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Imagine working with coworkers who don’t really seem to know what they’re doing and slack off a lot. Would you follow their lead and do the bare minimum, or would you work hard, taking on a lot of their workload and hope the boss would notice and promote you?

In this story, one banker chose the second option, and let’s just say it didn’t work out the way he had hoped at all. Instead, he found his mental health suffering to the point where his boss suggested that he take some sick days.

Taking a few sick days was just the beginning.

Keep reading for the whole 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.

I worked in a Mid Office function, so right in between the sales guys with the huge pay checks and the back office guys who would drop everything at 5pm, no matter how important it was.

Here’s some more context about OP’s job.

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 has been signed and paid out you needed to monitor it for the whole length of its run, 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.

The coworkers sound annoying.

We were separated into different product groups and when I started my boss send me to a product which was managed pretty damn badly by a woman in her fifties who still worked as she did during the 1990s (and this was the late 2010s) and 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 bad and I was supposed to save it.

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 anything) and the younger guy who didn’t do anything.

But I got it sorted.

Different products suffered due to different reasons.

Boss was happy and send me to another product.

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

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

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

OP is a rock star at this job compared to the coworkers.

Boss was even happier.

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 2 products, but since everyone worked veeeeeeeery slowly, it didn’t stress me too much.

OP thought he was on the same page as the boss.

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 wasnt much work.

Boss agrees, IF I am always ready to help out (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 agree as well.

Again, the coworkers sound awful.

I start on product 3 and pretty soon I am handling 75% of all deals in that area.

I have a part time colleague who is incredibly slow because she trusts no one’s work, not even her own and spends hours checking and rechecking everything and a younger colleague who is beloved by my boss’s boss’s boss, because he plays football (Soccer to the Americans).

This is where it starts to go wrong.

OP started to realize working hard wasn’t paying off.

Younger colleague gets a lot of projects, besides not giving a care and not working them properly and I suddenly realize that I have worked there for years and no one will give me a project or anything else that would allow me to develop, even though I do the work of three people and I am still working in product 1 as my replacement takes no responsibility and shoves everything troublesome my way.

I say as much to my boss (yeah, I know, younger me kinda 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.

Now, OP’s mental health is suffering.

My boss was COMPLETELY understanding and nice and said that something will come.

Now I am constantly angry and depressed and it’s starting to affect my health.

Boss tells me to take it slow and to actually call in sick when I am sick.

So yeah, I do exactly that (cue malicious compliance).

OP took a lot of time off work.

I have a young child at this stage and I am tired and angry and depressed and get a lot of colds and other illnesses, that looking back I can only assume had something to do with my mental state.

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

Add to that the 30days of vacation time and the fact that I had to lose a lot of overtime, and I suddenly wasn’t there 24/7 anymore.

And it turns out that my colleagues are not only not able to do their own jobs without me constantly supporting them, they are definitely UNABLE to do my job as well, because I had taken on so much responsibility.

One thing became clear…

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, no one could get my Excel tables to work (I still don’t get why people dont just Google stuff, Excel isn’t exactly rocket science) and deadlines were being missed left and right.

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

But instead all the colleagues complained that I was “constantly” absent and I actually came back to a very negative place that hated me 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.

Finally, OP made the right decision.

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 don’t need me, I am just one of the guys there.

So I quit and I am beyond grateful I did.

I now have a job in a local bank 20 Minutes from where I live (instead of 1-1,5h), they actually care about their customers and their employees, everyone tries to work constructively with everyone else and when we meet for drinks it’s actually nice and has nothing to do with work. Here no one gives a care about education or rank and it’s the first time in my life that I don’t dread going to work.

It’s about time! I’m glad he quit and found a better job.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This person can relate.

Another person had a similar experience.

This person thinks OP took way too long to quit.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a employee who airs every last grievance in his resignation letter.

One person wishes the story had ended slightly differently.

It can be a hard lesson to learn that being the best employee doesn’t always mean your hard work will be appreciated or rewarded.

OP took way too long to realize that working harder wasn’t helping his career at all. He definitely did the right thing by quitting his job, and it sounds like he has a much better position now.

They were completely taking advantage of him.