[An4ximandros]

 ...and finding an open position as a QA tester, this site came at the worst possible time of my life: http://trenchescomic.com/tales

 I know it's not always like this, but goddamn, way to kill my ambition about applying for the position.

 My "favorite" must be the one with the guys who worked their asses off for 60hrs a week only to get fired in the end and not receiving any compensation.

[Mongoose]

Oh yeah, those stories are absolutely horrifying.  I'm convinced that at least half of them entail some sort of labor law violations.

[BloodEagle]

One company I worked for had a QA department reminiscent of Metropolis or 1984.  They’re earned a reputation for having great QA, so they were determined to hang onto it, and the way they did that was regimenting QA down to a set of machinery that merely required human cogs.  Every test case was exhaustively outlined, every activity set to a checklist, every step of the bug report regimented to the smallest detail.  Every single bug- more than twelve thousand during my time there- had screenshots in the format [First Initial][Last Name]_[Build Number]_[Bug Number]_01.jpg, with the occasional “02” or “03” when you needed a sequence to demonstrate something.  Deviation simply was not allowed, and would get you a reprimand for the smallest change.

As someone who has had to dig through someone else's (horrible) work on multiple prior occasions in order to find a small error, this (and especially the bolded segment) is perfectly reasonable.

As for the rest of it, however....

[An4ximandros]

I had no working experience and was an IT university dropout. Literally begging for work at the job center got me a contract with a temporary employment agency, and I was promptly allocated to software and IT environment testing.

In the first month, we assembled a team of five people without a clue, got a vague assignment for a flash game, close to no resources, and an ever-absent boss who dropped us a mail once a week.

I got my first paycheck, except it wasn’t a real paycheck but instead “unemployment benefits” with another name to it, even signed by the job center. I began to inquire the job center about this “job” I had and got nothing but legal threats.

After another 2 months, we somehow got a crappy little game done - which was never released.

We were used by a bogus company to rake in funding by the state. It’s like a full blown industry here to pass around jobless people and keep them from getting real jobs. On top of that, the job center forced us to shut up under threat of prosecution (false testimony) and continue “working” a full 12 months in that joke of a company.

This is ****ing terrifying, not only a risk of a ****ty job, but a risk of a false ****ty job.

[karajorma]

You have to love the way the government is lining up to give money to scam artists while paying the people who work at the lowest level of the scam. It then probably complains about the massive amount of money it then has to pay in unemployment benefit!