Saturday, February 6, 2021

Company Cuts Employee's Salary In Half, Business Proceeds To Perish


When it's all said and done we're just grateful that the good players in this gnarly tale were able to find their greener pastures. You hate to see a company get greedy and screw over people on the money that they absolutely deserve. It's honestly surreal that this company had the audacity to cut the employee's salary in half like they did. 

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Rectangle - r/MaliciousCompliance u/technicalviking • 2d + Join 1 2 22 O 20 3 29 20 1 Cut my salary in half? Kiss your business goodbye. XL The cast: (Names changed for anonymity) Me - your storyteller of the moment. Chad - Hiring CTO. Richard - CEO, brother of Chad. Big Bro - Engineer coworker Eddie - IT and Desktop support guy.

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Font - This takes place near the very beginning of my software engineering career, back in '05 or '06. l'd just been let go from my previous place of employment due to be being compliant with directives Il'd been given (although not maliciously, so that story wouldn't be appropriate here, sadly), and thus working myself out of a job. I was a young college dropout from a technical college that hadn't been federally accredited yet, and thus all my student loans were from banks and loan companies i

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Font - professional so I couldn't be very choosy. I was living in Los Angeles county, so the cost of living was so bad, I was having to choose which bills were going to be late on a monthly basis. Specifically, I was living in a town called San Pedro, a small town tucked fairly out of the way. After blasting my resume to all the job boards, I get a call from a startup who seems interested in my resume and wants me to come in for a face-to-face interview (skipping the call-screen entirely). In my

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Font - seems excited that l've come! He escorts me through the building to an office. Mind you, as far as I can see, we're the only two humans in the building. He gives me the pitch for the company, tells me he built the software being sold, but it's not scalable, and needs someone who can rewrite it. After we go through the whole interview song and dance, he offers me the job on the spot. The pay is marginally higher than the last gig, so I figure gas would be covered for the commute. I agree,

5.

Font - Red flags start appearing from the very first minute I arrive on monday. First, I'm given a tour, which consists of the 14x14 foot office l'm going to be sharing with Chad, as well as another engineer who's going to be starting the following monday. I'm not a fan of having someone able to look over my shoulder, it makes me nervous. I ask why each engineer's desk has two computers. "Because the one you will be writing code on doesn't have internet access, for security purposes." (Note: thi

6.

Font - happening in February? Apparently I've agreed to rewrite, test, and package an entire application l've never seen before in approximately four months. So, tour being done, I sit down and get to work. After jumping through a bunch of hoops of getting the software I prefer downloaded onto the actual work machine, as well as the code, I set about reviewing code so horrific l've not seen its like since, and there isn't a single comment in the entire thing. Before I can ask a single question o

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Font - I'm alone in the office with this abomination, a machine that's been hamstrung to heck and back, and the only thing l've got to console me is the fact that at least I'm employed again. Fast-forward a week, I've documented the bulk of the code (because there wasn't any), and the boss and I do not get along. He's mad because l've not written substantial code, and l'm frustrated because l'm trying to understand a lot of what specific code is trying to do and he's routinely leaving around noo

8.

Font - Monday arrives, and in comes Big Bro. I call him this because he was a much more experienced engineer than I was. We spend the first day with him getting set up, then us reviewing what I've documented. He manages to answer some questions the CTO never did, just because he is that much better, and I start to feel more confident. Over the next weeks, Big Bro took me under his wing as an engineer teaching me best practices, standards, and where my plans were good and where they could be bett

9.

Font - April rolls around. I've got a special occasion I need the day off for, which happens to be a Wednesday that year. I'd advised him when I first started and he'd been cool with it. I remind him on April 2nd (since I had an irrational fear of policy decisions being made on April Fool's Day), and he loses it. He goes off on a rant, and straight up informs me that he regrets hiring me, claiming I didn't have the skills I told him I did, and wasn't worth what I was being paid. We're definitely

10.

Font - especially given the twelve hour days. He was not a fan of that, and switched to straight up yelling, blaming us for the lost sales and refunds due to the delays, and that the only way he'd get off our backs was by getting the project done. This entire time Big Bro is just sitting there, and says nothing to back me up. Chad then left the office for a bit, and I just declared I was taking my lunch and would be back in an hour. I felt frustrated by Chad and betrayed by Big Bro, who I felt (

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Organism - When we were both back in the office, he apologized for yelling and told me that since he agreed when I was hired I could have my day off. Cool. I apologized too, although not for anything specific. I just didn't want to talk to him anymore and figured that was the fastest way to end the conversation.

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Font - Fast forward to June, and the opportunity for Malicious Compliance. Over the last two months, Chad has been getting worse and worse. He's yelling nearly every day (and still leaving early too). Big Bro and Eddie are also feeling the pain, nobody is safe from his ego. The smoke breaks and afternoon/evening portion of our day are when we're most productive, as nobody can focus until Chad leaves. The first monday in June rolls around and Chad invites me to go on a walk outside for a 1- on-1

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Font - "Are you serious?" I ask. "I'm barely able to pay for my bills and the gas required to commute here as it is. If you cut my salary at all, I won't be able to afford to live." At this point the idea of cutting my productivity to help ramp up a new engineer so he can help us meet the deadline doesn't even occur to me, although in hindsight that would have also been a pretty major issue.

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Font - Chad brushes me off. "That's not my problem. The fact that you missed one deadline and look like you're gonna miss another is. If you've got a problem with that, you're more than welcome to go find another job. The new guy starts in two weeks." And with that he walks inside. I'd just been told that I had two weeks left of job at my current salary. Cool. So that day I do something I hadn't done since I first started. I left while the sun was still up. (Specifically, I left at 5pm). I drive

15.

Font - Me: "Hey, Big Bro, just fyi l've started looking for a new job. I've already got an interview lined up." Big Bro: "Really? Where?" Me: "Over at <company>" Big Bro: "Wow! That's where I worked before I came here! That place is pretty awesome, and I left there on pretty good terms. I know the CTO there, go ahead and use me as a reference!" Me, skeptical: "Really? Okay.."

16.

Font - Turns out Big Bro was true to his word, and the CTO and I even talked about Big Bro during the interview. Apparently they'd already talked about me, and Big Bro had been the ultimate hype man, confirming everything I said about why I was looking for a new job and everything. All goes well, and I'm electronically signing an offer-letter that Friday afternoon (Chad had already left for the day, so there was nobody to look over my shoulder as I used the work computer that *had* internet acce

17.

Font - Richard: "Hey OP, what's up?" Me: "Just wanted to let you know I found a new job, so I'm moving on." Richard: "Really, why? We need you!" Me: "You guys decided it was cool to cut my salary to a point where I couldn't afford to live. Chad said if I didn't like it, I should look for something new, so I did." Richard, looking defeated: "Well, when's your last day?" Me: "Today." Richard, now pissed: "We need you here to train the new guy who starts soon!"

18.

Font - Me: "Hey, I had to train myself and to an extent, Big Bro when he first started. The new guy should be able to as well." And with that, I left for greener pastures. The unexpectedly *huge* fallout: Four months later, Big Bro texts me to ask me how things are going. I tell him things are great, and we schedule a lunchtime call because apparently things have gone sideways in a huge way.

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Font - Part 1) Apparently Chad came in on Monday almost violently angry, and demands Eddie re-image my work machine first thing in the morning, which erases everything l'd left on there.Big Bro comes in an hour later, and he and Chad discuss the new timeline for the project. Somewhere in there apparently Big Bro asks Chad to log into the admin account on my old work machine so he can pull the documents l'd accumulated about the planned architecture, the existing code, meeting notes, etc. Chad an

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Font - Part 2) When l asked how the new guy handled the new documentation, Big Bro laughed and told me there never was any documentation. Apparently he and Eddie had become really good friends in the months we worked there, to the point where they'd become roommates about a month before I left. More than that though, they'd decided to start a freelance/consulting business together and only had to decide on when to make that their full time jobs. Neither of them liked Chad much, and wanted to mak

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Font - Thankfully, like the big helper he was, Eddie had ensured that the new guy's email was set up and in the proper groups before the email was sent, so the guys first email in the company was a novella about the kind of person he' agreed to work for. Apparently Chad thought it was appropriate to take his frustration out on the new guy, who'd already read a significant portion of the email before Chad shoved him away from his desk and deleted it. Apparently new guy promptly decided (and right

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Font - Part 3) With the new guy quitting, the August deadline was now little more than a dream within a dream, which according to Eddie doesn't stop Chad and Richard from trying to find that miracle rock star engineer who can save them from their own situation (which, given what they were offering as pay, didn't exist). So time advances in its unstoppable way, August arrives, and customers find that they've paid for something that hasn't been delivered yet, and pretty much unanimously demand ref

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Font - Final Note: For my fellow software engineers out there who were wondering just how bad this application was, this "program" was a single php file with over 40k lines of code, running inside a 'while` loop. Any and all logic consisted of if/else trees, which then led to either more if/else trees or more loops. No function calls, no external libraries included, just.... spaghetti of the worst kind. Given the nature of the application, most critical logic had to be implemented in no less tha

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