- Strangest Lay off Ever
I was working for these people for only over three months at this point.
I became one of the major contributors to their code base though. I solved a large number of bugs and did a lot of refactoring.
One day, out of the blue, leadership came to me with a strange talk about "initiating my transition to another company"...
I was puzzled by the strange wording, but I got the message. "Are you letting me go?" I said.
"Hum... I guess I'm letting you go, yes..." said leadership.
"Ok. Is this the reason why I didn't get pay? It's the last day of January, but I didn't get paid for the month of December yet" I said.
Leadership then looked at me with an expression of panic. "No! No! This has nothing to do with that! It's something else!" they said.
If you are lying about having financial problems, you should not give it away this much... lol
"We think that we are not being able to provide you the environment to allow you to reach your full potential..." they said.
"I've never complained about the work [even though the work was often boring and not suited for a senior developer]. Am I not delivering good enough work?" I said...
"No, your technical knowledge is good" they said.
"Is the volume of work I'm delivering not enough?" I said.
"No, the volume of work is good" they said.
"What's the problem then?" I asked.
"I cannot quite put my finger on it..." they said.
"Ok, then. I accept the lay off. According to my contract, you just need to pay the compensation for breaching the contract and I'll go my way..." I said.
Honestly, this kind of cryptic conversation with them happened very often and I was already tired of it, so I decided that was not worth the trouble to argue any further.
"I don't know about the breach of contract clause. I didn't read the contract..." They said.
That's very strange, I thought with myself. If I was going to lay someone off, I would read his/her contract before I talked to them. Were they trying to intimidate me? Was the lay off a bluff?
Then they tried to back-off. "Let's talk about that next week... Think about this over the weekend...". they said.
"No. I'm ok with the lay off. Let's take care of this now." I said.
Next day (a weekend) they email me saying that they could not find the clause I was referring to (the compensation for early termination of the contract) I mentioned. "Let's figure this out next week." they said.
I had to send them the clause as a quote and where to find it in the contract.
Then they tried to create excuses for me to stay longer than I had to. "If I let you go Monday, you need to stay until X date [2 months later]" they said.
"No. No "if". You have already gave me notice and I accepted it". I said.
They then created some weird obstacles and excuses such as "wanting to do this the right way..." (?),. They were trying to extend my notice for some reason. Seriously, looks like they were trying to intimidate me, not really lay me off.
Finally, after a lot of insistence from my side, they agreed to pay my compensation and let me go after I've made very clear that I was not interested in working for them any longer.
At this point, I don't know if they were letting me go because they are in financial problems (which I have a strong feeling they are) or if they were doing that as a form of harassment (and it backfired).
- Micro-management
Leadership are also coders, thus, you are put in a very uncomfortable situation, where YOU HAVE TO PAIR CODE WITH YOUR BOSS (and I'm sorry for being honest, but they are terrible coders).
They do not understand what are S.O.L.I.D. principles. I spent half hour trying to explain why they should use Polyphormic chains instead of immense "if, elif, else" blocks, both they would not listen to me.
They do not understand object oriented design and other very basic design concepts, writing python code that is full of cyclic imports for instance.
I could spend the whole day listing these sort of issues.
Also, they would write hundreds and hundreds of lines of code (without testing them, I mean, with tons of SYNTAX errors) and give it to me to debug. Honestly, that's very unreasonable to ask to any senior developer. Imagine that, being someone personal debugger... They write the code and you debug it! *sigh*. Keep in mind that I've NEVER complained about it while working for them.
Then, if you changed it too much they get their feelings hurt. You are supposed to do the least amount of changes to make that ugly code work.
Of course, I realized that the company had no future long before this conversation, but I was putting up with it until I could find something better given that the compensation was decent.
- Poorly designed and written code base
You don't have to believe my words, their code is available on GitHub. I can't believe they had the nerve of making it open-source in that shape... They have no shame or are clueless.
- No freedom
I, of course objected to many of their ideas (because they were just really bad ones), but I've never refused to do work, nor I was never rude nor brash when trying to explain why they shouldn't do it, nor I was ever particularly insistent in my objections, but only the fact that you disagree with them is offensive to them. They cannot even take a joke! They have huge egos!
Also, I only will give you my opinion, if you ask for it. I avoided giving my input, but they kept insisting because they were obviously trying to break my spirit and make me join their yes-man culture.
Yes, keeping my opinions to myself wasn't enough. They even slack me with this message: "Because you are the new guy, You are expected to obey orders without questioning".
Then, seeing how bad this made them look, they simply deleted the message. You see the kind of people we're dealing with here?
- Very Sensitive to Criticism
Once I criticized one of their API's due to the huge amount of technical debt in it as well as large amounts of copy-and-paste programming. I wasn't an a-hole about it though, as a matter of fact, I was offering to fix it. Every time I touched that code, I tried to make small improvements (which apparently offended them).
Someone tattled about me to leadership by the way! lol
In one of the all-hands, leadership stated out of the blue that "The system that they have developed has served them well up to this point, and that they were very proud of it..." in an angry and disapproving tone.
Honestly, trying to improve things is MY JOB. It's not personal...
When I first started, I looked at the code of one of their systems and found an performance issue that if fixed would increase performance ONE HUNDRED FOLD. They said that they tried to fix the problem and could not come up with a solution, I shown them a solution that works. They got angry that I wanted to fix it and just ignored both my solution and the performance issue itself.
Keep in mind that they asked me to evaluate performance! I did my job as I supposed to do and got backlash because their systems performs badly!
I guess they were fishing for compliments! They thought that I would find that the system is amazing! lol They didn't want an honest evaluation, they wanted compliments!
Of course, I didn't insist after that. I have nothing to gain by doing that. They are just hurting themselves with this behavior...
- Yes-Man Culture
Most people in there just agree to leadership without questioning and I see why. Their adulation on top of agreeableness is just disgusting though. I was pressured to behave in the same disgusting way. Honestly, at that point I had given up on trying to change anything, but I do not adulate anyone. I guess keeping it to myself was not enough, thus, I believe that's the reason they tried to intimidate me (refer to the "strangest lay off ever" section). They wanted to break my spirit and made me one of them.
- Do not provide laptop
I had to use my own personal laptop, which is not the safest thing. I asked them about it, but they simply dodged the question.