My company is threatening me
Sorry for the long post :(
I'm a 2021 graduate from a tier 3 college. I was working at a small startup based in Bengaluru that is into SAAS. The headcount is less than 20 and a completely remote job.
I don't have any notice period. I was told that I can leave the company whenever I want without any prior notice. And it's not mentioned anywhere in the contract. I had a promotion due in September 2022 in which the new agreement was supposed to be implemented where I had to serve a 90 day notice period and salary hike of 15% of my current CTC.
But the promotion was put on hold till now. I asked them multiple times but I was told that it's on hold indefinitely due to "shortage of funds".
On December 31st I sent a resignation letter as it will be my last working day. Even though it was a very short notice, I completed all the documentation about the things I worked on. Anyone who can understand English can deploy the entire product. And moreover everyone had worked on the product and almost everyone had a good understanding of the product.
Sometime in 2021, I received a bonus of 62k which was sent to my personal bank account (the company itself didn't have a corporate account back then). Since the company didn't provide me any work laptop, I was told casually that I can use the bonus to purchase a new laptop or keep it to myself.
I made a mistake of now waiting to get the December month salary before resigning. Now he's telling me that the bonus he sent is for the company laptop and it will be adjusted as my December month salary. When I asked about the purpose of the bonus was not to get the company laptop but to keep it myself, he's refusing to accept it. (Almost everyone in the company uses their personal laptop).
And coincidentally there was a service outage as the company uses free services wherever available (for example, oracle cloud free tier, free version of slack, GitHub and lot more). Continued in comments....
Bit harsh but if you are worried about future job and checks can just come out and say that this has happened to you and name and shame. I am sure support will come pouring in.
If you indeed deleted the service, just deny it fully. Assuming it can't be traced back to you. And do the above.
Many startups don't care about background checks, continue building and learning.
Also don't take advice from anon platform seriously without full blown understanding.
What if this guy gives a negative opinion about my employment during background checks? Do they listen to what actually happened? I don't know much about these things.
I haven't deleted any of their services as I didn't have any intention to do such things. Unfortunately I had a medical emergency in my family last week after resigning and that salary was pretty important :(
I don't know whether it's worth going with legal notice for this
I think we have a lawyers in this forum, if they can pro-bono this and draft a legal notice, send it to them. For 60K, they will simply back out. They will loose a lot in lawyers fee. The employment laws in India are employee friendly. Most important thing is were you responsible for outage, if yes then its karma, if no then stand your grounds
Some of these free services come with a hidden cost i.e; reliability. Especially the oracle cloud VMs which they can reclaim anytime. And the company abused the slack platform by not implementing any rate limits to any of the slack apps. Slack has suspended many apps a few months before as the apps were basically abusing their platform.
Now the few of the services went down, due to unknown reasons (note that everyone in the company has sudo access to everything, VMs, Cloudflare and all other services. Basically there's no access control).
The founder is threatening me that I was the one who deleted their service. They have no evidence.
How can I get out of this situation? Is it possible to get back my salary? How badly am I affected by future background checks at companies? Do I need to go with legal methods to get my salary back?
If you don't mind Whats your monthly salary?
~60k
Lawyers of grapevine, is it worth the money and time going after the 60k using legal methods?
I had once contacted a lawyer when an employer had deducted 50% of my bonus and my bonus was 1/3 of my whole package. The lawyer had told me that, it wasn't worth it. However you can file a case in the labour court of Bangalore. Do these only when you have secured a job after coming out of this. But yeah, filing cases can make you look like a rebel to future employers in bg checks which can hamper your chances.
This is not a legal advice. I'm just talking about my experience and situation.
I'm more worried about my future job opportunities. But it looks like he's going to screw me in background checks anyways, I can see that in the email responses and the threats he's making. So by sending a legal notice and IF I recovered the amount doesn't it make me innocent and prove that I haven't done any unethical things which he's claiming?
So you have been working in this next level LALA company for 2.5 years???? Bro you should send all documented records to the CEO and contact a legal advisor.
Unfortunately I had too many commitments as I'm the only breadwinner in the family and couldn't afford to leave the job. I applied to many companies but couldn't get through. Yes, im consulting a lawyer to see what action can be taken