Hard work is supposed to pay off, but sometimes it just piles on.

So when a high-performing quietly carried multiple product lines while colleagues coasted and management capped his evaluations, he trusted that performance would speak for itself.

But after HR backed the narrative that he had “abandoned” his team after taking leave, he finally realized how toxic the system really was.

Keep reading for the full story.

“You are doing too much” – “You are abandoning your coworkers”

So I am a banker.

Not the Gordon Gekko type, but the other kind, the one where every time you try to describe what you do, people give you a blank stare and try to say something polite.

I worked in corporate finance at a large German bank.

Speaking English and German was absolutely required.

Ideally, you would speak another language as well, as we financed a lot of stuff all over the world.

The banker describes more about the job.

I worked in a mid-office function, so right in between the sales guys with the huge paychecks and the back office guys who would drop everything at 5 p.m., no matter how important it was.

My job back then was to support the sales guys by basically doing their busy work and taking over a deal as soon as it was signed.

After a deal had been signed and paid out, you needed to monitor it for the whole length of its run.

This employee wore a lot of hats.

Collect documents, reports, balance sheets, and watch out for legal requirements, as well as take part in international meetings and just generally be available for everything anyone needs while coordinating all the in-house departments.

Basically, I was the first guy you reached when you came in from outside and wanted something to do with the financing in question.

We were separated into different product groups.

A big part of the job was cleaning up other people’s messes.

When I started, my boss sent me to a product which was managed pretty badly by a woman in her fifties who still worked as she did during the 1990s, and this was the late 2010s.

There was also a younger guy who worked with the dedication of a local public servant, or DMV worker, for the Americans.

So the product was basically going to ****, and I was supposed to save it.

So the employee buckled up and got to work.

I worked hard for a few months to reorganize everything.

Having to suffer my older colleague, who officially was my senior while actually not knowing ****, and the younger guy who didn’t do anything.

But I got it sorted.

The reward for a job well done? Even more work!

Boss was happy and sent me to another product.

Now product 1 suffered because of the people, but also because the older lady was constantly sick.

Product 2 suffered because the woman in question didn’t speak English very well and made mistakes.

But ever the resourceful one, this employee still made it work.

That was an easy fix.

I just set up our in-house systems for them so that they would receive reminders when the contract required it.

Those reminders gave them a detailed description, in German, of what they had to do.

Boss was even happier.

This employee was pretty much a beast at his job.

By this point, I did the major work of two products, when everyone else on the team had a main product and worked part time, like 30%, in a secondary product.

I did 100% for two products.

But since everyone worked very slowly, it didn’t stress me too much.

Soon came a bit of a shakeup in the employee’s job assignments.

So a young colleague decided to leave for another department, and someone had to take his place.

I was tired of product 1 anyway and told my boss that I would take product 3, together with product 2.

But he would have to have another colleague take over for me in product 1, since this had been streamlined so much already that it wasn’t much work.

Boss agreed, if I was always ready to help out.

So they got on with the swapped assignments.

I think you can see where this is heading.

Think naive employee believes working a lot will get him praise, a common theme here.

I agreed as well.

I started on product 3, and pretty soon I was handling 75% of all deals in that area.

But the colleague wasn’t handling the workload near as well.

I had a part-time colleague who was incredibly slow because she trusted no one’s work, not even her own, and spent hours checking and rechecking everything.

And a younger colleague who was beloved by my boss’s boss’s boss because he played football, soccer to the Americans.

This is where it started to go wrong.

The favoritism grew more and more pronounced.

Younger colleague got a lot of projects, besides not giving a **** and not working them properly.

I suddenly realized that I had worked there for years and no one would give me a project or anything else that would allow me to develop.

Even though I did the work of three people and was still working in product 1, as my replacement took no responsibility and shoved everything troublesome my way.

I said as much to my boss.

He started to remember all the ways his boss slighted him in the past.

Yeah, I know, younger me kind of lost out when the brains were handed out.

It didn’t help that he never gave me more than 100% on my yearly evaluations.

Always finding a reason why he couldn’t give me more.

Mostly it was because it would have been unfair for everyone else, and I wanted to please, so I didn’t say anything.

While I found out that the young football guy routinely got 125% while doing far less than I did.

The boss paid him lip service, but still the employee wasn’t completely satisfied.

My boss was completely understanding and nice and said that something would come.

Now I was constantly angry and depressed, and it was starting to affect my health.

Boss told me to take it slow and to actually call in sick when I was sick.

So yeah, I did exactly that.

Cue malicious compliance.

Little did the boss know, this employee had been getting sicker more often than ever.

I had a young child at this stage, and I was tired and angry and depressed.

I got a lot of colds and other illnesses that, looking back, I can only assume had something to do with my mental state.

So I got sick about a week or two every quarter.

This resulted in quite a bit of time off work.

Add to that the 30 days of vacation time and the fact that I had to lose a lot of overtime.

And I suddenly wasn’t there 24/7 anymore.

It was then that his colleague’s incompetence came into full relief.

It turns out that my colleagues were not only unable to do their own jobs without me constantly supporting them.

They were definitely unable to do my job as well, because I had taken on so much responsibility.

It became pretty clear that all the so-called seniors, a job I was denied, as someone would have had to leave before I could get it, completely relied on me.

These people were practically useless without him.

No one could get my Excel tables to work. Deadlines were being missed left and right.

I kind of hoped that this would cause the bosses to realize how important I was.

Of course, this didn’t actually happen.

But instead, all the colleagues complained that I was constantly absent.

I actually came back to a very negative place that hated me.

Now even his boss started to turn on him.

And a boss who wrote, “He abandoned his colleagues,” in my performance review.

Even though that sort of thing would get thrown out by any HR in Germany.

That’s when this employee moved into phase two of his plan.

Cue second malicious compliance.

I got really angry and told my boss that instead of blaming me, he should see what I actually did for the team and how it wouldn’t even work properly without me.

He was polite about it but basically said they didn’t need me.

I was just one of the guys there.

So this employee took the boss at his word.

So I quit. And I am beyond grateful I did.

Luckily, the next place was a lot less toxic.

I now have a job in a local bank 20 minutes from where I live, instead of 1 to 1.5 hours.

They actually care about their customers and their employees.

Everyone tries to work constructively with everyone else. When we meet for drinks, it’s actually nice and has nothing to do with work.

Here, no one gives a s**** about education or rank.

And it’s the first time in my life that I don’t dread going to work.

It sounds like everything worked out in the end.

What did Reddit make of this incredible story?

A paycheck is hardly worth destroying your mental health over.

It can be hard to stick up for yourself early in your career.

Many employers don’t appreciate their superstar employees who keep everything running.

This user was hoping this company would come back crawling.

They capped his performance at 100%, so he capped his loyalty at zero.

Turns out quitting was the best raise he could have asked for.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.