I decided to quit my job and travel around Asia about a decade ago and didn't want to teach English, so I worked as a remote software contractor instead.

The project was for a person that was running a side-company while working remotely as a project manager for a Fortune 100 company.

The development team was from various parts of India, Guatemala, and Mexico..and I was the only one that spoke English fluently (The project manager was from Guatemala and translated/managed all of the developers from Mexico..they didn't speak any English). I only got the position because I cut my rate in half, as my cost of living was really low, and I didn't want to have a project that was too involved/stressful.

Some highlights:

The company owner was obsessed with the Scrum process, most likely because this is what she used at her main job. We would have 3 hours of meetings almost every day. On Fridays, we would have an extra hour, where we would be required to tell fun stories or jokes. Since we were all from different countries and most didn't even speak the same language, it was just...awkward.

The interview process was a written English test (I had to take one too). The manager wasn't really that experienced and would give repo access immediately. The result was chaos. We spent an entire month with a broken repo because someone was overwriting the master branch constantly. I was paid during this time to just keep checking in changes from one particular bug fix, which would be working when I was finished with everyone's changes..and then the next day, the master branch would be overwritten.

Turnover was high. I was there for a year and we went through over 50 developers. We had one guy come into our meeting room after he was hired, keep interrupting us, and then eventually told us to fuck off. I think at some point, I stayed because I wanted to see where the train wreck was going and simply because I didn't feel like finding another gig.

The project was a way that made filling out government forms easier. There would be major form updates on a monthly basis, which required lots of code changes. The code base was originally written by an outsourced team, which was horrible. There were two, parallel versions running: original and beta. We were all working on the beta, which was supposed to be the better version. However, it was a complete mess of spaghetti code. I found code, written by the current project manager, where he had copy and pasted examples he found online and left the comments in explaining that it was sample code.

When I received a new task to be completed, it was very difficult to figure out what needed to be done. Bug fixes weren't difficult, but most feature requests were tickets from months or even years earlier and some of the requests weren't even relevant anymore. I would call the boss, to try to get clarity, and she had this way of using corporate speak and talking in circles to say lots of words, but never get the information that I need. When I did, it was almost always wrong. I resorted to just completing the task wrong (which I hated) and I would have to correct it later.

We all had to have our web cams on during the meetings. When the boss shared her screen. Every...single...time, she would forget that she had personal emails on the screen..and we would get to see her sexually suggestive emails she was sending to her boyfriend that day. One time I saw everyone's pay in a spreadsheet. Most developers on the team were getting paid $5/hour or less.

We were expected to work all major US holidays and weekends (I just flat out refused to work on any weekend). We had a meeting on July 4th (since I was in Asia, I this didn't really matter to me) one time and she was in the midst of the aftermath of a party. She looked sloppy and there were people passed out on the floor in the background.

When I finally flew back home to the US, she called me up one day and told me that I was too expensive and she could hire 3 people from India for what it costs to pay me.