I believe that I was harassed in a retaliatory way by my leadership, that my attempt to report this harassment to HR directly contributed to my termination, and that I received disparate treatment compared to my co-workers as part of this retaliatory harassment. (I had a whole 2500 word explanation written with specific dates, events, and names, but I had to edit it down so as to not "identify" any of the people who did this).
When I started with Quicken I discovered that I didn’t have anywhere near a full workload despite specifically mentioning in my interview that I would not be happy with that type of situation. I asked for more work because I was literally staring at my desk for 5-6 hours a day and couldn’t take the boredom anymore. My leadership seemed to get very defensive after this and told me if I didn’t have work to do it was my fault. Shortly after that conversation the harassment began. The first instance of harassment was an email sent to all my coworkers regarding a minor formatting change (battleship coordinates on the columns and rows of my spreadsheet) and asking for everyone’s input on what we should rename a column I had named “position date” (this was the date an employee started in their role; we ended up renaming it date-in-job). What makes this rise to the level of harassment, in my opinion, was the fact that all my co-workers were copied on the email. There was no reason to give the team that kind of visibility unless it was meant to humiliate me and intimidate me. Additionally, I was told these formatting changes mattered because my reports were seen by others in the company; however, my co-workers also made reports that were seen by different business units and they were not held to the same standard
Afterwards I began to have work taken away from me without explanation, even though I already had almost nothing to work on. My leadership would also verbally demean my abilities in front of my co-workers daily (i.e. “he is new, so he still doesn’t know what he’s doing”) even though I had far more experience in this field than my direct leader or all but one of my fellow co-workers. Leadership would make me sit with them and go line by line through my spreadsheets looking for minor formatting changes despite them not understanding Excel or compensation well enough to evaluate my work objectively. My leadership would also spend hours on their own digging through my work to try to find anything that could be criticized, whereas they hardly even looked at anyone else’s work. While working in my spreadsheets, leadership would try to re-sort the columns (which they did not have the Excel knowledge to do correctly) and then would come to me with the broken spreadsheet and accuse me of causing the mistakes. Based on these actions, and the events of my last two weeks at Quicken , I believe that I was harassed and terminated on false pretenses. Below is a timeline of the events for the two and a half weeks leading up to my termination:
I was repeatedly blamed for mistakes I didn't make, and when I asked for more detail I was told things like "I thought I told you to QC that file a couple weeks ago"- hence errors in a file I never touched and had no association with became my fault, more so than the person who put the file together. I was told that I was to defer all my decisions to my co-workers despite having more experience in this field than any of them. I was told in my interviews that the team would be relying on me because of my experience, yet when I got there I was directly told to defer all my decision-making to people who had been interns less than a year prior. I was even told to defer my decisions to someone who had a lesser job title than me.
I once got pulled into a room to go line by line through my responses to an "anonymous" survey. I felt this was a harassment technique to try to silence any criticism of the team, rather than a legitimate attempt to get more information based on the way the questions were asked. When you add in that this was less than a week before I was terminated, harassment seems to be the only plausible reason for this conversation.
I went to HR 6 days before I was fired to tell them I felt I was being harassed and that I was worried about being fired. The individual spoke with told me that she wasn't going to do anything because it might be seen as "tattling." 6 days later I was pulled into a room with that same person along with my leadership and told I was being let go because of "a resistance to feedback" and "quality concerns." When I asked for more explanation, none of the three people in the room could come up with a single example of either.
Long story short- if you are offered a job by Quicken, run for the hills because it isn't worth it
