‘What is the worst job offer you have ever had?’ – 23 employers who are way worse than yours
It’s rare to find a person who uncritically adores their boss, as, let’s face it, people who strive to be in a position of power tend to skew towards the worst end of the people spectrum.
However, your employer might not be as bad as you think compared to others. Over on the AskUK subreddit, Desperate-Drawer-572 posed this question:
‘What is the worst job offer you have ever had? ‘
And they kicked off with a brief example of their own.
‘Once offered free car parking and free coffee. Sounded great on paper. Salary was lower than minimum wage and had to work 12 hour shifts four days a week.
‘What is yours?’
And lots of people shared their own woeful stories of awful potential employers, like these…
1.
‘My old man was an architect and, when I was 16, got me a job on a building site. The first day, the foreman put me on the “Whacker” for 8 hours. Basically, looks a bit like a lawnmower and is intended to flatten the ground.
‘My hands and arms were completely numb for hours after. I worked a little harder at school after that.’
–RogueTrooper1975
2.
‘I graduated in 2009, just as financial crisis was starting. I had an interview for a ‘marketing’ position. Got a call after saying I’d got through to the next round which was a trial shift.
‘Next day I went with another employee to do door to door sales around a housing estate. Had to use my own money for the bus fare out there.
‘The other employee was really pressurising me to ‘take the job’ but the more he talked the more I realised it was kind of a pyramid scheme. I’d be self employed, only earn if I made sales and he would get a cut of whatever I made. So of course he wanted me to sign up.
‘I saw the day out, trudging around in the rain and then said ‘no thanks’.’
–Objective_Result2530
3.
‘This was for a marketing manager role. was offered £20.5k a year (2022), which was told to me during the interview; they were adamant this was an incredible wage offering, especially with the added benefit of finishing one hour early on a Friday.
‘I apologised and said something along the lines of I assumed, with it being a manager role, I would at least be paid more, or at the very least similar to my current salary as an executive at £28.5k, and there is no point continuing.
‘They still called me and said I just missed out to someone they hired from New York who had worked with some of the biggest brands in the world. They were local window fitters.’
–EdibleBeans-on-Toast
4.
‘I was approached in a central Berlin street by a photographer while I was wearing sandals. He handed me his business card and said I had “interesting feet” and “an interesting face” and would I like to make some “special films”.
‘I stared at him until he went away. For context I’m a bald, bearded, overweight Yorkshireman.’
–Choice-Demand-3884
5.
‘The company I work for’s main competition offered me a position below starting salary with enforced overtime every other weekend and all bank holidays, and also didn’t want to pay for my van insurance or diesel.
‘Like yeah, let me take a pay cut, work more hours, and be out of pocket a couple of thousand pound a year on top of the pay gap. Great offer guys, 10/10 when do I start.’
–fastestman4704
6.
‘Once had someone reach out to me about doing some freelance blogging around 7-8 years ago (before widespread LLMs became a thing.) They wanted some B2B blogs written, properly sourced and researched, SEO optimised, about 800 words each.
‘Okay, I have a pretty normal day rate for that, which I give them and say I’m willing to do a bulk discount if they want me to do 10. The reply was “oh, I was actually thinking closer to £15 per blog. If you do ten a week that’s not a bad payment, right?”
‘Yeah, I never wrote those blogs.’
–AndyVale
7.
‘Hotel housekeeper lol, three months and I was done. People are dirty animals.’
–Unique_Bandicoot_502
8.
‘I did double glazing telesales for all of two weeks. I was 20 and had just dropped out uni. I was stuck in a windowless box room behind a pub with about 10 others on the phones. It was absolutely awful, plus they tried to charge me for a uniform tee-shirt which wasn’t even provided.’
–nowdoingthisatwork
9.
‘£5 an hour plus £1 a delivery in 2026. In my own vehicle, on my on fuel. Free chips at end of night though. Get fucked.’
–mj271707
10.
‘Not sure if it counts as a job offer but I politely left a group interview for a job.
‘While I was unemployed I applied for some stock counting job where you would travel around doing stock checks for a lot of the big supermarkets. During the interview I found out the travel would involve staying in hotel rooms with random work colleagues and I just wasn’t remotely comfortable with that.’
–inevitablelizard
11.
‘As someone who makes art my worst are always please do my commission for free and you can use it as advertising! Erm no you pay me thanks.’
–Familiar-Candidate-7
12.
‘A teaching contract that was temporary until midway July and then permanent from September. Basically they didn’t want to pay me for the holidays. Kindly told them to go fuck themselves.’
–girlandhiscat