14 ms·

Three programmers got fired, including me, due to a single app crash

• thrower123 5y ago
  More red flags than a May Day parade in Pyongyang.
• buildbot 5y ago
  Not only red flags, but most likely it sounds like seriously illegal wage theft was occurring. What company?
  • ma2rten 5y ago
    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.
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    Most likely it does not exist anymore. And, if it does, you never heard of it. Companies run like this do not go far.
• noobermin 5y ago
  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.
• macintux 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    You only had to hold it differently and you'd have no issues ^_^
    • k12sosse 5y ago
      "Everybody gets a case." - Oprah Jobs, Humility Inc.
    • deregulateMed 5y ago
      There's nothing wrong with the keyboards.
      • brokenmachine 5y ago
        You're kidding, right? Google "macbook butterfly keyboard"
    • smoldesu 5y ago
      It's a shame you're getting dogpiled for echoing something Jobs himself suggested. Let it live in infamy, "you're holding it wrong"
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    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.
    • 5y ago
• binkHN 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    It’s apparently legal in Japan. If you are late to some companies you automatically get charged half a day off. I presume that means that you lose half a day of salary if you run out.
• brabel 5y ago
  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.
  • gentleman11 5y ago
    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
    • bluefirebrand 5y ago
      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
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  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).
• EvilEy3 5y ago
  How is that HN material?
  • bigbillheck 5y ago
    "The experience of being a programmer in a start-up" is almost quintessential HN material.
    • tester756 5y ago
      is being programmer in a start-up different from being programmer in a small company?
      • bigbillheck 5y ago
        Yes. (Small companies aren't usually hustling for investors, for example).
        • tester756 5y ago
          and how does it affect programmers? it'd mean that programmers have to work >8h day and everything is ASAP?
• Exuma 5y ago
  I'm sorry that happened to you but, who cares, move on.
• zrobotics 5y ago
  https://archive.vn/SFVU8 https://archive.vn/SFVU8
• TameAntelope 5y ago
  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.
  • 0xEFF 5y ago
    $100/month pay surprised me as being way too low.
    • atum47 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        Not pounds, euros. Sorry
  • grumple 5y ago
    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.
    • abrokenpipe 5y ago
      You would be surprised by a lot of the shit that some US/CA based startups pull, theres no shortage of self-funded (broke) pipe-dreamers trying to create the "next big app" using cheap/free intern labor. I worked for one briefly as an intern many years ago. The "CEO" had a self directed and "burn and churn" strategy, working interns as hard as he could till they quit, I saw him make one cry for not working hard enough. He would also split interns into cohorts to prevent communication between the groups, eventually interns wisened up by communicating through linkedin and quit en masse. The owner even got reported to and investigated by the labor bureau although not much came of that. Afterwards I ran into a couple other similar startups while looking for other intern/junior positions and knew to avoid them. The people who run these companies know to target students/bootcampers. They hangout on beginner forums, discord channels, and college campuses, I remember going to my state university's job fair and probably 80% of the booths there were for some sort of pyramid-scheme/scam. Ive never seen a software one come close to working, but sadly some people do find success with these shady business models, a good example would be "College Pro Painters". Once they hire you, you are required to pay them thousands of dollars up front for overpriced painting equipment, you are then expected to manage finding clients and painting all on your own. They keep a significant portion of what you earn plus charge all sorts of hidden fees. Most students who join end up painting a few houses before discovering they are only earning like $2/hr and quit, the company is also apparently quite good at scaring students into continuing to work for them by threatening legal action for not paying the "quitting fee"...
• macNchz 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
• samfisher83 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      In 2017 Germany I made net ~570€/month (~1€ 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 5y ago
    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.
• plank_time 5y ago
  Getting fired from a predatory, horrible company like what the author describes is not shameful at all. It’s a badge of honor.
  • imglorp 5y ago
    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.
• steve_adams_86 5y ago
  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.
• gravypod 5y ago
  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?
  • stavros 5y ago
    Because "CTO co-founder" means "person who will program for just equity".
  • aynyc 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
      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.
  • devoutsalsa 5y ago
    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.
• an_opabinia 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
  • didibus 5y ago
    Big tech can also support lots of junior developers, because they can scale their teams. They don't need to operate lean, they could have one dev per Class if they wanted, so even if the code base is a big mess, they can just throw more brute force at it by having two, three, four teams, or as many as needed to work on the code base and break it down into smaller services each team can focus on.
• aniforprez 5y ago
  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
  • wirrbel 5y ago
    > I also wasn't paid for the time I worked there. That sounds like wage theft.
    • aniforprez 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • stopnamingnuts 5y ago
        +1 for use of "dog-diggety"
      • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
        State labor boards can be extremely harsh on these cases. It could have been as simple as making a report to your state’s labor agency and letting them handle it. If nothing else, it sends a message to the company that they can’t get away with it. I’m sure the time has long passed for you, but it’s worth noting for any other people reading this who might end up in similar circumstances.
• stavros 5y ago
  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.
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  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."
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  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).
  • spamizbad 5y ago
    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.
    • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      > 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.
      • gregoriol 5y ago
        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
      • 5y ago
• renewiltord 5y ago
  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.
• egypturnash 5y ago
  Jesus fuck that sounds like a shitty working environment with a super abusive boss. Also a good argument for unions.
• logicalmonster 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    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.
• Yoric 5y ago
  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.
  • scaramanga 5y ago
    Wherever you go, there you are.
• aenis 5y ago
  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();
• aenis 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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?
• imwillofficial 5y ago
  Sounds like being fired was the best thing that could have happened from this hellish job.
• sriram_sun 5y ago
  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!"
• MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  >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.
• Animats 5y ago
  What's that "CEO" doing now? If they didn't get funded, they're probably no longer a CEO.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  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.
• allenu 5y ago
  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.
• squarefoot 5y ago
  You should have showed this to that idiot CEO, just before the middle finger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er8g6D_PqvY 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.
  • unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
    >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.
  • indymike 5y ago
    > 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.
• dabinat 5y ago
  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.
• dilippkumar 5y ago
  >...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.
• agentultra 5y ago
  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.
• jasonhansel 5y ago
  > 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?
• himinlomax 5y ago
  The executive described here is clearly a psychopath/narcissist.
• lmeyerov 5y ago
  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 :(
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• z3t4 5y ago
  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.
• maxk42 5y ago
  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.
• koonsolo 5y ago
  Seems like management was more junior than the developers.
• rspoerri 5y ago
  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.
• lmilcin 5y ago
  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.
  • ratww 5y ago
    I had something similar but not quite at the company I worked previously: about 90% of the developers there were senior, and some had only 1 or 2 years of experience. However there were levels and a level 5 Senior was paid about twice as much as a level 1 Senior. In the end it was more about making everyone "happy".
    • lmilcin 5y ago
      I forgot to mention, half my team is currently Vice President and other half is Associate Vice President. People take this because they are deluded this is worth anything and company gives it because it does not cost anything.
  • wruza 5y ago
    Heh, my experience is two decades of for-business custom software development. But no matter how much you brush the 1-month-old half-project and how strong you stress them on not diverging from the script at the presentation, there will be some idiot who will tap randomly to show all critical issues of a not-yet-product to investors, including the ones that you warned them about in capsbold beforehand. You can’t trust something done in a hurry, by a junior, by a senior, or by a chief officer of rockets and things. Of course I would test for gibberish in fields, but only because I have OCD to fix crappy frameworks or glueware before using it for anything. I don’t usually dare to use as-is from-scratch methods for presentations, only parts of already tested projects. Management knows this and feels very relaxed at their shows, which allows for what I described above. Deception is a team work, and if you want to succeed, just follow the damn script. Make it threaded, excessive, whatever, stress your brain matter and foresee the questions, we’ll harden the path. But I “double dare you” to step off it. That’s just not realistic.
• Rantenki 5y ago
  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.
• alexpc201 5y ago
  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.
• wangvnn 5y ago
  you have a senior developer who is also the CTO..but he did not do anything and that is the problem.
• RichardCA 5y ago
  This used to be a "meme spread by copier" back in the 80s/90s. https://www.amazon.com/Phases-Project-Coffee-Ceramic-Wellcoda/dp/B0796W4DVC https://www.amazon.com/Phases-Project-Coffee-Ceramic-Wellcod...
• tgv 5y ago
  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.
• LinAGKar 5y ago
  I'm not gonna care care about your story if you try to force people to install some wierd app to read it.
• nullymcnull 5y ago
  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.
• brundolf 5y ago
  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.
• LatteLazy 5y ago
  $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...
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  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.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  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.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  Every team should be a mix of old hands and junior devs. I've learned so, so much from the old hands. As the auld faht today, I have the privilege of working with the young guns. They don't agree with me initially, but as they get experience they tend to change their minds. And sometimes even I learn from them, too. P.S. There's no crying in software! C'mon, people! I'm old enough to have many people close to me die. I cry about them. Not about software. I might get mad, I might get frustrated, I might get discouraged, I might have to go out for a run to calm down, but for crying out loud, no crying!
  • glangdale 5y ago
    Younger people catastrophize; she's not crying about her software job, she's crying about what she perceives as the "obvious failure of her entire career starting now". When I had a dubious run of bad job interviews and crappy life choices just post-PhD, my wife delivered what we still refer to as the "living in a van by the river" speech. :-) No-one cried, but it is very easy for inexperienced people to wildly extrapolate from a small set of data points to a trajectory of disastrous life failure.
• glangdale 5y ago
  One thing I've noticed in a number of different contexts is that women seem to disproportionately feel shame and guilt in circumstances where the majority of men would just cynically punch the clock and collect cash until it's time for the next thing. It wouldn't surprise me if childhood conditioning (where girls are meant to 'make nice' with people) and different standards for male/female behavior ("he's independent" / "she's a ruthless bitch") contribute to this too. But I've encountered so many men who recognize bullshit jobs for what they are and openly just coast and get while the getting's good, while a larger portion of women seem to behave earnestly. It's also more of a thing with juniors, too. When you've been around for a while, you realize that no-one gives a shit about a 2 month gap on your resume.
  • ipaddr 5y ago
    I noticed this too. When the author mentioned crying all day that stuck out as unusual. Getting fired instantly and paid for two months feels like a win here. Getting fired vs having your company shutdown affects you more personally. It takes a strong person to not think I suck and this was my fault. Being in that situation I wouldn't know how to explain it. Looking at it now I would be honest and say we created an a and the team was let go after the demo to investors.
• xwolfi 5y ago
  Reading this person, I still find her a little bit passive. She's not a designer, she wasn't told how to plan, she hasn't been put in the right project etc etc. I suppose she's young but she's bound to get some agency in her life as an adult at some point. We're not just passive drones waiting for clear and easy tasks to be added to our backlog and executing them in an orderly manner. When something like that happens to me I usually starts anti selling it immediately. There s not a day I spend without uttering the word failure publicly. Sometimes by miracle a short term demo idiocy turns out profitable, but most time it requires rework and I get picked as the guy who never lied and tried everything... You need to be clear from the get go and act as q contributor at all layers - if programming was task execution they wouldnt take junior developers, they d take high schoolers during summer vacations.
• nojvek 5y ago
  Wow! This sucks. At Stripe I felt a similar thing. Crazy schedules, being yelled at, being told I’m terrible over and over again. I quit after 5 months.
  • FounderBurr 5y ago
    Maybe you were terrible?
• danbmil99 5y ago
  A sack of asses does not a company make
• dave333 5y ago
  I had a job a bit like this in the early days of Chegg. I got fired after a week mostly due to incompetence in new areas I had never worked in before. But I learned a lot and at least got paid for the week! Interesting that they checked my reference and my referee told me that I should avoid working there under any circumstances!
• aryehof 5y ago
  My first thought was what country is this in? Different countries and cultures have different attitudes to work and workers. My first guess was India or one of its neighbors, where I have witnessed such abuses first hand. As a westerner I have to my horror even seen rows of 30 developers, with overseers walking up and down with a large stick behind them hitting those that do not meet some unknown (to me) standard. Too much power is held by the employer, and workers are just resources that can be abused, mistreated and replaced at will. While laws might exist, the rule of law does not, leaving employees open to abuse (in some cases without pay) without recourse. This is a failure of society and workers collectively to provide and demand decent conditions. It also reflects that software development is a commodity skill in oversupply. You normally have the right to take your employment elsewhere, but what to do in an abusive culture, where “junior developers” are a dime a dozen? Where dozens of eager applicants are ready for abuse just for your chair in front of a computer?
• FounderBurr 5y ago
  Open in app. Lol sure.
• JeanMarcS 5y ago
  > He didn’t even try the app once before presenting it to the investors Ah ah, so classic. It just happened to a client I have (I only manage hosting for them) <slack alert> : we have this one page down with an error, but it's the landing page of a mailing we just sent ! <me> : do you had the error when testing before launching mailing ? <client> : mmmm..... Problem was solved by the developer in a matter of minutes, but it's always a good lesson.
• sam345 5y ago
  I understand this was a tough experience but this wasn't a job. It was a volunteer opportunity with paid lunch ($100 a month). You don't even need to mention it on your resume.