[HN Gopher] Three programmers got fired, including me, due to a ...
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Three programmers got fired, including me, due to a single app
crash
Author : signa11
Score : 241 points
Date : 2021-07-11 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (betterprogramming.pub)
(TXT) w3m dump (betterprogramming.pub)
| rspoerri wrote:
| If your client does not want to pay the price of development, he
| usually also does not value your work. I guess the same is true
| for employees. The worst clients have allways been those who have
| complained about the price beforehand.
| aenis wrote:
| I had a job like this 20 years ago and I did learn important
| lessons - mainly how to spot toxic work environments and people.
| These days, in pretty much any part of the world, one can get a
| job as a programmer in a matter of days. My company is now
| handing out $100k in deferred comp (stock, not even options,
| vesting in 3 years, with a performance-based multiplier of up to
| 3x) to key devs despite being a large company with a $30bn
| topline that, until quite recently, considered programmers an
| expendable commodity. Well, not anymore -- covid accelerated
| shift to 'fully digital' business processes and companies are
| struggling to find devs in all the western world.
| lordnacho wrote:
| A few days of process time maybe but not wall time. Gotta take
| longer than that to get an interview arranged and contracts
| done by HR?
| macintux wrote:
| Steve Jobs had to follow a very narrow happy path in his first
| iPhone demo because the product was still very buggy. It still
| amazes me that the iPhone shipped so (relatively) soon after.
|
| Failing to prepare for a business-critical demo was absolutely
| the CEO's fault.
| mst wrote:
| Yeah, the demo malpractice was the thing that stood out to me
| as peak idiocy.
|
| I mean the general toxicity was awful, but even in a
| functioning company with sensible timescales and staffing
| that's 100% how to end up with a mid-demo disaster.
| i0nutzb wrote:
| You only had to hold it differently and you'd have no issues
| ^_^
| deregulateMed wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with the keyboards.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's a shame you're getting dogpiled for echoing something
| Jobs himself suggested. Let it live in infamy, "you're
| holding it wrong"
| k12sosse wrote:
| "Everybody gets a case." - Oprah Jobs, Humility Inc.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I saw Jobs give a demo of Enterprise Objects (when he was at
| NeXT) at a trade show. He wasn't actually operating the
| keyboard and mouse, but he was on stage directing and
| explaining and suddenly the whole demo crashed with a kernel
| panic on the big screen. He handled it pretty smoothly, just
| said "oooops!" and waited for the reboot and then continued.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| He was also Steve Jobs. Not some random entrepreneur.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| >I missed two interviews because I couldn't manage time to attend
| them and I was not in a position to take the risk of losing this
| job.
|
| Comments like this make me feel fortunate myself that I always
| walk in with the mentality that I can be fired at a moments
| notice or I am willing to quit if a better opportunity arises.
| It's relieved an astronomical amount of stress off my shoulders
| even though normal people would consider that absurd. I frankly
| don't care. It's out of my control so why would I be worried
| about an employer that threatens to cut my salary in half if I'm
| late due to unforeseen circumstances? Unfortunately, nobody ever
| tells you about these events or how to handle them. You just
| gotta figure it out on your own.
| plank_time wrote:
| Getting fired from a predatory, horrible company like what the
| author describes is not shameful at all. It's a badge of honor.
| imglorp wrote:
| It's also better to get fired from one than quit. Author was
| going to depart either way, but in firing case got severance to
| relax and job hunt.
|
| I'm not saying one should aim to be fired, but if you smell an
| abusive company, it's sometimes better to wait for the axe, act
| professionally, and come out ahead.
| binkHN wrote:
| > If anyone came to the office five minutes late, he cut their
| pay to a half day's salary.
|
| Assuming this was true, it simply screams get out now. Perhaps
| someone can chime in on its legality too.
| bshep wrote:
| Well if you're 5mins late then just come in after lunch, might
| as well take 1/2 day off if you're only getting paid for 1/2 a
| day.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Any company that sells "enterprise" solutions, and only has a
| small staff of all junior, underpaid developers, is an automatic
| dead pool winner.
|
| They are lucky the app crashed before signing the agreement. It
| was garbage, and deserved to die.
|
| Personally, I am of the opinion, that the practices written about
| in this post are actually quite common, and the output shows it.
|
| Glad to be out of the rat race. Even the food pellets sucked.
| dabinat wrote:
| It seems crazy to me that someone would demo something that
| important without first doing a practice run-through.
|
| Things do sometimes go wrong and it's the presenter's job to make
| light of it and carry on like it's not a big deal.
| alexpc201 wrote:
| Sometimes you are on the Titanic and no matter what you do the
| boat will sink anyways. It's important to learn to recognize
| those moments and prepare for the freezing water. When I found
| myself in those situations, first asked for a raise, and then
| started analyzing alternatives. But sometimes after hitting the
| iceberg, the mood and the environment were unbearable so I
| resigned. Peace of mind is everything.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Fired? They did all of them a favor. No senior devs, overworked
| team, a-hole CTO, etc.
|
| This should be retitled "How to self-sabotage your startup" or
| "If this story sounds familiar then you need to update your CV."
| brabel wrote:
| A company which only hires junior developers is not a company
| that values quality development practices and it cannot expect to
| get stuff done on time, let alone with high quality and
| industry's best practices... not that junior developers cannot be
| good (with proper guidance they can be awesome), but without
| experienced people around to guide them, and without them having
| experience of their own, they are bound to make every possible
| mistake in the book no matter how smart.
|
| The people running the company were playing with fire and they
| must either be too junior themselves to understand that, or they
| were just knowingly doing so and hoping to get whatever product
| MVP they had planned as quickly as possible with the minimum
| amount of expenses possible.
|
| Don't feel bad for being fired from such a company. It might have
| been the best thing to happen to you because now you get the
| opportunity of getting a proper job where you might actually have
| experienced people to mentor you and help you become a great
| developer and professional.
|
| With that said: next time a CTO asks you to create something in a
| month for a demo, just go ahead and implement a mock (no DB, no
| error handling, just happy path code) that's just about enough
| for the demo, nothing else. Make it clear to the person who is
| going to run the demo that this is not the real deal, and arrange
| for only the happy path to be followed in the demo (add a few
| safeguards just in case so if the person does something
| unexpected you just ignore it, never crash!). You could have
| probably pulled that off in a couple of days :D but yeah, you
| probably thought you needed to have the real final product ready
| otherwise it wouldn't be demo-able... Trust me, that's almost
| certainly not the case.
| dheera wrote:
| > A company which only hires junior developers
|
| Part of it is also stingy investors in the ecosystem.
|
| The top-tier investors often give enough cash to hire
| experienced developers. Unfortunately most companies don't get
| that kind of money, and instead of getting the $2M round they
| _need_ , they settle for a third- or fourth-tier VC's $200K
| check with bad terms and a warrant for the rest of the $1.8M,
| and then they end up paying their employees crap wages and
| overworking them with the hope that they can attract a top-tier
| VC for the next round.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Depends on the students. The top students in a graduating class
| can be extraordinary compared to the average experienced
| person, although there is a lot they don't know
| erdo wrote:
| > although there is a lot they don't know
|
| I think that's exactly the problem. Re top students I assume
| we're talking about things like a deep knowledge of
| algorithms, implementation details of relevant languages, the
| latest frameworks, being comfortable writing in an object
| oriented or functional style, being extremely smart, having a
| lot of working memory, loads of energy and enthusiasm, being
| able to grasp complicated concepts quickly etc (I've never
| met a recent grad who is even close to that, but I understand
| it's at least theoretical).
|
| But experience lets you do things like push back a little on
| the requirements (because you know that what is being asked
| for is not actually what is wanted). Or choosing path A
| instead of path B because you know that path B will come back
| to bite your team later because you've seen how it played out
| a few times before. Knowing which things will make the
| biggest difference to the speed or quality of delivery,
| whilst costing the least to implement. You know what problems
| you should ignore and what problems are serious risks. Things
| like that can sometimes make the experienced developer a 10x
| programmer, it's certainly not because they're typing 10x
| faster than anyone else.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| The top student in any grad class is probably still going to
| make a ton of mistakes compared to even an average dev with
| 10 years of experience though.
|
| There really is no substitute for actually making the
| mistakes and learning from them
| pkolaczk wrote:
| The average devs with 10 years of experience also make ton
| of mistakes, even when developing the 10th project.
| Projects are not all the same. I've met people with 10+
| years of experience, labeled as seniors who write horrible
| code.
|
| I'd take a smart junior who can think logically and who is
| passionate about the job over someone who has 10x 1 year
| experience and doesn't want to learn, or is just not smart
| enough. Chances are a good junior can beat such senior
| after a few months (sometimes even weeks) of experience on
| the project. And the junior typically won't fight with the
| tech lead over something they "have always been doing"
| (even when it was an anti pattern).
|
| Anyway, it is good to have at least one senior dev who is
| an expert on the tech stack / architecture used.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| It doesn't depend on the student. Every developer starts out
| as a dumbass. There are an infinite number of sharp edges in
| software and we all cut ourselves on all of them.
| asdjlkadsjklads wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. The only reason i'd call myself
| employable as a developer is because i've taken on many
| self-projects and reinvented many wheels, which resulted in
| lots of sharp corners and hard lessons learned.
|
| It's a definite time sink to learn these lessons, but it's
| of real value to me personally.
| _dibly wrote:
| I'm almost two years into self-employment and I'm wondering
| when I'm going to either stop cutting myself on things or
| land a position with some people who can show me their cool
| scars for a while.
|
| This forum is the closest thing I get to coworkers and I
| don't even understand what half of you are saying. I'm
| fortunate for the opportunities that I have, but my
| antisocial tendencies and lack of professional peers can
| make progress a bit of a bear on occasion.
| flir wrote:
| It's just as important to develop the soft skills as the
| hard skills, and I think you've just quite nicely
| summarized why that is.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| It never ends, unless you stop advancing/keeping up.
| That's the frustrating thing about this field, you are
| never an expert because the technology advances so
| quickly.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| I'm in a very similar situation, just a few years further
| down the road. I would gladly show you my cool scars.
|
| I have often thought about trying to build a network of
| like-minded individuals. Of course, it doesn't come
| naturally. If it did, there wouldn't be a need for it!
|
| My contact info is in my profile, feel free to reach out.
| wernercd wrote:
| "starts out as" 10 years in and I'm still a dumbass... I
| work circles around most and I'm still a dumbass... I'm
| close to being honestly a full stack developer - server,
| database, api, windows services, websites (I know Asp.net
| MVC... but not deeply... finally learning Angular)...
|
| ... I'm still a dumbass...
|
| I wonder... if after 10 years... will I stop being one
| after 20? 30?
| lowercased wrote:
| No. 25 years in here. You may think you're a dumbass even
| then. _Other people_ may think you 're a dumbass. You
| will still make stupid mistakes. You will probably make
| fewer than other people, and there will be many mistakes
| you don't make any longer, because you've already made
| them and have learned your lessons.
|
| But the feeling of being a dumbass may never leave you
| entirely. You will need to learn to control that some,
| and not always let on to everyone around you how dumb you
| feel at all times. But... honestly, the folks I've worked
| with who never ever admit to feeling dumb or doing dumb
| things - they STILL make the same mistakes, often more,
| and seem to have no capacity for self-reflection or
| skills improvement. So... understand your "I'm a dumbass"
| feeling may just be part of you pointing out that you can
| get better, and help you find opportunities to improve.
| wernercd wrote:
| Well, I honestly use the feeling of being a dumbass (AKA:
| imposter syndrome) as fuel to learn more and do better.
|
| As you say, self reflection and skill improvement.
|
| I honestly think it's why I'm a good programmer...
|
| That... and being lazy. I'll work for weeks to make
| processes easier. IE: a release process that used to be
| manual and fraught with mistakes is now, more or less,
| button clicks and powershell scripts.
| miscaccount wrote:
| i feel also with time, you get better from recovering
| from these stupid mistakes faster and also come up with
| better solutions/fixes faster.
|
| This will have taken your younger self , twice or more to
| understand the problem and come up with solution
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| You also getting better at owning mistakes without making
| them sound like a big deal. You just say stuff like
| "that's an interesting edge you'd only learn by querying
| a table with millions of rows" instead of anxiously
| shitting your pants in shame.
|
| Last Friday learned that Postgres (and apparently MySQL)
| will effectively ignore an index in a column when
| combining "ORDER BY ... LIMIT ..." and "WHERE some_column
| IN some_array". I had introduced a query that timed out
| on a critical prod table , fixed it by removing the
| limit, and turned it into a teaching moment to others who
| could have made the same mistake:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8909163/avoid-full-
| table...
| sangnoir wrote:
| > ... I'm still a dumbass...
|
| While that may be true, you're less of a dumbass now,
| thanks to experiences. If you were to guide a junior
| developer now, you'd probably walk them back from a dozen
| sharp edges, thanks to your experience, but we tend to
| discount that.
| aniforprez wrote:
| Honestly the feeling hasn't completely gone away but I've
| slowly stopped thinking of myself this way as intensely
| as I did before. What it took was strong mentorship from
| a really good boss and exposure to all levels of the
| stack and strong architectural and technical principles
| to building robust applications. Taking some interviews I
| felt much better about myself than I had in years cause I
| was actually able to answer things that I couldn't have a
| couple of years ago
|
| I hope you find that place in your life too. It's a lot
| of relief when it happens
| slumdev wrote:
| They may have extraordinary potential, extraordinary problem-
| solving ability, extraordinary communications skills, and
| extraordinary critical thinking skills. They may be
| tremendously resourceful and almost entirely independent.
|
| But all of these qualities only accelerate the learning
| process that happens in the real world. They don't replace
| it.
|
| Edit: To be fair, given the choice, I'd rather have an MIT CS
| grad than some schmuck who barely squeaked through the MIS
| program at Big State U. But I'd take a good experienced dev
| over either of them.
| Google234 wrote:
| I don't think it would take long for the MIT CS grad to
| start out performing this "good" experienced dev. The
| experienced dev could be a principal engineer by 20 years
| if they cared more about CS.
| tester756 wrote:
| What makes you think so?
| exdsq wrote:
| Most projects don't require some deep CS knowledge so
| even if the MIT CS grad was great at getting up to speed
| they still lack experience of edge cases and gotchas.
| Most companies don't have Principal level roles.
|
| Might still make sense because they're cheaper.
| longhairedhippy wrote:
| Not everything is written in books or taught in classes, even
| the most accomplished genius is going to have gaps. Depending
| on the person and they're penchant for studying outside of
| the curriculum, those gaps could be relatively smaller
| between people, however it's not going to erase them. Someone
| who has already built a live system, potentially multiple
| times, is going to have experiences you cannot just
| intuitively reason through, you must live them. You don't
| need a majority of folks like this on the team but one or two
| could save you a lot of wasted time and effort.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "A stupid person can make only certain, limited types of
| errors; the mistakes open to a clever fellow are far broader.
| But to the one who knows how smart he is compared to everyone
| else, the possibilities for true idiocy are boundless."
| jjav wrote:
| > although there is a lot they don't know
|
| That "although" is the whole point.
|
| Knowing the technical basics (language syntax, getting things
| to work) is the easy baseline. What's missing in every
| studente (unless they went back to school after a solid stint
| in industry) is the experience of understanding the processes
| and approaches required to build something lasting and to
| operate within a larger team.
| abunuwas wrote:
| There're very few extraordinary students who can start
| contributing from the start. But those students are already
| stars of their own, not the kind you can hire. For the vast
| majority, there's a very long journey from graduation to
| professional developer. This applies also to PhDs, and yes,
| also from the best universities in the world (I have those in
| my team often). A company that only hires junior graduates as
| devs is a company that doesn't take software seriously. Such
| companies often collapse under their own weight
| asoneth wrote:
| I agree that recent graduates can be extraordinary, but a
| team with no seasoned developers is still a major red flag to
| me.
|
| I've worked on many projects, some successful, some not. The
| difference was often that the successful projects had a
| critical mass of wise people who had learned from past
| failures and could anticipate the pitfalls and avoid them --
| it seems more rare that actual project success comes down to
| having yet another brilliant programmer.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. There's no evidence
| that the kind of instruction that e.g. Facebook gives its
| junior developers is meaningful for performance on average.
| However I bet hiring from top universities is definitely
| meaningful for performance on average.
| gbear605 wrote:
| A junior developer is going to have a lot of blind spots
| because of unknown unknowns. A team with both talented
| junior developers and experienced senior developers can
| utilize the raw ability of the junior devs while having the
| senior devs cover the blindspots. A team with only talented
| junior devs will likely make some great things but they'll
| also wind up having crucial problems that will only late
| into the project.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| This is probably true, top university admissions is a
| function of innate ability, and programming is too
| apparently.
| cortesoft wrote:
| It isn't the instruction on the job that is important, it
| is the experience of actually doing things in anger
| pjc50 wrote:
| I've worked with all sorts of brilliant people and genuine
| 10x developers, and it's true both that students can achieve
| great things and that anyone can make a mistake - and that
| low-quality work environments like that of the OP can _force_
| anyone to make mistakes.
| 6510 wrote:
| Others have to fill your gaps. I have no problems telling
| people their methods are wrong even if they might fire me
| over it. We either fix it or I'm gone.
| neither_color wrote:
| There is a reason years of experience matters more than class
| GPA or school rank. Being a good student in many cases just
| means being able to cram for exam week, it says nothing about
| your consistent habits. Software is a marathon not a final
| exam.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| GPA doesn't have anything to do with being a good student
| onion2k wrote:
| An app like the one the author of the article is talking
| about doesn't need "extraordinary" coders. The reason for the
| crash was that someone entered invalid data. That is a _very_
| simple, and very common, problem that you only start to
| understand with a bit of experience. You don 't need to be a
| brilliant genius to understand it. Literally every dev whose
| worked on a few apps can deal with it. But you do need to
| have worked with real QAs and real customers in order to
| understand that people do stupid things that you need to
| protect against. No one is teaching that in a compsci class.
| Juniors learn that from seniors. If you have no seniors,
| demos failing on "obvious" things is exactly what happens.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Despite the deluge of downvotes, recent grads and dropouts
| formed many of the worlds largest companies, and many you
| work for them or for their successors. Linux was started by
| Linus while in school as well. I don't know why this is
| getting so much hostility
|
| Bill gates Michael dell Zuckerberg Jobs Dorsey (Many others)
|
| I'm sorry this makes so many people mad but... stop looking
| down on people
|
| Also, why are people conflating high gpa with being a top
| student? Top student means "the best at creating software"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
| emsy wrote:
| I know exactly why you're being downvoted: most developers
| identify as the average experienced developer and can't
| handle the fact that they can be outperformed by an
| extraordinary rookie (although such people usually have a lot
| of experience from working in their free time).
| tgv wrote:
| I don't think that was the point. Rather, it's that many
| rookies, including bright graduates, think "meh, I can run
| this SQL script without making a backup first."
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "most developers identify as the average"
|
| That is what average means
|
| Let's make this more obvious: Imagine that in you have to
| produce Nitroglycerine, explosive set off by the slightest
| of mistakes.
|
| Would you rather it done by someone superbly clever, but
| straight out of uni, or someone who's average, but has done
| it for 20 years and survived?
| Google234 wrote:
| Well if you are happy that you found someone that can
| follow a checklist then fine. I doubt the top tier grad
| would want that type of job anyway.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Do you know how many hundred top tier chemical and
| nuclear scientists died while "following the checklist"?
| Look up Demon Core
| oriolid wrote:
| IIRC the work with Demon Core was described as "tickling
| the dragon's tail", not "following the checklist".
| Wikipedia also mentions "Slotin's own unapproved
| protocol".
| Google234 wrote:
| Also how could there be a checklist? They were literally
| pioneers
| Google234 wrote:
| 1, you are now really exaggerating. 2, this analogy is
| really straying far from software engineering. 3, what is
| your point here?
| RichardCA wrote:
| Not calling you out, but where did you get the number
| deaths > 100 from?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident
| exdsq wrote:
| Out of interest with your name Google234, are you a
| student or early employee? You seem to be very certain
| about things in your comments here but I'm unsure if they
| come from experience or speculation.
| laumars wrote:
| Most senior engineers _expect_ to be out paced by juniors
| in terms of raw throughout.
|
| But what the seniors have over the juniors is several years
| of experience making mistakes.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| "Raw throughput" like what? Mashing on the keyboard? Then
| - sure. Sorry but that's just not true ime. On some tasks
| jrs are even infinitely slower than srs because they just
| can't make any headway at all
| acituan wrote:
| The hinge of this analysis is on the word "outperformed".
| Performance of _what_ you 're measuring exactly? If our
| sole performance criteria was churning out LOC and
| subsisting on adderall, any new grad can kick ass. But you
| wouldn't entrust them multi-million-dollar man-hours of
| headcount to a steer multi-quarter project _to actually
| work and bring in money_. Without such steering, any code
| is mere dead matter, for which the performance of making is
| irrelevant.
| djsweet wrote:
| > The people running the company were playing with fire and
| they must either be too junior themselves to understand that,
| or they were just knowingly doing so and hoping to get whatever
| product MVP they had planned as quickly as possible with the
| minimum amount of expenses possible.
|
| Knowingly playing with fire like this is a sign of a lack of
| maturity, both on the founders part and the investor's part.
| Anyone experienced in the business of building software would
| have known that:
|
| 1. It takes time
|
| 2. Time takes funding
|
| 3. It's probably not going to work the first time you try an
| end-to-end test
|
| Mature founders would have found mature investors to give them
| both the funding and the time to stabilize the software. They
| would not have attempted to make their investor demo the first
| big end-to-end test, and even if they did put off testing they
| would have communicated that to the investors, who should have
| understood the state of their investment only six ~months~
| weeks in.
| lmilcin wrote:
| > Knowingly playing with fire like this is a sign of a lack
| of maturity, both on the founders part and the investor's
| part.
|
| It doesn't matter really whether this is or is not knowingly.
|
| If you are CEO and you don't know something (because you have
| never had any experience in IT, for example) it is your job
| to find people that do and give them tools to do their job
| well enough.
|
| But you would not run a company without at least some
| experienced accountants or lawyers, I would assume any
| thinking person should be able to predict the same goes for
| software developers.
| tarsinge wrote:
| > The second fault was the CEO's. He didn't even try the app
| once before presenting it to the investors.
|
| That says it all regarding maturity and/or professionalism,
| that's the number #1 job of the CEO.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| The CEO should not be presenting the app in the first
| place. Product demos should be done by someone who knows
| the product inside and out, knows where the unfinished bits
| are (if any), and has experience presenting products to
| investors/buyers.
| MobileVet wrote:
| Have to disagree on this a bit. The meeting in question
| was with an investor. The CEO should be the point person
| for all investor relations... especially the first
| meeting with said investor.
|
| If your CEO can't 'sell' the product / app/ company to an
| investor effectively, you won't last.
|
| The CEO should absolutely have the skills, knowledge and
| energy to sell whatever it is your business does
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Oh of course the CEO should be involved with the
| investors, at a business level. I'm saying the CEO is not
| the best person to actually do the demo, in most cases.
| Bring along a product and sales expert to the meeting do
| that. Steve Jobs is the exeption that proves the rule;
| most CEOs do not have his showmanship.
| Diesel555 wrote:
| This reminds me of the WWDCs. Tim Cook is there to
| introduce the products, but their engineers (or
| management of the individual product) are the ones to
| demonstrate it.
|
| But, I guess Apple probably has people with better
| salesmanship skills in each product team than the startup
| had below the CEO. I'm arguing with myself.
| amelius wrote:
| > next time a CTO asks you to create something in a month for a
| demo, just go ahead and implement a mock
|
| But expectations have shifted and management now expects to get
| the real thing.
| caeril wrote:
| > A company which only hires junior developers is not a company
| that values quality development practices and it cannot expect
| to get stuff done on time
|
| I wish this wasn't such a common trope among the VC, FAANG, or
| Fortune 500 crowd.
|
| Believe it or not, there exist a million small businesses who
| don't enjoy the luxury of burning OPM, who can't afford $200k
| developer salaries, no matter how much they want to.
|
| In one sense, you're ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. But here in the real
| world, in flyover country, revenue will always constrain
| resources. Those of us running small, stable businesses are
| forced to make tradeoffs that FAANGs or cash-burning VC-funded
| operations don't have to.
|
| That said, yes, the people in this story seem to be the
| gambling, poor-management types and the OP shouldn't worry
| overly about losing this "opportunity".
| gizmo686 wrote:
| If you are a software company, then paying market rate for
| quality developers is table stakes. It is an expensive market
| to operate in and you care competing with very well funded
| global competition.
|
| Most small business are not that. If you are running a
| tailoring business, or an ice cream shop, or a landscaping,
| you probably don't need a senior developer. Heck, you might
| not need to hire any developers at all. As long as you have
| someone technically inclined, you can probably manage your
| digital presence well enough without it being anyone's full
| time job.
| brailsafe wrote:
| It may be a blessing in disguise, until an employer asks you
| why you left your only work experience, and you have to dance
| around a bit to persuade them to give you a shot.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I was fired once, and it really crushed my self esteem and morale
| for a long time.
|
| Similar story, I wasn't paid overtime and I was a new developer.
| I worked like crazy. I was the full stack dev slash designer. If
| my work didn't meet a standard or I made a mistake, I'd be kind
| of coerced into recording less hours for the effort. I don't
| think this is uncommon in software.
|
| I've come to believe I was fired for a few reasons, but none of
| them really reasonable. The main two were that my CTO learned
| that I found our product morally reprehensible, and he simply
| didn't like me. I was never rude or argumentative with him at
| all, but it became quite clear over time that these things were
| creating a divide between us.
|
| I ended up having a health issue eventually, and I mostly kept it
| to myself. I became quite depressed because I was facing an
| operation which might change my life permanently (loss of sex
| drive being a major risk) and my output dropped for a couple
| months. It was like hitting a switch. After nearly three years of
| work and a team who really valued my work (and many even kept in
| touch to this day), he called me into a meeting and literally had
| me escorted out. No one understood or saw it coming. My project
| was passed on to several others out of the blue.
|
| At the time though, it crushed me. I blamed everything on myself.
| The new team would message me for help and I'd actually do it! I
| felt sure I must have left a legacy of garbage and I owed it to
| them. Although they expressed that my leaving created a major
| bottleneck at the company, I was still sure I must have been
| fired because of incompetence. I must be a failure. I
| contemplated leaving software for months, convinced that I'm
| terrible at it.
|
| The experience was eventually incredibly helpful though. My
| filter for people like that CTO is extremely useful. I use the
| experience as a reference to avoid treating people the same way
| and to remind myself how hard juniors will work despite bad
| conditions. Am I treating less experienced people properly? Am I
| making sure I don't take advantage of their enthusiasm, making
| sure I credit them properly for their efforts? Making sure they
| don't work overtime and simply learn instead to be realistic and
| content with their output?
|
| Inexperienced people in competitive industries are vulnerable.
| They often feel like they might never find another job. Sometimes
| they feel inadequate. They work harder than they should for the
| compensation they're given, and tell themselves they're lucky.
|
| Being able to reflect and recognize how crazy I was is helpful in
| teaching myself how to be a better mentor, and generally a better
| person to work with. So I'm grateful for that at least.
|
| There is still the part where I need to value myself and my work
| more. That's the hardest part. I'll get there eventually.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| There is a very simple solution to things like this: just leave.
| Software developers are currently fortunate enough that there is
| enough demand that they don't need to work for shit-shows like
| this. Other red flag: if a shop is only hiring junior developers,
| it's because any senior developer can smell the stink for miles
| and wouldn't want to join.
|
| Best lesson I ever got in business was when I saw a highly touted
| exec get hired, then actually hire a few folks on his team, then
| quit after 2 weeks when he saw he wouldn't be able to work with
| the existing exec team. A lot of lower level folks think that
| leaving is somehow a mark of failure, and while I would see a
| string of very short tenures on a resume as a red flag, bailing
| out of a bad company once or twice wouldn't bother me at all
| (and, if the tenure is less than a month, no reason to put it on
| your resume anyway).
| mperham wrote:
| Not everyone has the experience to quickly find another job or
| the savings to weather a period without a paycheck. The
| business as described is a modern day sweatshop.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > there is enough demand that they don't need to work for shit-
| shows like this.
|
| See, people keep saying this, and insisting that it's a sellers
| market for programmers, but stories like this one continue to
| be the rule rather than the exception. If we're so in demand...
| why is the treatment so poor?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > If we're so in demand... why is the treatment so poor?
|
| Couple points:
|
| 1. I'm not sure the treatment is "so poor". A post that goes
| "Hey, I got a job, mentorship is pretty good, my boss is
| good, I generally like my co-workers but a couple rub me the
| wrong way" is a lot less likely to hit the front page than
| "We all got fired when our program crashed".
|
| 2. Information asymmetry. Most junior developers right out of
| college don't have a good understanding about the broader
| industry, don't know how to negotiate, etc. I think the best
| thing you can do if you are a junior dev is to find someone
| more senior who you trust to review any job offers and also
| to review your job hunt tactics generally.
| [deleted]
| ufmace wrote:
| How do you know that they "continue to be the rule rather
| than the exception"? Have you done a statistically valid
| survey of programmers working or seeking work and what their
| working conditions are?
|
| If you are forming an opinion based on articles that come to
| your attention, then you are getting a highly biased view of
| the world. Nobody writes articles about how their programming
| job is great, everything is fine, and they're treated with
| respect and paid well. If anybody did, they wouldn't be
| upvoted or shared on news-sharing sites. Due to this, you'll
| basically never see or hear about people who are happy and
| doing well. Only stories about things that seem outrageous
| get written and shared.
|
| There are probably hundreds of thousands of people working as
| full-time programmers in the US alone. It only takes maybe
| like 5 stories a year making it into your reading to shape an
| opinion. But one-sided stories from 5/100,000 = 0.005% of the
| population don't reflect reality. Have any of these stories
| even been investigated to see what other people involved in
| the situation think? It's fairly common for horror stories to
| be exaggerated and to leave out equally poor behavior by the
| author. Some may be entirely made up in an attempt to get
| karma or fame or to trash somebody they have a grudge against
| for some other reason. Not in every case for sure, but it's
| common enough that you shouldn't just take such stories at
| face-value.
|
| If the vast majority of working programmers on here tell you
| that it's a seller's market and treatment and pay is
| generally very good, that's a lot more likely to reflect
| reality than a trickle of one-sided horror stories that go
| viral. Just in my personal experience, I've worked with
| hundreds of other professional programmers, and never seen
| anyone be mistreated in such severe ways. Everyone I know has
| been quite comfortable with quitting for reasons like not
| liking the culture enough or not getting big enough raises
| fast enough, and everyone who has will have another offer for
| work in hand already before they actually quit.
| spamizbad wrote:
| It's actually harder for Junior developers to just leave. Until
| you have 2-3 years experience under your belt, you're just not
| that attractive to employers; and your competition for those
| lower-level positions is fierce.
| indymike wrote:
| I have no problem hiring junior developers if they are coming
| off a short stay with an employer. Honestly, junior employees
| are not very good at picking an employer, and there are lots
| of employers that are just horrible. Treat every candidate
| like they might just be your next hire... until it is clear
| they are not. And even then, treat them with courtesy,
| respect and dignity... after all referrals are a thing.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Until you have 2-3 years experience under your belt, you're
| just not that attractive to employers; and your competition
| for those lower-level positions is fierce.
|
| I don't agree, especially in today's market where I see
| companies snapping up junior level devs that can actually
| code. And importantly, if you're working in a place where you
| are getting 0 mentorship and/or growth opportunities, it is
| all a net negative for you in any case.
| dehrmann wrote:
| It got a lot easier for me to find new jobs after my resume
| was two jobs I held for three years. The tech job market
| also got a lot hotter around then, but hearing how hard it
| is to break into the industry, those six years really make
| a difference.
| gregoriol wrote:
| Junior dev out of school maybe be more valuable for those
| companies than junior dev with a few months experience: the
| first one will more likely accept things than the other
| one, plus a first experience that ended shortly may not
| look very positive to a recruiter
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You need at least a minimal amount of experience for that
| though. It took me a couple months to find a not crap
| junior job out of school.
|
| Just three months of experience made it so that recruiters
| barraged my LinkedIn.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > if a shop is only hiring junior developers, it's because any
| senior developer can smell the stink for miles and wouldn't
| want to join.
|
| That's possible, my assumption was they didn't offer enough to
| get any senior developers on board.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Related to that, any company knows what they're doing easily
| knows that a competent senior developer (key word being
| competent) is easily worth multiple X of a junior developer
| with 0 experience, especially when it comes to setting up
| your initial project and architecture.
|
| Imagine if you were building a house and said "We can't
| afford to hire an architect so we'll just hire a bunch of
| kids right out of college because they're cheaper".
| wangvnn wrote:
| you have a senior developer who is also the CTO..but he did not
| do anything and that is the problem.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'll pay for a paywall for the WSJ and The Economist but I'm not
| gonna bother even bypassing the paywall for some rando blog.
| RichardCA wrote:
| This used to be a "meme spread by copier" back in the 80s/90s.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Phases-Project-Coffee-Ceramic-Wellcod...
| Animats wrote:
| What's that "CEO" doing now? If they didn't get funded, they're
| probably no longer a CEO.
| tgv wrote:
| No reason to feel ashamed. I had a similar-ish experience. At
| first, I also felt bad about it, but looking back, it's a good
| thing we got fired.
|
| I had just taken the job, being a nice upgrade from the previous
| one: it was a bit more in my personal interests, and I could get
| a "hands-on architect" or "senior systems designer" or whatever
| you want to call it role. The team was small: a front end
| designer, me, one trainee with a BSc in CS who wanted to learn
| more, and a team lead annex director of the local branch. But the
| chain didn't end there. There was an account manager (although
| there wasn't an product yet) stationed 6000km away, there was a
| team working on a product that we were supposed to incorporate,
| 1500km south from him, and the overall bosses were 2000km further
| west. All had different expectations. So, three months in the
| job, the CEO from the mother-mother company came over, and fired
| the whole team working on the new product, because reasons. They
| apparently had almost 200 people working on similar products (in
| various companies), and they were going to build it. As a
| European, I was shocked. And embarrassed.
|
| In hindsight, it really was an absurd project. Not that it
| couldn't have worked, but it was just set up to fail. And it
| turns out that, years later, the company is still selling the old
| product, and has bought one or two more companies in the same
| field (library software, if you want to know).
|
| Strangely enough, it opened the way for me to work on a wonderful
| project, which unfortunately never was a commercial success.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| 1) still got two months salary!
|
| 2) they did you a favor firing you
|
| 3) silver lining: you probably got to learn a lot, both in rapid
| skill development, experimentation, and, more importantly, how
| NOT to do things.
|
| 4) You probably got important exposure to the machiavellian and
| narcissistic aspects of managers and executives. It is very
| difficult to learn these through testimony or second hand
| description, it is such a visceral thing to see the psychology of
| these individuals who have survived or thrived in society with
| these exploitative traits. And in larger companies you are
| generally shrouded from them to some degree by dev orgs and IT-
| focused managers that aren't quite as bad (but definitely can
| be).
| egypturnash wrote:
| Jesus fuck that sounds like a shitty working environment with a
| super abusive boss.
|
| Also a good argument for unions.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Sounds like being fired was the best thing that could have
| happened from this hellish job.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| It sounds like everyone is going to get fired because of the
| leadership team not being able to secure payroll, whether through
| a stream of customers or investors
|
| Symptoms: ceo + cto being unable to successfully pitch non-
| existing products, building prototypes for investors vs
| customers, and customer revenue being from purely custom services
|
| it's easy to spot basic warning signs like these for people who
| have been around, but not for new grads :(
| lmilcin wrote:
| The problem is really simple.
|
| I know this may sound contentious, so read carefully.
|
| Junior developers, BY DEFINITION, cannot be trusted with
| important projects. If you do, you are responsible if something
| fails, not the developer.
|
| By "important" I mean anything that may significantly impact
| company. If you would fire for it then it is important.
|
| By "cannot be trusted" I don't mean they can't do it. Maybe they
| can, maybe they can't. You need to have somebody experienced to
| make sure there is no technical surprises, that you are getting
| what you think you are getting and that you will get feedback if
| something is not happening right.
|
| My personal distinction between senior and junior developers is
| whether they can be trusted with important projects. A senior
| person is somebody who is experienced enough, intelligent enough
| and mature enough to recognize something is not right and come
| back to you for direction.
|
| I work with a lot of people who get a label of "senior" but are
| not. This is a problem.
|
| It is interesting, that at one known company people who can be
| trusted with important projects are called "officers". So
| basically you have junior developers, senior developers and
| officers. I guess "senior" is given just to pacify developers who
| would be called junior with a lot of years of experience but
| "officer" as a real recognition of maturity.
| brundolf wrote:
| Normally I understand the need for professional discretion, but
| this situation sounds... frankly insane. Honestly I would name
| names so nobody has to work under these people ever again.
|
| I've left a job before that I considered toxic, and this sounds
| 10x worse.
| sriram_sun wrote:
| Once I asked my Lead if I was going to get fired for what (in
| hindsight) was a pretty superficial bug. Response? "Gawd no. I'm
| going to make you stay here, figure it out and fix it!"
| thrower123 wrote:
| More red flags than a May Day parade in Pyongyang.
| gravypod wrote:
| Something that has always puzzled me: how do so many incompetent
| CTOs get into the ground floor of startups? I've met more than
| one and I just don't understand it. There's readily many
| extremely competent technical people I know who want to start a
| company but have no idea. How could a CEO find an investor and
| not find a tech person who can foster/grow a team of engineers?
| spamizbad wrote:
| Startup founding teams are not a meritocracy. So it's not
| uncommon to see someone who is functionally a junior developer
| become the company's CTO because they were the only founder who
| knew how to code.
|
| I've also seen CEO's appoint what I can only describe technical
| yes-men to this position. eg: "I have a product described in
| this 20 slide power point. No real mockups or anything. Can I
| launch in 6 months?" - The first person to tell them yes got
| the job.
| aynyc wrote:
| Because they are friends with CEO/board/investors. I
| interviewed three startups that are exactly like that. One of
| the CTO asked how I would validate US zip code. I told him
| there are around 42K zip code, just store them in a hashmap and
| do lookups. He thought I was crazy and insist on Trie tree.
| gravypod wrote:
| I've spoken to some who say they need real time stream
| processing off of MQTT backed by a Spark cluster..... To
| store ~10 messages/second. I've reduced infra costs and
| improved perf by just turning it into an API with a retry on
| the client and storing into a database.
|
| After I left, I hear he's rebuilding the Apache Spark data
| pipeline stuff "so we can scale".
|
| (This problem they were solving was embarrassingly parallel
| and could have been shared like crazy to make it way cheaper
| to host)
| walshemj wrote:
| And this is a solved problem I remember working on a product
| that did UK Postcode validation 20 years ago and we brought
| in a product to do that for us.
|
| Just update the US version of the PAF file every month.
| indymike wrote:
| > how do so many incompetent CTOs get into the ground floor of
| startups?
|
| To start, there really aren't CEOs and most startups until they
| have 20-30 employees. There are only founders. Maybe they have
| some management experience, maybe not. Once you do get big
| enough you need and can afford a CEO, sometimes a founder grows
| into the role. Sometimes not.
|
| >How could a CEO find an investor and not find a tech person
| who can foster/grow a team of engineers?
|
| I've been on the other side. I can build a great engineering
| team. I had to find a cofounder that was good at finding
| investors to make my current startup go.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| If you're a nontechnical founder looking for a partner, at a
| certain point you'll learn to work with anyone who will pay
| attention to you at a price you can pay.
|
| Source: was a nontechnical founder at one point.
| dreyfan wrote:
| > how do so many incompetent CTOs get into the ground floor of
| startups?
|
| You start a company, hire your buddy, and call yourself a CEO
| and CTO.
| walshemj wrote:
| Or get 50k from Daddy and play at being entrepreneur - I
| remember hearing that at First Tuesday back in the day (late
| 90's)
| stavros wrote:
| Because "CTO co-founder" means "person who will program for
| just equity".
| spfzero wrote:
| Many startups are basically a group of people who already knew
| each other. When one of them is any kind of technical, that's
| the CTO. The others aren't and so they don't have a way to vet
| technical people even if they wanted to.
|
| When a startup is the founders' first one, unless they are very
| experienced, you are looking at long odds even if the idea is
| great. The reason is, no business experience. Like not
| understanding that you only demo things you've already tried.
| Yoric wrote:
| I've seen at least one CEO going through several CTOs until he
| found one who would say "yes" to everything and make the proper
| impressed noises when the CEO showed their latest iDevice.
| Needless to say, that wasn't ideal.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I can't imagine graduating college and having this be my first
| job experience. Abusive bosses deserve to be publicly flogged.
| But based on the threads, it seems the psycho-genius trope is
| still being idolized, when it needs to be buried.
| [deleted]
| nullymcnull wrote:
| I've been in largely the same situation as OP - early-stage
| startup, rushed work on an MVP requiring far too many bells and
| whistles, CEO doing a crucial demo before potential investors who
| would likely make or break the company.
|
| The crucial difference in my case was that the CEO was whipsmart,
| and a natural salesman; he knew his market, he knew his audience,
| and he knew our work. He ran through the app enough times in
| advance of the demo to know it inside and out, and he prefaced
| his demo with boilerplate warnings that it was an MVP/prototype
| and that bugs _were_ to expected - he did this so effectively
| that it almost seemed like he had them _excited_ about the
| prospect of seeing bugs. When the inevitable faults in the
| application / backend _did_ occur, he was able to gracefully
| roll with the punches and sustain the momentum: he joked his way
| past it and adjusted his approach as he ran through the failed
| step again (having correctly guessed at what the problem was with
| his input the first time around). The investors could see - as
| our CEO had emphasized up-front - that the shortcomings were
| superficial, and that both the app and underlying system were
| fundamentally solving the problems they were meant to solve - and
| doing so in novel ways for the vertical we were in, with _much_
| better UX than that vertical was accustomed to.
|
| That company succeeded by any measure, and is still running
| strong today. And at least 80% of why it succeeded, imo, is
| because of the quality of its earliest employees, both C-level
| and technical. A CEO may not need to be a one-in-a-million kind
| of guy or gal, but they definitely do need to be one-in-a-whole-
| lotta-thousands, at the very least - if they're just another
| thoroughly average individual with an oversized ego and a 'fake
| it till we make it' ethos, _you are screwed_ - no amount of
| unpaid blood, sweat and tears in the trenches will save you. We
| were lucky enough to have an inspiring and intelligent CEO who
| brought in critical voices rather than yes men, and who at the
| early stages of the company 's life would often directly
| interface with the coders who were designing the apps and systems
| he and his sales people would be pitching to potential investors,
| partners, and customers. And when your company has ~5-20
| employees, that's absolutely how it should be - _all_ doors
| should be open. Rigid management hierarchies are no more than
| adult make-believe at this stage, and indulging in them is
| inherently toxic.
|
| Anyways, I suppose OP's story is really just an old and universal
| one: bad management _will_ fail, and it will _always_ find
| someone else to blame for its failures.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| I don't blame the CTO too much for taking the project: startups
| need to take risks and try and make money and if something is
| physically possible you usually have to try. On a tight deadline,
| you put together a proof of concept and succeeded so it seems
| like a correct decision. You did your job.
|
| > He didn't even try the app once before presenting it to the
| investors.
|
| It's this that really floors me. Ok, not everybody is going to be
| Steve Jobs and rehearse like a madman to try and put on a
| spectacle, but at least try an app before a key meeting.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Every experienced C-level I've worked with will rehearse
| investor demos with greenfield software. The only time they
| don't is when they're giving the investor the same demo they've
| given prospective customers dozens of times before. Some will
| even ask "What should I avoid?"
| alexpc201 wrote:
| I used to work in a software factory when I was young. Only one
| guy in the sales department used to approach us (developers)
| when he was preparing a demo for a big client of a new
| development. He wanted to know what to avoid, what not to do,
| which dataset worked better for the demo. Today I remember him
| as the most professional salesperson I met.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| How is that HN material?
| bigbillheck wrote:
| "The experience of being a programmer in a start-up" is almost
| quintessential HN material.
| tester756 wrote:
| is being programmer in a start-up
|
| different from
|
| being programmer in a small company?
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Yes. (Small companies aren't usually hustling for
| investors, for example).
| tester756 wrote:
| and how does it affect programmers?
|
| it'd mean that programmers have to work >8h day and
| everything is ASAP?
| lordnacho wrote:
| It sounds pretty unlikely that they didn't get the investment
| because of the demo going wrong. Investors aren't crazy, they
| know the product isn't don't yet and small things can crash it
| before it's polished. More likely the management were not
| convincing about the investment case.
|
| Also the thing about being junior, even a bright one, is you go
| down a lot of dead end paths. You learn a lot, but you also eat
| up a lot of time. This is the risk of hiring juniors, and the CTO
| should have known.
| z3t4 wrote:
| A live demo is the most effective way to find bugs. For best
| result let someone else use the app... And don't test the app
| beforehand, and do not repeat a path/script that you know do
| work. You do not need tests or static analysis, just demo your
| app regularly.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| > If anyone came to the office five minutes late, he cut their
| pay to a half day's salary.
|
| Isn't that illegal for exempt employees?
| Exuma wrote:
| I'm sorry that happened to you but, who cares, move on.
| buildbot wrote:
| Not only red flags, but most likely it sounds like seriously
| illegal wage theft was occurring. What company?
| ma2rten wrote:
| If she has not put the name in the post it was most likely on
| purpose, however I would be interested what country this was.
| noobermin wrote:
| What a story of abuse. One of the arguments I've heard generally
| for small businesses being valuable is the flatter structure
| allows you to be closer to higher ups and thus higher ups can be
| more human and decent to worker bees because of the closer
| distance. Experience of course suggest it varies.
| zrobotics wrote:
| https://archive.vn/SFVU8
| an_opabinia wrote:
| It doesn't sound like the writer was fired for doing her job. It
| sounds like she did a really good job, given the circumstances,
| and that her bosses used two pretty quintessential management
| techniques - deadlines and negging - to motivate her and her
| colleagues to outperform.
|
| But this demo - her bosses ran out of money, and even if the text
| field did work, but they didn't get the money from this investor,
| they were going to be fired.
|
| That aside, as other commenters have noted, junior developers
| need instruction. That's easy to say if you're Facebook, and
| every 22 year old you hire is "junior" but also went to Harvard.
| They're not really the same kind of "junior" as the 50th
| percentile 22 year old college graduate. In my experience
| Facebook hires these "junior" developers because they thrive
| _despite_ receiving little to no meaningful instruction - as if
| "code reviews" or a month of onboarding on Mercurial really teach
| anyone anything. The small startup is gambling that maybe they
| can find these 22 year olds that Facebook has missed, which is a
| reasonable gamble, there are a lot that were missed. But it was
| never about finding someone who needed instruction.
|
| Also, it's never been my experience that paying bad developers
| more money made them better. Paying good developers more money
| does. It's tough.
| thewarrior wrote:
| To add some more context to how Facebook hires juniors - Yes
| Facebook now only hires juniors once they complete an
| internship where they have to thrive with very limited
| instruction. And yes it's mostly elite college graduates.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| >...If anyone came to the office five minutes late, he cut their
| pay to a half day's salary.
|
| Again, highlighting the importance of _who_ you work with over
| _what_ you work on.
|
| There is nothing to be gained by teaming up with the wrong
| people, irrespective of how much effort you put in.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| $100/month for 60h/week? Why not just go to work at Walmart or
| McDonald's?
|
| Then she missed 2 interviews because she didn't want to take time
| off? There comes a point where you're enabling your abuser...
| LinAGKar wrote:
| I'm not gonna care care about your story if you try to force
| people to install some wierd app to read it.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| The only thing I see here that's surprising is that pay was
| docked if you arrived late to work. Everything else seems pretty
| typical of an early stage contracting firm, and start-up life
| generally.
|
| The part about getting pay docked for showing up late does sound
| pretty abominable, though. If the workers are "exempt", their
| salaries shouldn't get touched for any situation except to lay
| them off.
|
| I would bet small sums this didn't take place in the US.
| grumple wrote:
| The behavior described means it was not a first world country,
| couldn't be US, UK, EU, Canada, or Australia. The amount of
| money is also too small for those places.
| andrewfong wrote:
| It almost certainly wouldn't have been legal in the U.S. to
| dock an exempt employee's pay, but I've seen plenty of U.S.
| startups with absolutely no understanding of wage and salary
| laws.
|
| The $100 / month thing was for an internship, and I've seen
| plenty of U.S. startups straight up assume they can treat
| interns as unpaid labor.
| mratzloff wrote:
| Well, it clearly didn't take place in the US since she had an
| employment agreement that required a two-month separation
| notice from the employer.
| walshemj wrote:
| I would guess Europe possibly India
|
| And if you are "salaried" normally that means no fixed hours of
| work its literally one of the defining characteristics in
| labour law.
| 0xEFF wrote:
| $100/month pay surprised me as being way too low.
| atum47 wrote:
| I'm Brazilian, I once interned (when I was still in college)
| for a 33 million pounds Star up for $200 dollars a month.
| They would pay me through Paypal who took 20 dollars as cut,
| haha. Those were dark times.
| atum47 wrote:
| Not pounds, euros. Sorry
| maxk42 wrote:
| This is just a case study in bad management.
|
| The woman who wrote this article shouldn't feel shame: that's the
| goal of an inadequate manager (in this case the CTO and/or CEO)
| and not her responsibility.
|
| Regardless, I think anyone who's had more than a few jobs in
| programming can relate to some of this.
|
| Aspiring entrepreneurs: If you get funded, learn to manage your
| emotions, engage in the best practices of your industry
| (including testing), and learning to find root causes of failures
| rather than blaming people. At the end of the day, it is YOUR
| responsibility if the app didn't work. Firing the people who
| developed it won't fix your failure to test your product and
| budget adequate time for fixes.
| allenu wrote:
| That sounds like a horrible place to work. I hope the author
| learned a lot from the experience and is cautious around future
| employers. I chalk up this post to a young dev not knowing what
| options they really had available to them.
|
| It sounds like a case where very junior developers were pushed
| way beyond their abilities and since they were junior, did not
| not know they could push back or say no to things. If you're
| getting paid peanuts and being pushed hard, you have a lot of
| leverage to walk.
|
| Also, if a job is so bad, you need to make time to attend those
| interviews at other companies (even feigning sickness). Don't
| prioritize your current horrible job over a potential opportunity
| to jump ship.
| himinlomax wrote:
| The executive described here is clearly a psychopath/narcissist.
| Yoric wrote:
| I sympathize.
|
| I worked in such a company, many years ago. The workload that was
| totally disconnected from reality, the humiliation and
| punishments, the scapegoating, the improvised demos based on
| products that were not expected to work. We also had to cope with
| a CEO who was... very imaginative when it came to facts and a CTO
| who didn't contribute much besides repeating to the CEO what the
| CEO wanted to hear.
|
| When the entire team got laid off (to be replaced by other
| people, with less experience, to do the same job), it was
| actually a relief.
| aenis wrote:
| The most important advice: leave any job thats toxic. If you are
| a programmer you are fortunate enough to always be able to get a
| job, especially now with remote-only positions opening
| everywhere.
|
| I did a job like this 20 years ago and consider this a bit of a
| rite of passage, but back then the job market where I lived was
| horrible.
|
| Seriously: programmer && unhappy && leave();
| macNchz wrote:
| The company described in this post is clearly highly
| dysfunctional, however the self-sabotaging pattern-scheduling an
| important meeting before even starting to build the make-or-break
| thing that will be demoed in the meeting-is one I've seen in
| plenty of ostensibly functional organizations. Nobody should be
| surprised when something brand new built by an under-resourced
| team on a non-negotiable timeline blows up in front of whatever
| important {investor, client, prospect} it was supposed to
| impress.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It seems like it might have been workable if they tried it out
| in a practice presentation beforehand, but they seemingly
| didn't even do that.
| agentultra wrote:
| That sounds like a horrible place to work. I think the OP's
| instincts are correct to lay the blame at the feet of incompetent
| management. As a general rule you can pick two from: _fast_ ,
| _cheap_ , and _good_. But you can't excuse the kind of behaviour
| where you blame people for your failures and treat them so
| poorly.
|
| I've seen far too many non-tech managers and founders discredit
| the needs of their team: expecting the moon and paying them less
| than market rate.
|
| That's how startups make money: undervaluing talent and paying
| them less than market rate so that their exit is profitable. But
| you don't have to be that callous and exploitative about it.
|
| If anyone sees these kinds of behaviours I hope you get out as
| fast as you can. It's not worth the BS and the therapy bills.
| aniforprez wrote:
| I have a similar story but since it wasn't an internship and I
| had about 5 years experience in far better companies, I reacted
| with relief that I got out. I only stayed in the company for 2
| weeks in which the CEO and his wife, who was the COO, yelled at
| me multiple times. I was yelled at for not understanding the code
| base and delivering a feature within 3 days of joining, trying to
| relax in my chair when they were talking, using their stash of
| tissue paper cause they didn't bother keeping some in the
| bathroom for wiping your hands etc. In retrospect I wonder how I
| even got through those 2 weeks without quitting on the second
| day. I just stopped showing up and the CEO came to my house,
| banged on my door to try and get me to delete their crappy code
| written by a mountain of interns from my personal laptop. I
| pretended I wasn't home and we later had a call where I deleted
| it all. I also wasn't paid for the time I worked there. Everyone
| who wasn't me was pretty much an intern writing awful code
| because they really didn't know any better
|
| Unlike here I have no qualms about naming and shaming praktice.ai
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| "Hopefully the company aren't working in an important area like
| healthcare" ... oh, that's exactly what there are working in
| gedy wrote:
| Sounds the typical "I have an idea" leadership who wants slaves
| to implement their "vision", but who have no clue or skills to
| make a real product.
| wirrbel wrote:
| > I also wasn't paid for the time I worked there.
|
| That sounds like wage theft.
| aniforprez wrote:
| The effort it would have taken to try and get that money
| would have far surpassed what I was owed so I really didn't
| give a dog-diggety. I considered it payment for learning
| experience and moved on to better things
| [deleted]
| stopnamingnuts wrote:
| +1 for use of "dog-diggety"
| maxk42 wrote:
| "Wage theft" would be if you weren't paid overtime you were
| owed. This is just theft.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Wage theft is denial of _any_ wages owed. Overtime or not.
| pm90 wrote:
| incredible. Thanks for naming and shaming; I hope this person
| is never able to fuck someone else like this.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| I want to point out glassdoor is incredibly helpful for this.
| I already dodged a bullet because of that.
| Rantenki wrote:
| Reading that story, I feel like you were sabotaged at every step
| by a CTO that was so insecure that they were afraid to succeed,
| and would rather fail on their own terms.
|
| You might have been able to improve some small aspect of the
| mobile demo that would have prevented the crash (ie: error
| handling on that field), but your C-team was obviously playing
| Russian roulette, and if the demo hadn't blown up, then
| attempting to productize it almost certainly would have.
|
| In a way, you should feel better about the outcome you got; your
| CTO was obviously trying to bluff the investors that there was
| more product maturity than actually existed. If he had succeeded,
| he would have burned through a bunch of other peoples' money, and
| the outcome would have still been failure.
| stavros wrote:
| I agree with everyone else, but also, isn't the only way to lose
| an investment because of a bad demo to have basically
| misrepresented the state of your product to the investors?
|
| Investors aren't looking for a bug-free app, they're looking for
| an idea with market potential. Sounds like the CEO wanted a
| scapegoat so he wouldn't have to admit to his/her mistakes.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Seems like management was more junior than the developers.
| squarefoot wrote:
| You should have showed this to that idiot CEO, just before the
| middle finger.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er8g6D_PqvY
|
| They got rid of the only people that, assuming it was your error,
| wouldn't have made it twice. Making mistakes is part of learning,
| which is part of doing things. Also, you had been put under
| excessive workload due to absurd time constraints, and the pay
| was ridiculous. Your only "error" was to accept from start
| working in that environment, but that's an error most of us do as
| young devs; sometimes the enthusiasm after landing the first job
| plays tricks on us. Been there done that.
| indymike wrote:
| > Your only "error" was to accept from start working in that
| environment, but that's an error most of us do as young devs;
| sometimes the enthusiasm after landing the first job plays
| tricks on us.
|
| This story would have had a much better end had the CEO not
| been counting on getting the investment. Sounds like the CEO
| spent his last powder on a moonshot. Bad form blaming the
| developers.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| >They got rid of the only people that, assuming it was your
| error, wouldn't have made it twice.
|
| In some traditional legal systems, if an object causes a death,
| an anthill for example, the aggrieved family may put the object
| on trial. If the antill is found "guilty" it's destroyed. This
| is true for a car, a bat, an appliance whatever. The object
| doesn't need to be defective or inherently dangerous, just
| assigned blame.
|
| Companies can be similar to this, especially at the executive
| level.
| samfisher83 wrote:
| In the article it mentioned she made 100/month as intern. You can
| make more money working at McDonalds. It must not have been the
| US. I think developers in the US have it pretty good.
| vessel wrote:
| Assuming the lowest wage possible at $7.25, you can make $100
| dollars in one week; that's only 14 hours of work... 3 hours
| per weekday.
| Lev1a wrote:
| In 2017 Germany I made net ~570EUR/month (~1EUR more than
| minimum wage) working 15h weeks in a supermarket for around
| 3-4 months while studying. It was pretty mindless work (apart
| from always looking out for the use-/sell-by dates) and also
| nice working in a colder part (dairy and frozen products) of
| the supermarket during the hotter months.
| sdiq wrote:
| Based on another article written by the same author that
| features stories from South Asia, I would want to believe she
| is also from South Asia.
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