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0:00 Everyone knows that working a low-paying, physically demanding job with long hours and grueling labor, that's obviously going to be a bad experience. Low-level construction jobs, retail, fast food. Yeah, the work itself can obviously be hard, but it's not just the work, it's the complete lack of respect you get when you work these jobs. But as a guy that worked a minimum wage job for years and then ended up working a high-paying engineering job for several years, I can tell you from firsthand experience, my life was just as miserable working at that relatively high-pay, high-status job as it was back when I was slinging burgers for $7.25 an
0:46 hour. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you I would rather work in fast food. All things considered, my engineering job was better. It at least paid enough that I could pay my bills, but there were certain things I witnessed at that job that made me realize just how [ __ ] up this life is. Honestly, after everything I saw at that job, I will never again trust any statement coming from any corporation. Cuz I know firsthand how willing these corporations are to lie and cheat and just do whatever they have to do to maximize profits. And this was a smaller company I worked at, by the way. I'm pretty sure larger
1:32 corporations are worse, if anything. One of the most eye-opening experiences I had at this place, it was actually something that happened when I had only been working there for a few weeks, so I was still new. I didn't know how common this was and I didn't fully realize at the time how big a deal it was. Looking back now, I feel like I definitely should have said something, but hindsight's 20/20, I guess. Not that me saying something would have made a difference anyways, but just a quick background before I get into what exactly it was that happened. So, before I started working there, my supervisor, who was the only engineer at this place before they hired me, he had basically
2:19 invented this new product that was meant to replace an existing product that's been in use all across the world for probably 100 years. I'm not going to say exactly what it was or what industry this was in, but it's something related to transportation and infrastructure. So, it's a very highly regulated industry. You can't just invent something and then start selling it. This thing would have to be approved by a federal agency before it could legally be put in service. And to get that approval, it would have to undergo years of testing. There would have to be stress testing in a laboratory environment, and then they could do field testing. There's a lot that goes into it.
3:06 So, by the time I started working there, this thing was already in the field testing stage, but they were also still doing some lab testing because I guess someone at the federal agency that regulated these things wasn't convinced by the initial test results. So, I don't want to get into the too much detail, but that's the gist of it. So, I remember I'm sitting in my office one day, which I shared with my supervisor, and the president of the company walks in. Now, if you happen to see my previous video where I talked about this job, this was the same guy that rigged the raffle for the Yeti cooler, and also the same guy that I suspect had some sort of an affair with a girl working in
3:51 customer service. But, I didn't find out about any of that till much later. So, the president walks in, and he's talking to my supervisor about some testing we were doing on this product. We weren't doing the official testing ourselves. We had another company we were working with that actually conducted the test at their facility, and they would write up a report for us that we could then send to the federal agency. Okay, so remember that. I'll come back to that in just a minute. But, aside from that official testing that this other company was doing for us, my supervisor did conduct some tests himself. I'm not sure exactly how the process works, but basically we had a customer that agreed to test these
4:37 things in the field, and the federal agency had already approved that field testing for a certain small number of these things. And there were certain terms and conditions and everything. I'm not going to bore you with all the details, but basically the company that was letting us field test these things, they put a few of them out in service in the field, then they wanted us to do some extra testing on a certain part of the device. Uh it was the fasteners. They wanted us to do some additional testing on like the bolts and washers and everything that was used to hold the thing in place. So, that was kind of an unofficial request from that company. So, the federal regulatory agency was not
5:22 involved in that. So, basically my supervisor was doing that testing himself. Okay, so the president of the company came into the office to talk to my supervisor about the results of that testing he did on the fasteners. To make a long story short, the results were not perfect. There was cause for alarm. My supervisor was already starting to try to figure out how to fix it, and he had me looking into it, too. That was actually one of the first things I remember working on at that job. But when the president came in to talk about it, he was basically just like, "Look, we don't have time to change the whole design. Just make the results better." So, my supervisor was like, you know, he
6:09 kind of laughed at first, and he was like, "I'm not going to fudge the numbers." So, then the president was like, "Oh, no, of course. But then again, you know, this is just something our customer asked us to do. It's not like the government's involved in this." So, yeah, the president was trying to get us to doctor the results of the test. He wanted us to just lie to the customer that was letting us do the field testing, which is obviously unethical. I don't know for sure if it would have been a safety issue. Uh it it could have been, but it definitely was something that could waste a lot of time and money. But all these companies care about is the short-term profits. Nothing else
6:54 matters. Luckily, in that case, my supervisor was eventually able to convince the president that sending out fraudulent test results would actually not be a good idea because there was legitimately an issue with the design of the product. Like, it just was not going to work out in our favor when they go ahead and do the field testing based off of whatever fraudulent data we send them, it's it's just going to fail in the field, and then we would have to do the redesign anyways. Now, I don't think my supervisor would have allowed that to happen in the first place. He always seemed like a man of principle to me. So, it's good that he was there. I'm pretty sure he still works there, by
7:40 the way, so that's good. But, I do wonder sometimes, you know, not every company has a guy like that that's willing to push back on what the company president tells him to do. And this was just potential fraud through the engineering department. What kind of financial fraud is this company committing? What kind of other unethical things are they doing? And what about every other corporation in the world? I'm pretty sure unethical [ __ ] like this is going on all the time. This [ __ ] is just standard practice. But, yeah, a little while after that whole fiasco, we did redesign the thing, or really my supervisor redesigned it. I didn't really help much. But, some changes were made to the design. Then,
8:27 we contracted this company to do some stress testing for us based on federal regulations. So, they do the tests, then they send us the report, and it wasn't ideal. The design was failing one of the critical tests that it had to pass in order to get approval, but it was just barely failing. So, it was the kind of thing where it probably wouldn't have actually been a problem, other than the fact that the regulatory agency wouldn't approve it, but the product likely would not actually fail in the field. So, to make a long story short, the president comes into our office, and again, he tries to convince my supervisor to doctor the data. He
9:14 wanted him to literally change the numbers in the report that this other company had sent us. Now, in this case, it was an extra stupid idea. Forget about the ethics of the situation, it was just a brain dead idea to try to doctor the results when we weren't even the ones that did the testing. If something did go wrong, and they ended up doing an investigation, there's a good chance it all might come crashing down as soon as somebody talks to that company that actually conducted the testing cuz they're immediately going to say like, oh, this this is not the results we got. This is not our data. So, not only was it a highly unethical thing to do, it was also just stupid.
10:01 By the way, my supervisor refused to do what the president was asking, but get this. Coincidentally, a couple weeks after that, the company that did the testing contacted us to say that there was a mistake and actually our product did pass all the tests. I'll let you decide what you think happened there. I know what I think happened, but I wouldn't want to risk falsely accusing somebody of something. So, that was something that happened early on in my short career that really made me question how things are run in our society. Cuz what are the chances that I just so happened to encounter a super rare case of a small company president trying to
10:47 commit fraud or whatever you want to call it? I'm guessing the company president's sense of morality is probably not rare in that type of high-level position. It's probably the standard. By the way, if you're wondering why I didn't mention all this in my first video where I talked about all the troubling things I saw at this job, honestly, I just didn't want to risk someone from that company seeing this and trying to sue me or something, but I don't think that would happen. I made sure not to give any specific details about anything. And I mean, it's a very low chance that anyone from that company would see this anyways. So, yeah. Anyways, something else that happened while I was working there that just never seemed right to me.
11:35 There was this one salesman that had been with the company for like 30 years. He started in the warehouse, then he worked his way up to eventually being a regional sales manager. So, he was the senior salesman in the company. He had more than 10 years more experience over the next senior salesman. So, I forget what exactly the job title was, but basically there was a guy that was the boss of all the salesman. He wasn't just in charge of sales, he had other responsibilities too. But, that guy also had started as a salesman. He had gone through basically the same trajectory as this other guy, you know, starting at the bottom of the totem pole, then he worked his way up to regional sales manager. Then, I think
12:21 they actually created the top position for him. So, everybody knew that uh Frank, we'll call him, everybody knew that after the boss guy retired, Frank was next in line. And by all accounts, I do think Frank would have been great at that job. Everybody spoke highly of him. He seemed like he knew what he was doing anytime I worked with him. Granted, I never really knew the ins and outs of the salesman's duties, so I wouldn't really know. But, everybody liked Frank. I never heard anybody say anything negative about him. I'm pretty sure he was more than capable at fulfilling the duties of that top position. And even the guy that was
13:07 retiring, he thought the job was going to Frank. I remember hearing him say something to Frank one time like, "See what you have to look forward to? Haha." You know, implying that Frank would someday have the job that he currently held. Well, the boss guy retired, and lo and behold, Frank did not get the promotion. Instead, the job went to a younger guy that was close to my age, actually. I think the guy was maybe 30, 31 years old. Not to say a 30-year-old couldn't do the job, but Frank had 30 years of experience just working at that company. He had literally been working there as long as the other guy had been alive. And here's the thing, the guy that got
13:54 the job, he was an outside hire. He didn't have any experience at the company. He didn't even have any experience in the industry. So, everybody was surprised when we all found out Frank got passed over for the job, but it wasn't really that surprising when you think about who did get the job. Because the younger guy that actually got the job, see, this guy had a special connection to the company. And that connection was that he was related to the CEO's wife. Now, I don't have anything against this guy. As far as I know, he wasn't particularly bad at the job, but I'm 99% sure Frank would have been a better
14:40 choice. It just goes to show these companies have no loyalty whatsoever. You could put your heart and soul into your work for 30 [ __ ] years and still get passed over for the promotion just because your boss's wife's cousin is looking for a job. I know I'm not saying anything new here. I'm sure you all already know this. Probably most of you have had your own experiences where you've seen firsthand just how far loyalty gets you in the modern workforce, but man, is it brutal out here. And it's funny cuz when I first started at this company, everyone was telling me how the company has more of an old school vibe. Everyone said they take
15:25 care of their workers. Hardly anybody ever gets laid off. I specifically remember the chief financial officer or whatever, basically the head accountant guy. When I first started, he was telling me that he can't even remember a single person ever being fired since he started there, which was like four or five years prior. So, I was thinking, nice. I lucked out. This seems like a great place to work. Well, come to find out that very same guy, just a few months before he told me that, he himself personally walked up to someone's cubicle and told them they were getting laid off. I know this because apparently he did it
16:12 right in front of everyone in the middle of the day, very untactfully, which obviously rubbed some people the wrong way. So, I heard some people talking about it. But, it's like, how are you going to tell me to my face that you can't even remember anybody ever getting fired when you yourself publicly fired someone just a few months earlier? Like, is it just a requirement that you have to be a sociopath in order to make it to a higher up position within a company like this? Cuz from my experience, most people higher up like that tend to not have any values aside from making profit for themselves. And then maybe 6 months after I started working there, I remember sitting in my
16:59 office one day and I could hear people arguing loudly in the conference room, which was across the hall from my office. And I could just barely make out some of what they were saying, but basically what was happening was the CEO and the president were in there with this one guy that had been working there for I'm not really sure how long, but it was at least a few years. So, I could make out that they were telling this guy he's fired, and he was pleading with them to not fire him. Then, eventually, they all leave the room, and a few minutes later, the guy that got fired came into my office to tell me and my supervisor that he just got fired. And I am not exaggerating at
17:46 all. This man was in his 50s, and he was crying. He had tears running down his face. I later found out that he had actually just been given a promotion, like a pretty big promotion, but it was supposed to be at our sister company, I guess you'd call it. Basically, the corporation I worked for was like four separate companies, and a couple of those companies were located elsewhere. So, they tell this guy that he's getting a much higher paying job at one of the other companies that was actually located in Canada. So, big move, but apparently, the guy had already
18:31 bought a house up there and everything, and then they fired him before he even transferred. Now, I have no idea if this guy was good at his job. For all I know, he sucked at the job, but I never heard anything about him embezzling company funds or anything like that. So, I just don't understand how you go from telling a guy he's getting this big promotion, then waiting all the way to the point that the guy's already bought a new house in preparation for the move, and then you fire him with no warning. Like, how does it even get to that point? I mean, it's possible that he did something really bad to deserve getting fired, but I kind of doubt that. I think I
19:18 would have heard about it if that was the case because it was a small company, people gossiped about these things, but I never heard anyone say anything about this situation other than how bad they feel for the guy. So, I don't know what happened, but it's just brutal. This was a man that, you know, he was supporting his whole family. He thinks he's about to have a major income increase. He buys a house, and boom, fired. Now his income is nothing, and he owns a house in Canada where I'm guessing he probably wasn't going to be moving to anymore. And remember, when I first got hired, everybody was telling me how this company is very worker-friendly, nobody
20:05 ever gets fired. By the way, when I say everybody was telling me that, I'm talking about like the chief financial officer, the HR lady, the company president, you know, all the people you talk to when you're first getting set up at a new job. Yeah, they were full of [ __ ] Don't get me wrong, the majority of people I met there seemed like decent folks. I don't want to make it sound like I was just working with a bunch of psychopaths. Most people there were friendly enough as far as I could tell. I didn't socialize a whole lot, but yeah, it's not like they were all evil. But I can say without a doubt from everything I witnessed working at this place with how upper management would just tell outright lies whenever it was
20:51 convenient, and how the president of the company was so quick to commit various kinds of fraud, which he wasn't even trying to hide it. He just came into our office and was telling my supervisor to make up fake data. He knew I was there. He wasn't talking to me. He was kind of speaking quietly just to my supervisor, but he knew I was there. He must have known I could hear everything he was saying. But he acted like he didn't care. He acted like it was just another everyday item of business. Just another day in the office. Oh, hi there. How's the wife? Kids doing good? Great. By the way, could you just falsify some data real quick and submit fraudulent
21:37 documents to the government? Thanks. Like he had no fear about repercussions from what he was asking. Like that's just a normal thing. >> [sighs] >> I don't know. It It's crazy to me. But by now I've realized that's life. That is modern society in a nutshell. Narcissistic psychopaths run [ __ ] while the rest of us are just scrounging out here trying to survive. Scared to death at the prospect of losing our jobs while sociopathic presidents and CEOs and vice presidents and CTOs, CFOs, etc. They're the ones doing [ __ ] that you should get fired for.
22:23 But they don't get in trouble. They're in charge. Maybe I'm the crazy one for caring a little bit about integrity. And I am certainly not a saint. I'm not trying to say I am. But I can't even imagine trying to get away with some of the [ __ ] that these big wig douche bags get up to. There was one guy I worked with. He's a big wig now, actually, but back then he was probably making similar to what I made. But he was very good at networking. Maybe you could call him a bit of a brown noser. But he was good at it. He was close friends with all the higher-ups like the CEO and the president. But, I'm not even going to get into it all here. Maybe this story is better suited to be its own video.
23:09 But, this guy was openly cheating on his wife. I don't think she knew about it, but everyone at work knew about it. I mean, I knew about it and I hardly even talked to anybody. But, yeah, there's a reason that guy is now one of the higher-ups cuz he had a lot in common with the rest of them. As hard as it has been being unemployed for so long, I am glad to not be in that environment anymore. I sure as hell don't miss waking up at 6:30 in the morning, but yeah, work sucks. Even if you have what looks like a good job on paper, a lot of times it's really not. If you found anything I said here insightful, or even if you just found it
23:55 entertaining, please consider watching some of my other videos. There's also some secret videos you can watch for free on my Patreon, videos that YouTube doesn't want you to see. So, check that out. No sign-up required. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time.
