ah, yes. The joys of working for small businesses. I worked for someone who moved from reselling operating systems to selling childrens toys. I worked for someone who built an on-premise competitor to google analytics and despite having many big customers never made a single dime. I worked for someome who build a crappy web app and sold liceses for >20k a month to twenty clients and made a good living.
What did that last web app do if you don't mind sharing?
The surreal experience of my first developer job
31–40 of 278 posts
Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job
#32He'd randomly lay off huge numbers of the sales team, and the first anyone would know about it is when the door code would be changed and we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS) for the new code.
His grand idea to save the failing online learning platform was "pivoting" to selling personalised dog food online........... (and I mean personalised in the sense of just slapping the dogs name and their face on some generic crap dog food, not actually nutritionally personalised to the dog)
Left that place being owed 3 months wages (which I never got).
Last I heard he was being investigated for fraud. (this was the scum bag in question: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/sep/04/barclays-sm...)
Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job
#33Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job
#34This is eerily similar to a job I had. I also worked for a young asshole CEO called Andrew, with multiple rubbish businesses, pretending to have more money than he had, having no idea what he was doing, and faced jail time a few years after I left. If you replace "property market" with "education sector" and "UK" with "Australia" we could have almost written the exact same article. I wonder how many of these companie…
I wish I had read this several years ago. This is the kind of thing which everyone instinctively knows but somehow forgets with age, or ignores due to circumstances (like needing a job having just been made redundant). I swear that CEOs like the one mentioned here specifically prefer hiring those who are in need like this, with the predictable awful behaviours. Some people will get lucky, but I expect that they are t…
I think the key here is is the culture pathological or not - not the specific role of the CEO. CEO can have good enough understanding of tech to do their job well even thought they are not elbows deep in it themselves.
Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job
#35Out of curiosity: is posting internal company communications (referring to the e-mail here) on a public site like this legal? I'm not saying that it isn't; I genuinely don't know.
Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job
#36I've noticed that many entrepreneurs have this immense drive and very little ethical/moral sense, and this helps them get by the most dire situations, where common people would simply give up, because they simply go on with a "fake it until you make it" mindset. Entering very dark grey areas and leaving a lot of bodies behind (figuratively speaking). There are the stupid ones of course that don't get far, but the sma…
[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=MQvGc8Ee1SsC&pg=PA137&lpg=...
Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job
#37> Do it today tomorrow doesn’t exist ! Epic motivational line.
Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job
#38This literally could have been written by any developer in the UK. I think most of us start out like this! I think the best one was a company I worked for in Leeds, it was building a secure learning platform for schools which ultimately fell flat on it's arse. The company was run by a self-made millionaire who was notorious for scamming people. He'd randomly lay off huge numbers of the sales team, and the first anyon…
The CEO and 2 others were old high school mates, funding seemed unlimited, we had “company cars” we could take anytime we wanted for errands or lunch or whatever, all were pretty expensive performance cars. Company lunches every day at local restaurants etc (I generally just ate in the office because they all weirded me out). Any hardware/software/whatever you needed was on your desk the next day.
In the 2 years I worked there, the company pivoted maybe 8 times. I’d come to work and suddenly my role was to develop custom e-commerce sites, a few months later I’d be doing graphic design for hardcore porn (DVDs/etc) distributors, a few months later I’d be helping develop hardware prototypes for shopping mall displays, etc etc.
It paid very well (for a first tech role), but the whole thing constantly felt “wrong”, I kept expecting the feds to kick the doors in one day. Just bad vibes all round. I ended up getting a way better job through a workmate there and when I checked on their website a year later it was squatted and domain for sale.
Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job
#39This literally could have been written by any developer in the UK. I think most of us start out like this! I think the best one was a company I worked for in Leeds, it was building a secure learning platform for schools which ultimately fell flat on it's arse. The company was run by a self-made millionaire who was notorious for scamming people. He'd randomly lay off huge numbers of the sales team, and the first anyon…
Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job
#40There are lots of these half-arsed tiny tech companies in the UK (I've worked for a few). I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a peculiarity of the UK? It could be that we don't have a culture of VCs who would fund a company to the required scale and provide adult supervision. I remember when I ran a company, raising money or even getting a bank loan was impossible. (We just ran it on a shoestring…
It was, however, an incredibly educational experience.