You know, I bet the cocaine fiend guy wasn't even on cocaine. How would the company know this? If they had insurance coverage and he went into rehab it would be seriously violation of medical privacy for this to be revealed to the company. If he did go into rehab, the article author would have mentioned it given that he claims to know all about the guy's cocaine habit as well as his mental health history, which he is now disclosing in public. Boy I would hate to have a former employer get on the internet and post articles about how they think I have a cocaine addiction. I suspect it was all speculation, and probably wrong. Though when cornered, to save face, the author would likely deny all this and claim to have proof.

I took that one a bit personally myself as I could relate to it. Let me tell you how that went down with me. Went to work for a company, gave it my all. Did in 3 days what took other employees six months, and with fewer bugs and faster performance. The company rode me hard, demanded I worked more and more. Soon I was responsible for nearly all the critical projects. I was working 16 hours a day 7 days a week. My boss refused to let me even take Sundays off because of the crisis. Yet my salary was based on 40 hrs a week, no overtime, so when I figured my effective hourly rate if I was a hourly worker, it was less than I could make in fast food. Finally after a year of this I cracked and got very sick, suffering total exhaustion. I could not come in to work. The work then fired me. I later hear them tell people they suspected I had a drug problem.

So yeah, maybe I was even the guy he is talking about. Who knows. There were no drugs though.

That was the first couple jobs out of college. After that I wised up and started setting boundaries. But eventually I had to strike out on my own because too many companies will take advantage of diligent workers.

Looking back at it all I see it like a rich guy that buys an expensive race horse and then runs the horse in every race he can find without rests between until the race horse collapses, and then he sends the horse off to the glue factory with no loyalty to what the horse won him. Another example is the spoiled trust fund kid that buys a ferrari and drives it around and never changes the oil and after a year the engine freezes up, a total loss. This is just stupidity and failure to manage your investment properly. There are a lot of managers out there like this. Any company that routinely requires overtime is a company that has failed and is run by incompetent management. When the overtime is required of employees who don't even get paid overtime it makes the whole thing just that more abusive and exploitative. This all is especially absurd for those of us that produce at 10-30 times the rate and quality of the average developers. I always would find it infuriating to be told I must work 112 hours in a week during which I would write some 8,500 lines of complex code and there is another guy paid the same who writes 13 lines in the same week and goes home after 40 hours because his contributions aren't all that important anyway so no point in keeping him late.

Anyone in this situation do as I did. Leave and start your own company.