Many colleges have something called “capstone projects” for undergraduates in their last year. The idea is to get experience in their fields. Often, engineering colleges will have multidisciplinary capstone projects that are sponsored and paid for by companies for a few thousand dollars. It is a great way to exploit free labor, but often, the results are not particularly meaningful.
My company decides to participate, and by some miracle, we end up with a young man outside of our project’s scope who has the sought-after skill we need. He, therefore, ends up doing the bulk of the project.
However, one of the requirements is being able to interface with a virtual reality headset with our program. It is obviously more difficult and none of our engineers have done it yet. Nevertheless, he soldiers through it and promises to get it done. For the entire nine months of this project, my boss is falsely promising this outstanding young man a job, pending the success of this project. She has me, the contact point, reiterate it several times with her listening on the phone.
Even two weeks after graduation, he continues to work on our project for free with the hope it will result in a job. When I ask if we should be paying him or taking him on as an intern, I am met with scoffs on how this is part of his project and it’s expected of him. So essentially, my boss is holding the threat of not graduating and the promise of a job over his head.
Finally fed up with it all, I decide to schedule a time to get company equipment from him so my boss can either hire him or stop stringing him along. That Friday, she calls him and later tells me that she wants me to reiterate once more that we want to hire him, but we need a couple of weeks to budget it all.
I waste my Sunday driving to a town two hours away to pick up this laptop because, at this point, he has obviously gone home. When I meet him there, he is in a foul mood. I smile and tell him that we would enjoy working with him in the future, to which I get a rather curt, “Whatever.”
That night, I call my boss, and this witch of a woman tells me that she told him that she couldn’t hire him.
She had no intentions of hiring him but wanted me to look like the bad guy!
Unfortunately, this is not the first nor last time she has done something like this. She also strung along with a guy she had made a job offer to but refused to let him work more than eight hours, forcing him to be able to unable to pay off his student debt or even rent, and dropped another intern’s internship from forty hours a week, to fifteen, to ultimately nine hours at the very last minute so she couldn’t find a better internship.
These are three young people who wanted to work for our company and were deeply excited about it but had their livelihoods jeopardized and finances strained by this truly horrendous, thoughtless woman — all so she could save a few bucks to give herself a raise.
