29-year-old employee leaves his job as a specialist at a small planning and design firm and his ex-boss instists on him leaving a review on a popular local job review site: 'He wanted a review? Fine. Let's comply'

Author image for Olivia Arocena
Olivia Arocena • Writer and Editor
Jul 7, 2026 8:00 AM EDT

Heartfelt review

Sometimes our managers are so spaced out that they don't notice their employees are having an awful time working at their companies. You might even resign without another job secured and block them everywhere, and they still wouldn't notice. If it were for them, they would call you from a different number just to ask you to post an honest review of the job online, thinking you would review them beautifully. That's what happened to this maliciously compliant employee, who managed to get the last word on the subject.

Add as a preferred
source on Google
Advertisement
  • wan with pen writing on wall
    via Nirmal Rajendharkumar

    The employee getting ready to write his honest review

    Model portrayal

  • Toxic ex-boss begs me to leave a company review. I give him exactly what he asked for.

    For context: I (29M) recently quit my job as a specialist at a small planning and design firm somewhere in Germany.
    via Hopplafish
  • The place was a mess. The pay was a joke, the leadership was completely unpredictable, and they expected me to do the job of a fully qualified project manager (like planning the entire renovation of a large
    via Hopplafish
  • municipal facility) without the pay or the support. The turnover was crazy. Three of my colleagues quit around the same time and during my 4 years there, my boss went through 5 different
    via Hopplafish
  • assistants. I eventually packed my bags and moved to a different city for a fresh start. A week after my last day, my former boss texted me.
    via Hopplafish
  • He casually asked me to "please leave a review" for the firm on a popular local job review site (basically our equivalent of Glassdoor). He genuinely thought we parted on great terms and assumed
    via Hopplafish
  • I'd drop a 5-star rating to boost their c py score. I just rolled my eyes and ghosted him. Fast forward to a few days. ago. I checked the company's page and saw
    via Hopplafish
  • three brand new 4.5-star reviews posted in the same week. They were so obviously faked by management. They all used the exact same HR buzzwords ("great work- life balance", "amazing
    via Hopplafish
  • health benefits", which was literally just 15 minutes of stretching on Wednesdays, lol) and magically praised all the exact things people usually complained about.
    via Hopplafish

  • It’s silly to try to leave fake reviews on job sites like that; they’re obviously made to benefit the workers, and I guess they have ways to find out if the reviews are genuine. I understand the manager’s desperation, but you can’t ask an ex-employee who had a negative experience to leave a review hoping it’ll go great. That’s why I think management sometimes lives in a parallel universe where they can’t tell that theirs is an awful place to work. 

  • At this point, I remembered his text. He wanted a review? Fine. Let's comply. I sat down and wrote a brutally honest, mathematically precise review. I kept it completely
    via Hopplafish
  • man using mackbook
    via Christian Velitchkov

    The ex-employee finding inspiration to write the 'hearftfelt' review

    llustrative image only. Person shown is not connected to this story.

     



     

  • professional and entirely subjective ("In my experience...", "I felt that...") so they couldn't legally sue me to take it down. I gave them 1 and 2 stars in almost every category, explicitly
    via Hopplafish
  • mentioning the lack of support, the horrible communication, and the heavy workload. But I didn't stop there. While I was at it, I contacted the platform's
    via Hopplafish
  • support team and reported the three new 4.5-star reviews for manipulation, pointing out the identical wording and the fact that they were posted at the exact same time. Less than four hours later, two
    via Hopplafish
  • of the three fake reviews were nuked by the platform. The automatic spam filter probably caught them because my boss was dumb enough to write them from the same office PC/IP address.
    via Hopplafish
  • With his fake reviews gone and my honest 1-star review dragging the average down even further, panic mode set in. How do I know? Because my ex-boss texted me again. This time the
    via Hopplafish
  • message was full of typos, desperately asking if I could please leave a good review to help them out. He has absolutely no idea that I am the one who tanked his rating and reported his fakes.
    via Hopplafish
  • I left him on read again. The cherry on top: A buddy of mine who still works there texted me yesterday. He said my review perfectly hit the nail on the head. He also
    via Hopplafish
  • mentioned that since the review dropped, management has suddenly been acting super nice and accommodating to everyone out of pure fear that more people will quit.
    via Hopplafish
  • a desk with a notebook with some notes
    via M. Ed.

    The ex-boss crafting his fake reviews

    Picture is representative

  • Either way, extracting positive reviews out of thin air is not the solution, of course. Maybe it would be better to put all that energy into improving the work environment, but well, we don’t live in wonderland. Or maybe we do, because the maliciously compliant review was heroic in the end. I guess the boss will sooner or later realize who it came from, but it doesn’t matter; he won’t be able to change it or fire somebody who’s already gone. Maybe he will be forced to improve working conditions for his employees, and this humiliation turns out to be helpful, but something tells me he will look for a way to lie again, lol.

Want More? Follow Us and Add Us as a Preferred Source on Google.

Tags

workplace-stories toxic-workplace work workplace toxic-work-environment
Scroll Down For The Next Article