> I don't really understand people staying in abusive job situations like this.

I'm working to get out of a job that turned into this once our (lovely) manager bailed and exposed our team to the incompetence of our current leadership.

I'm having to HEAVILY fight my gut instinct by leaving, because I was raised in poverty and grew up as a disabled lesbian back when those things created more issues than they do now. I'm also from a rural area and neither of my parents have college degrees.

I may logically know that I (as someone with credentials and a decent skill set) have every right to leave and it's in my best interest to do so, but it conflicts with literally decades of messaging I've got telling me I'm lucky to be allowed where I am at all and seeing those around me be punished for standing up for themselves.

I was also abused by my parents, and that's another angle: People who are used to abuse don't think it's that bad, and I'd wager there's a fair number of people who have just never had a decent work situation. If you're going to be abused, at least pick an abuser you know and can work around.

Humans are pattern recognition/social machines, and if you only expose humans to dysfunctional patterns, they'll assume the problem is them. If you design a society, it's pretty easy to get yourself a group of people who are open to being exploited.

I can relate to this. Neither of my parents have college degrees and we were poor growing up. For a while they just pushed me to get any job I could. I worked in a call centre (horrible), door to door sales (more horrible), a butcher in supermarket (slightly horrible), working in the NHS (terrible pay, lovely people).

I've had a lot problems myself struggling around guilt about the pay and general lifestyle in tech. But I'm now working in a tech company with lovely people, doing interesting work. For what it's worth from a stranger: I wish you luck in overcoming your inner critic and that you are worthy and deserving to get a job with people you like at a job you enjoy.

> For a while they just pushed me to get any job I could. I worked in a call centre (horrible), door to door sales (more horrible), a butcher in supermarket (slightly horrible), working in the NHS (terrible pay, lovely people).

This is a large part of it, especially as someone whose community is likely to have those sorts of jobs. If everybody around you hates their job and you grow up in a culture where people actively despise their workplaces/management, you assume that's just how jobs are.

EVERYBODY I grew up around hated their jobs, so it's really hard for me to know what to put up with. To people like my stepdad, my displeasure at how I'm treated by leadership is complete stuck up whining: I personally make more than him + my mother and their households ever have, I'm not in physical danger (unlike him doing HVAC work, my mom doing warehouse work, my siblings' SOs who work landscaping, etc), etc. I was taught growing up that basically unless your boss put you in the hospital, you were lucky to not be homeless or starving and work just sucks.

This is a particularly hard mindset to get out of because in white-collar environments, you can't talk about how growing up blue collar or working class makes you anxious because a lot of 'professionalism' boils down to 'don't let the nice people know you're a peasant or you'll be kicked out for not being a culture fit'.

The pandemic has been very helpful, ironically! I'm more than willing to blame myself for all my life problems, but when I see OTHER people being treated like I was, it raises my heckles and pisses me off.

I'm so glad to hear that you found a job you like. I'm hoping to move from a small-shop/journeyman dev to working in a dev team and I'm trying to maintain optimism, so stories like that help!

It's scary how two different people can have such similar backgrounds (minus the lesbian part, that's playing the rural dating game on hard mode for sure). For me I just kept living like a college student and saved most of my paycheck until the adult part of me was able to convince my inner child we were, in fact, safe.

Feeling safe let me leave bad employers in the past. Thankfully my current one is pretty awesome.

Yeah, I was on the track to do what you did, and then I got multiple sclerosis during my last semester of graduate school. Disability is a major player in my own personal negative patterns: My MS came out of nowhere, I can't make good choices to make it go away, and I can't just ignore it. I also was fucked over when I tried to plan for things like student loans: Over half my undergrad debt is from my last year because my dad lost all the money he was using to help me in 08.

My personal experiences, outliers though they are, tell me that change is likely to screw me over. I would love to save my paychecks but when your meds cost 300k+ a year for your entire life, your life is dictated by health insurance and care. I lived like a college student and saved and was STILL fucked by change, so I'm very change and risk averse.

>I genuinely don't understand why anyone would work here or put up with this.

While the special instructions incidents were horrific, particularly to someone like me who wants to do the right thing and their brain seizes up with such insanity, they were eventually resolved.

Finally they instituted a policy where instructions were reviewed by a group of senior account managers every 90 days. Whomever wrote them had to justify them, or they were simply deleted. That actually turned out to be a great process as many out of date instructions were auto deleted without anyone doing anything.

As for the job, it was actually a great job. The support team was amazing, supportive, it paid great, and the company weathered a lot of economic downturns easily. If anything the special instructions incident demonstrated how even a great organization can go bonkers insane.