Boss forces employee to work overtime to complete a project, only to fire him the next day without providing compensation, employee withholds the passwords to access the project in response: ‘I walked out’

Author image for Bar Mor Hazut
Bar Mor Hazut • Senior Editor
Feb 18, 2025 9:00 AM EST

Completing a big project at work should be followed by a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. After weeks, months, and possibly even years of overworking yourself and losing sleep over this assignment, you are finally able to say goodbye to it and pass it on. Your bosses are supposedly happy with the outcome and are pleased with your performance and ability to successfully complete this project. Overall, everyone should be happy, right?

Well, that is surely the dream scenario, but unfortunately, not everyone is this lucky. Some employees find themselves completely undervalued as soon as they complete their big projects, while others find themselves out of a job entirely.

The employee in the story below falls under the latter category. He was approached by his boss telling him he must finish their project by tomorrow morning, so he stayed up until 2 AM working to make sure it was done. The next day, the employee got to work thinking he was going to be praised for his successful performance, but that could not have been further from the truth.

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  • Instead, he was told he was fired and must leave work immediately, but not before handing off all his work to a coworker. Disappointed and shocked, the employee quickly caught on to his (now former) employer's agenda and decided to play his final card.

    Keep scrolling to read what that card was, and how it turned out.

  • "I played my final card"
    via thecorgi

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • "AITAH For Withholding Passwords After Being Laid Off?"

    So I'm at work on a Thursday, and the CTO comes in and tells me that a software feature I'd been working on needed to be finished before tomorrow morning. OK fine, I
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • don't have an issue working late, but it was a strange request given that they'd postponed the project for several months to have me working on other stuff. Still, I
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • stayed up until about 2 AM and finished the project. The next morning when I arrived at work, the CEO and CTO called me into a meeting
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • to let me know that I was being laid off, and that it would be my last day. No two weeks, no severance pay. "We'll need to you to finish. out today, working with
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • [name redacted] to log all your logins and passwords and show him the rest of your code. To say I was angry was an understatement. "So you
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • knew you were going to can me today, that's why you made me work late yesterday? Does that seem wrong to you?"
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • They just stared at me, no apology, no acknowledgment. So I played my final card. "Alright. If you're gonna play it this way, then it's both.
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • personal and business. I need a job, so it's to my benefit to quit right now and walk away, and start looking for work, rather than helping a company that clearly doesn't
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • care about me. If you want me to sit here and generate a list of passwords and train my replacement, then I want a two-week severance package, or I walk right now."
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • They declined, and I walked out the door. I called one of their vendors and let them know I was open to work, and had a new job within a week. They were still emailing me to beg for "help" weeks later. Was I in the wrong?
    via RecommendationOk7537
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    via anyaberkut
  • RichardKopf NTA, What they did was beyond dirty. If they still need help, tell them to hire you as a consultant on your terms.
    via RichardKopf
  • jaymooreco Companies love to talk about professionalism, but they never want to practice it when it comes to employees. Good on you for standing your ground.
    via jaymooreco
  • Careful-Natural-5217 NTA: They knew and decided to use you. So what you do, is email them back, as a consultant, you have the right to set your rate of pay for your
    via Careful-Natural-5217
  • time. Make sure to get it in writing. Also a good contract with a nonrefundable deposit would also be a good thing to include.
    via Careful-Natural-5217
  • Friendly_University7 This is just absurdly false, especially within the IT world. If OP was any kind of admin, or stored his source code locally or even on the company cloud encrypted, there's a multitude of ways the
    via Friendly_University7
  • company would be s_.._wed without his credentials. For standard productivity stuff and stuff stored in O365, sure, their AD team can cover this and get access. But as he's a developer, and developers
    via Friendly_University7
  • store code, change logs, and support tickets in a variety of third party or in-house created options, they're SOL. Even better, if OP participated in BYOD, something very common in IT startups, even more reason they'd be SOL with no access.
    via Friendly_University7
  • RecommendationOk7537 OP Small startup, BYOD, a lot of user accounts were created at personal levels and the CEO wasn't tech savvy to speak of. They set themselves up for failure.
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • ItchyCredit I suspect this isn't true or is highly embellished. Every company has the capability to access employee accounts without the employee volunteering his or her password. No company would
    via ItchyCredit
  • leave themselves vulnerable to being held hostage by a disgruntled current or former employee. OP likely has professional knowledge of processes and procedures that his former employer would like to have and he isn't sharing.
    via ItchyCredit
  • The lack of this knowledge may slow them down but they aren't going to let that reduce them to groveling or "begging". OP, I hope your new job is everything your old job wasn't. I
    via ItchyCredit
  • hope you are professionally fulfilled and appropriately compensated. Now please quit telling this story of how you WISH you had been able to sw over your employer. It's annoying to listeners to have to pretend they believe you and it makes you look insecure and silly.
    via ItchyCredit
  • Recommendation... OP In this case, the employer insisted you purchase and use your own laptop, and they were a very small startup so a lot of the processes and software were managed by individuals
    via RecommendationOk7537
  • using our own user accounts and passwords. Wasn't a professional environment, but it was a fun place to work until they did me dirty. They weren't prepared for my response.
    via RecommendationOk7537

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code boss aita workplace-stories employee fired manager job tales-from-the-workplace reddit story petty revenge ceo overworked-employees workplace Reddit company developers
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