A culture of beer and overtime
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A culture of beer and overtime
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Re: A culture of beer and overtime
#2I love leaving companies like that one. You should celebrate, with a beer, perhaps? (Kidding)
When you took the job, did you sign an offer letter that outlined your employment status and role with the company?
Just curious. I would think an offer letter would resolve any questions about that, should it become necessary.
Re: A culture of beer and overtime
#3I'm all for putting in the occasional overtime, and working on stuff at home if you're still engaged.
But an expectation that you will work more than the 40 hours a week that they're paying you for, blows my mind.
Re: A culture of beer and overtime
#4The project manager sounds like a dick, but the author also sounds like a push-over. The author had a chance to out the manager as a huge asshole, but based on the post, it seems like he just left silently.
Re: A culture of beer and overtime
#5n.b.
It was time to leave, and the HR lady came to me and said I would have to sign a release letter and send it back within 2 work days (the following Monday was a holiday), otherwise I would not get any of the remaining pay
I'm not familiar with the law in Canada, but I rather suspect that it's similar to America, so a bit of advice for the young and impressionable: virtually no threat to not pay an employee wages is worth taking seriously. Don't sign anything. Say you'll run it by your lawyer. You don't even need to have a lawyer when you say that, but the prospect of your lawyer going to the employment commission and saying "My client was denied wages. Do you need me to say anything else or can we just proceed directly to 'He gets them'?" will generally make them back off.
I mean, as one point among many, your lawyer is going to say "You think he was a consultant? We have written representations from you that he was a FTE, and you treated him as a FTE, for example in attempting to control his working hours. It is materially against his interests to be a consultant, because this implies that you haven't been paying employment taxes on him. That's unfortunate, but it's not our problem, and rather than stick him with the bill for $X,000 in back taxes we're just going to tell the tax authorities that he's been maliciously reclassified and that you're delinquent in your obligations. Given that this will likely trigger an audit and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines for you, how about we just agree to give my client what he has coming to him, and you report an inadvertent paperwork screwup to the tax authority when you pay your fair share?"
Re: A culture of beer and overtime
#6You Were Fired.
When you have contractor status, are brought into a meeting where they say you are underperforming, not committed, and turn deaf ears on however you try to justify yourself... and you end up leaving the company... you may have been fired.
The biggest mistakes you made was a) still being a contractor b) not asking for severance if you would opt of of claiming unemployment on them.
Re: A culture of beer and overtime
#7You Were Fired. When you have contractor status, are brought into a meeting where they say you are underperforming, not committed, and turn deaf ears on however you try to justify yourself... and you end up leaving the company... you may have been fired. The biggest mistakes you made was a) still being a contractor b) not asking for severance if you would opt of of claiming unemployment on them.
In general if there's overtime you should be getting paid hourly, unless you have more than 1/N percent of the shares where N is the number of employees. (eg. a disproportionate amount of extra value accrues to you anyway)
Re: A culture of beer and overtime
#8before he even got to the first "red flag" I started to see red flag patterns. a team that small with its own PM and copywriter, detached executives (plural, and again, with an overall team/copmany size that small, etc.)
disadvantages to getting older, but one advantage is accumulating a set of observed good patterns and bad patterns you can start doing pattern matching against. there's a reason some companies specifically going after 20-somethings, folks. because y'all are more likely to fall for the anti-patterns, not see the warning signs early enough until its too late.
Re: A culture of beer and overtime
#9The project manager sounds like a dick, but the author also sounds like a push-over. The author had a chance to out the manager as a huge asshole, but based on the post, it seems like he just left silently.
I'm pretty sure everyone already knew the PM was an a-hole.
Re: A culture of beer and overtime
#10If you were listed as a contractor, isn't that grounds to sue? Here if you are fulltime you have different employee protections compared to contractor.