Fired after saving my company thousands of hours with custom code they now refuse to pay me for.

I worked as an hourly ecommerce dev for three years and made the classic mistake of being "too helpful." Since the tech market was rough, I took a lower-level job but used my free time to build custom automation systems that saved the company thousands of hours. Instead of a promotion or a salary bump, they just piled on more work and made me a manager in everything but name.

The red flags really started when they had me interview a new hire who couldn't even pass a basic CSV parsing test. They hired him anyway because he was willing to take $16 an hour. Immediately after, they demanded admin access to all the private code I had written outside of work that they were now relying on. When I realized they were trying to replace me with cheap labor and steal my IP, I checked my pay stubs and found out they were also auto-deducting 30-minute lunch breaks from everyone's time regardless of whether we actually took them.

I contacted the Department of Labor, and they confirmed I was owed for every single hour of "off the clock" coding. I tried to be reasonable and just asked for a 6-week severance to move on quietly. Instead, they spent the night cloning my personal Google Drive, cut my access, and fired me.

Their actual severance offer was a joke. They offered two weeks of pay, but only if I signed a two-year nationwide non-compete, waived all my wage claims, and gave them full access to my personal devices whenever they wanted. I refused and found a lawyer to take the case on contingency.

Since then, the CEO has been trying to financially squeeze me. They lied to the unemployment office by claiming I quit, so I have been stuck in an appeals process for two months. He even tried to withhold my retirement money.

The worst part is that their system has massive security vulnerabilities that they refused to fix because of the cost, and they were so incompetent that they didn't even rotate the API keys after firing me. I have too much integrity to use that access, but it's terrifying how much they gamble with customer data.

I finally found a better-paying job, but this whole experience was a brutal lesson in how much a company will try to destroy you once they think they've squeezed all the free value out of you.

Anyways, thanks for reading. I just needed a place to vent.