The job was at large "non-tech" public company. I was a junior dev.
Over the course of a year, I spent nights & weekends building support to redesign a core piece of the website, something I believed could really make an impact for the company.
I submitted proposals for approval but was denied each time by my manager, a non-technical marketing director, who didn't trust me after I voiced criticism to a decision on one of his priority projects.
A few months pass & I'd given up, until the c-suite team requested that middle management produce what I'd already proposed. I got involved but during the planning phase, my manager pulls me from the project stating "we don't want too many cooks in the kitchen". He hired a development agency to build the new work. It was later revealed revealed that were no technical internal stakeholders involved in the planning at all. But if he didn't want me near it, I'd let it go again.
6 months pass, the first iteration is released to the public. A single, badly designed, static landing page.
The agency keeps working and time flies by until the beginning of December. I'm mentally preparing to take my first PTO of the year, an international Christmas vacation, when the agency transitions the codebase back to us & my manager puts me back on the project.
The site is now a 5-page static site with a bare-bones blog featuring:
At this point, my manager tells to my cancel my vacation. He 'needs me for a new years day release' and that 'he never approved my PTO' that I made months earlier. I pushed hard back but pacified him by agreeing to setup a automated deployment pipeline to handle the 'big release'.
I staged the features, issued an explicit code & content freeze, and left the country.
When I came back from vacation, I was greeted by utter chaos. The marketing team broke the content-freeze on Christmas eve. The features deployed early & stayed up for entire week until someone figured out how to revert the changes (literally 1-click).
Once the the C-suite saw it, the corporate blame game started. My manager spent the entire week blaming me on #announcement slack channels to the entire company. As the new year started, I was placed on an informal PIP & given a annual review that cost me a bonus.
How do I know it cost me a bonus?
The next year, I beat the PIP & got gushing reviews from the same manager despite accomplishing the same work as the prior year. The review was accompanied by a $15k bonus.
I put my resignation in the same day.