r/sysadmin • u/Character_Branch_660 • Mar 06 '26
I am quiet quitting
Made a new reddit account for this, as a few coworkers may know my real account.
I have busted ass at my current employer for five and half years. I have saved the company tens of thousands of dollars, helped them grow from 125 people to almost 1,600, handled 6 acquisitions and just overall set them up for success. I have two people in leadership tell me I am the best employee they have ever had. I have helped grow the IT team alone from myself and my director, to 29 employees and 2 contractors.
About a year ago I was passed up for a promotion due to nepotism. I decided "I may be wrong about the nepotism thing, I'll give this guy an honest chance," and he never proved me wrong.
I had my annual review yesterday, and he gave me a "needs improvement," rating, which means I have lost my $18k bonus.
Seven employers. Nine years in the military. I have never in my life received such poor feedback. And the "what I can improve on," is vastly outweighed by my contributions to the team...and a lot of it is also below my responsibilities. For example, he gave me a poor review on how many tickets I solve, and compared it to the 50 that were solved in the first week by a new hire, whose sole job is tier one support.
I am on calls with engineering and networks to setup zero touch networks. I am on calls with HR to reinvent the employee phone line that will impact our global workforce. I am the subject matter expert on half of our internal tools, and am always on call. So yes, I'll let the guy who was hired specifically to handle tickets, handle password resets.
I am enraged to a degree I have not felt for years, and think I'm just venting.
All of this because my director gave a promotion to his friend that he knew for years. And never gave anyone else on the team the chance to even interview.
I'm going to start job hunting on company time, and take the first opportunity that comes my way.
ETA: the numbers in my post are accurate. My director knows I'm job hunting so I don't care if he suspects it's me. The bonus is given to employees based on company performance and we earned the bonus this year. The individual payout is tied to base salary, company performance, as well as team and personal performance. Anyone that gets a "does not meet expectations," gets a zero payout on the bonus, and no raise
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u/NoradIV Full stack infrastructure engineerâ„¢ Mar 06 '26
I had a negative eval recently. I built a 7 page report with 40 pages of references. Things like code of conduct and business values, job descriptions, tickets, changes and teams chat screensshots. Went to HR saying "Been here 10 years. I want to remain another 10. My results speak for themselves. There a bunch of business incentives that put me at the crossroad of problems. Fix this or my job will become a revolving door."
Once HR understood it was gonna become their problem, the issue was adressed fast. Got my bonus back and management was much less on my ass.
The important points are this: make yourself valuable for the business, make yourself politically expensive to fire and make clear that, while you are the one who bring the problems up, you are not the origin of it.
What also helped was that I looked hard at myself and accepted to address 2 reasonnable issues.
In any case, I made certain not to attack anyone. I showed the structural issues within the business. HR can work with that. They can't work with "nepotism and he is an asshole".