Manager fires UX architect after selling their work to a client at great profit, leading the employee to work directly with the client instead: ‘The company crashed’

Author image for Bar Mor Hazut
Bar Mor Hazut • Senior Editor
Jun 21, 2026 1:45 PM EDT

If you knew your company pays you less than 5% of what you earn them… would you stick around?

Unless you know how to get an inside look at the company's financial sheet, it's quite impossible to know exactly how profitable you are to the company you work for. Obviously, they make money off of you; they wouldn't have hired you, but exactly how much they have left after they pay your salary is not public knowledge that you can easily access.

When your job includes working with clients, you might be able to get a better idea of how much your work earns the company if you manage to find out how much the client is paying them. If a client pays your company $50,000 for your work, and you get $10,000 out of it, well, it should be easy enough to calculate your profit compared to the company's. Then it's up to you to decide if that's a fair trade.

The employee below, who worked as a UX architect for a company, discovered that while a client paid the company $70k for their work, they only earned about $1500. This meant that their employer sold their work for x23 what they paid them, and we can all agree that this is a terrible trade.

The even worse part was that the employee never got a chance to quit after finding that out, and instead got fired by the greedy boss. Luckily, the employee was not left without a job for long, as they quickly joined the client's company and started doing the work in-house, while the original employer was left without their biggest client.

By firing this employee, they signed the company up for failure, and within a year, the company completely crashed. All while the UX architect got to hold on to their actual work, and get paid much more for it…

They shared their full story on an online community, and you can read it all down below. Scroll down to do so, and after that, check out this story of a manager who bans employees from sitting on chairs during their shifts.

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  • Employee celebrating success outside modern office building, presented by models
    via Vitaly Gariev

    Employee celebrating success outside modern office building, presented by models

  • my former employer got greedy and nuked his own company in the aftermath

    In 2014 my former employer sold my work for x23 he paid me, then had the audacity to terminate my contract after I had heart sur ry, because he wanted to transition me to freelancing.
    via styrianbears
  • I joined the customer's company. I was the only person with all the knowledge of the product, so the original employer could no longer fulfill the project.
    via styrianbears
  • the company crashed within one year, because it needed the customer they endangered when terminating me.
    via styrianbears
  • EDIT: I'm a UX architect and was responsible for designing a multiplatform fantasy soccer + betting platform. my work
    via styrianbears
  • was really good, the customer paid 70K for it, while I earned 1500€ net x 2 months (it was my first job after getting my master's). I
    via styrianbears
  • was severely underpaid already, but after my heart sur ry the boss figured that me being on sick leave was too much for the company... well! it was a good exit to be honest. very satisfying.
    via styrianbears
  • obviously I was lucky I had no contractual clause prohibiting my employment. 3K earned vs 70K billed to customer
    via styrianbears
  • Modern young office worker (model) sitting at a desk, working on his laptop
    via Getty Images

    Modern young office worker (model) sitting at a desk, working on his laptop

  • Historical_Gur_3054 I worked for a place that hired me specifically to move them from a paper production process to a software based one. When I
    via Historical_Gur_3054
  • was hired I was told I'd be going to training on eh software within 2 weeks. They waited till the next year at the start of our busy season to try and transition.
    via Historical_Gur_3054
  • The software wasn't ready to go at the transition because it had not been set up to match our process but the process where it was developed. We spent 4 months trying to get it "workable"
    via Historical_Gur_3054
  • Then the developer quit because of the way he'd been treated. I left 2 months later Company crashed and burned a year later because they had no one to do that part of the business.
    via Historical_Gur_3054
  • RecordOfTheEnd So I've run my own consulting firm. My general rule is I give the consultants working under my 30-50% of the billed rate. I find that's pretty normal.
    via RecordOfTheEnd
  • styrianbears OP that's perfectly fair, like they basically told me there's no money to make, then made me "check" the bill for errors.
    via styrianbears

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boss employee fired ux manager job tales-from-the-workplace client profit ceo workplace company
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