At every stage from recruitment through to post-resignation I had issues with management and HR. I was regularly ghosted by HR during the application process in a very unprofessional manner. Management did apologize to me once I got the job. The compensation, benefits package, and growth potential was quite lackluster relative to comps in the industry. The PTO policies were somewhat draconian, particularly around rolling days over to the following year. This was a problem because I worked at Bastian during COVID when my kids were getting kicked out of school left and right. When I went to management with my concerns about losing all my banked time to the new year when I might need it to cover these outages, the attitude was a combination of "not our problem" and implied patriarchal "why can't your wife just cover the outage?" When I resigned because of these PTO COVID concerns, I gave 4 weeks notice instead of 2 in an effort to provide a very smooth transition. In response, HR forced me to stop work earlier to prevent me from taking any holidays or using banked PTO. Once they knew I was gone they made every effort to nickel and dime me, including making it impossible to take some accrued leave, essentially eliminating this part of my compensation. This was particularly nasty as I had banked up all my time to provide for COVID needs before I realized I would be unable to use it the next year so it amounted to $1000s and $1000s of dollars of reclaimed compensation. After I left, I realized months later that I was still being paid. I reached out to inform Bastian and they wanted to fully reclaim all of this. They also suddenly remembered they needed to reclaim some of my signing bonus. There was a brief apology, but absolutely nothing tangible offered in recognition of this being entirely their mistake. More than a year after this I realized they had also failed to reclaim 401K contributions from my phantom checks. Once again I let them know and once again they did nothing to take responsibility for this. They pulled money out of my retirement account directly at the value of the money at the time of contribution which was higher than the current post inflation and interest rate hike rate.
