going on, finished whatever they were doing, then walked away for a smoke break.

In that 20 minutes, I called the company owner (who I play board games with nearly every week), and let him know what was going on. This was ~90 minutes into an 8 hour day. But notably, the crew had a 5 hour minimum. Meaning they’d get paid for at least 5 hours regardless of how long they worked. The intent is to ensure every job is worth the drive; without a minimum, nobody would take a 30 minute job if they had to drive 45 minutes to get there. And he said I could give the crew a choice. They can stay for the full 8 hours, or they can take the minimum and walk away right now. Next, I talked to the church’s main point of contact, to let them know what had happened, and what I was about to tell the crew. And when my crew came back after their break, I gave them all that choice. Every single person on the ~40 man crew took the minimum and walked away for the day.

The show’s load in was delayed by a day, and the church’s sound guy wasn’t present for the rest of the week’s load in and setup.

Got stuck as the charge nurse of acute psych almost every single night I worked for over a year. “But no one else can handle it like you” (I’m aware–acute is what I do) but I needed a fucking break. I told them 1/3 days I wanted to either be a floor nurse on med-psych or be the BERRT / consult nurse to the medsurg nurses for behavioral codes. They humored me one day a month for like three months then shoved my head right back under.

Then the supervisor came in to critique my morning reports twice in one week and honestly I didn’t even snap I literally just said “OK understood can I finish report now” so she tried to corner me in a side room but I haven’t survived ten years in acute psych without major injury by not being able to clock aggressive body language so I just walked right back into the nurses station to let everybody see her yell at me then handed her my badge and keys and left. Had a new job lined up within the week.

Current boss started out with the same sort of compliments like “oh you’re so calm when people are threatening to murder you” etc like yeah, as I said, this is what I do, and once I was settled in, everybody got used to asking me for advice on the EMR, meds, they got me teaching the violence deescalation classes the supervisor was tired of, made myself indispensable etc, I straight up told her I’ll do all of this, you can even enjoy my fun side projects I get up to when I’m bored–but if you make me charge nurse or let the house supers get shitty with me I’m out as soon as my contract is up.

So far she hasn’t pushed it.

After university I was looking for any part time work I could find. This was in 2007-2008, so the job market wasn’t particularly good in the UK. Ended up at a company that did over the phone charity donations. I wasn’t working for a specific charity, it was a company hired by charities to make cold calls. Called a lady who said she was going through chemo and lost her job recently, although she really would love to help a children’s hospital, she couldn’t afford it. Asshole manager is listening in on the call, makes a hand motion and mouths to me “keep pushing, it’s just excuses”. I apologized for taking up the ladies time and said I hoped her treatment goes well. Hung up, took off the headset and walked out the door. One of the best decisions I’ve made in my life!