I worked in a department that frequently got pulled into short lived projects, and we did a lot of “fire-fighting” (i.e. getting pulled onto a project that was in trouble, working on it for two weeks to turn it around, then leaving). We had been through a particularly tough run of this, working nights and weekends, and all of us had vocalised our displeasure at this to managers and in team meetings.

Then another project came in. And the first I heard of it was when I arrived into work in the morning to find everyone in the big meeting room, in a kickoff meeting about it. Well, almost everyone. They had pulled in every engineer on the floor except for me, one other female engineer, and the interns.

When I asked our lead about this, I was told it was because we had complained in the past about the firefighting work, and he assumed we wouldn’t have wanted to be included.