I Once Worked for Someone Who Doesn't Pay and Treats His Employees Like Crap
I worked for a terrible manager. He created a hostile work environment, and doesn't know on how to even run a software company, blaming his programmers for failed products. So this is the story of how things went, and I hope you guys never come across someone like him.

You might, ask why did I start working for someone so terrible? Well, I needed a job. I was convinced that I should work for him because he hired a programmer to build a product that shipped. He also had a nice, trendy looking office in Downtown Vancouver.

But despite that, he was a terrible manager. I can't believe I was able to take his crap for eight months.

There was a side of me telling me that I'm just a terrible programmer, and another side telling me that probably the manager was right, and maybe there are some ways to win myself back.

But nope, I learned that the hard way. This guy was a total ass hole boss, that lacks even the most basic critical thinking skills. His way of managing is no more different than a fortune teller with a crystal ball. If there is something that he doesn't like, he won't analyze, but instead react instantly, based merely on intuition and no thought was put into his action.

## My Eight Months Working for This Guy

I started my first day along with another guy. I was the programmer, he was the designer. First day or not, it was an orientation, and because it was an orientation, the boss decided to not pay for it. I found it odd right there.

And, on the day of the orientation, he set out rules for us. And the rules weren't the fluffy, make-you-feel-good-inside rules, such as "we come to work all happy and joyful, and we will have lots of fun and we will learn a lot." It was fluffy, but it made you feel like crap hearing it.

This was his first rule: there is nothing you can't do; there's no complaining. Everything the customer wants, you must be able to do it.

And then he contradicts himself by putting out this second rule: there is no bullshitting. He litterally pulled the verbified form of the s-bomb, and prefixed it with a noun to describe a male cow. I'm not kidding you.

So, I already started having doubts about this guy.

Then comes my second day at work.

I started doing the regular stuff, building up the company's web page, adding in some sample projects me and the designer had done in the past--also an odd thing to make us do.

In the middle of the day, I hear the boss exclaim "oh my god! She actually sent out the emails as Cc and not Bcc?"

He then makes the phone call to the person. And man was it ugly.

"Hey, I saw the emails you sent out," said the boss "you're supposed to Bcc, not Cc! Don't do it again!"

He then ends the call. "Stupid girl," mumbled the boss.

"Why?" I asked the boss.

"There was another organization that I worked with," said the boss "we sent out emails, and sent them with Cc, and not Bcc. The people being Cc'ed weren't too happy."

I was still skeptical that that was a good enough reason to spazz out at a someone in such a manner. Regardless, I didn't have much of an idea what all of that was about, because that girl wasn't an employee at the company, but was part of another organization, that the boss is involved with.

For the next few weeks, we work on our first few websites. Those went smoothly.

But the boss decides to have a change of plans, and wants to build a product that competes with HootSuite.

He wanted to get it done in four weeks. And all of the features done, perfect, no mistakes.

It wasn't the schedule that bothered me, but the details he put into it.

There is nothing wrong with that either, but he wanted everything to be done by the four weeks time schedule. As if there is absolutely nothing wrong that can happen. As if I am an encyclopedia of the DOM API, the perks and quirks of all browsers, and a plethora of back-end technology that will allow me to come up with the perfect solution to the problem, in a short amount of time.

Well, things end up not going as planned. Four weeks is too short for such a feat. Especially with just one developer working on it. Especially with him wanting version 1 done in four weeks, rather than to release a minimum viable product.

So the boss decides to abandon it. But not just "oh well." But more of a bitterness in him.

He then has a change of plans and now wants to compete with Groupon.

As an added plus, he wants to send out physical flyers to people!

And this time, he wants it done in two weeks.

It was three weeks in, and I still wasn't halfway done.

And this time, he feels that he has about had enough. He threatens me and the designer that he is not going to pay if we take too long.

Well, needless, to say, it wasn't too long until one of us quits. The designer decides to be the first to go.

Ever since then, the boss kept saying how crappy he was.

Yeah, so much for a crappy designer that now works at Electronic Arts. And it's a true story, by the ways.

Anyways, the boss now wants to start doing iPhone app development for clients.

Problem is, I don't know much Objective-C, and I know squat about native iPhone development using Objective-C. So, I guess I should go hit the books. Problem is, I'm not going to get paid for it.

Alright fine, but how the heck am I supposed to pay the bills?

So I learn this iPhone stuff. No clients, so we go back to web development. We build our third website for another client.

A week later, the boss wants me to change the size of all CMS-generated images on that site. And he wants it done in fifteen minutes.

OK, the issue with this now, is that you might never know how are these images stored. So fifteen minutes is a ridiculously short amount of time.

So a quarter of an hour has elapsed and the size of these images haven't changed one bit. I'm still trying to figure out a way to change them without having to screw anything up.

The boss starts getting impatient. Sits beside me. Occasionally, he would keep pointing at the screen, see a word, and ask me to change some code that laid adjacent to some words, because he read somewhere that words have values attached to them, and they're generally adjacent to those words, at the right-hand side of an equal sign, right? So there were times he would want me to change the value of a variable that has been commented out, thinking that it will make a difference.

Then he gets really frustrated. "C'mon this is easy! It's just changing images!"

Two hours later, I managed to resize the images. Turns out, the system we were using will automatically do that for you. Just change one of the parameters that outputs the images, which was an undocumented feature. But I didn't tell him. I had to beat around the bush to tell him how much of a tough job it was. Sure it was easy, but with a guy that's pressuring you, with a guy that thinks you waste time when you read documentation on pieces of API, and a guy that gets ticked at the smallest thing, it's impossible to tell the truth. I have to say something that he would want to hear, no matter how much of a lie it is.

Either ways, this project is done. But now, he wanted to go back to mobile app development.

It's already bad enough this guy has been acting like a total gorilla, and I only have a week's worth of experience with iPhone app development; I was barely able to take his crap. But regardless I decided to go with his idea.

However, I decided to beat around the bush, again. I told him how it would be better to write mobile apps entirely in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and perhaps some newer technologies that are being used on the front-end these days, such as SASS and CoffeeScript.

He actually buys the crap that I told him, not realizing the performance hit the app is going to take.

Either ways, for this project, I try my best to keep a poker face, tell him straight on how are the things going to look like in the app, how are things going to work out.

Well, that attempt failed.

A week after I managed to build an app that could work out, and be readily marketable, the boss was still not satisfied with the work I did. I told him that that's it, if he wants to make improvements, we'll call that version 2.0.

In particular, he wasn't happy with the twitter page. It didn't have that iconic iPhone's way of refreshing the stream, by pulling the entire list down until an arrow shows up, and releasing the stream back up until it refreshes.

I told him that's not possible for this version, because it's going to take too much time. I then ask him to simply market it now. He tells me no. I tell, how about we take an extra week working on this, then? So I take the extra week to do it.

Little did I know, though, that he wasn't counting my hours.

So when I get my pay stub, I see that I didn't get paid for an entire week.

I ask him, why? And he tells me that he nixed my pay because I was just "learning." Because I wasn't doing work but, just "learning" a new framework, and so he feels that I shouldn't be paid.

So pretty much, I was doing work, but he feels that he shouldn't pay me because I had documentation open. I don't know about you, but that's total crap.

<h3>My Resignation Letter</h3>

Needless to say, I didn't stay for this guy for too long. It wasn't until a month later that I found 7Geese.

I quit at a really crucial moment. The boss hired ten new people. None of which are technical. They might say they are technical, but they've only had experience with Twitter, Facebook, et al; some MS Office stuff; maybe some HTML, but that's it.

Anyways, he hired these people to handle sales. Which is not a bad of an idea. A good start-up focuses on getting customers--which is the only right thing this guy did.

So, it was these sales people's orientation day--probably unpaid. But I took a day off.

And it's because it's on that day that I was about to send off my resignation letter to the guy.

When I sent the letter. This guy had nothing left. Ten sales people, whilst his only developer left him.

## Conclusion

Anyways, it's really hard to know ahead of time which manager will give you the best time of your life, and which one will be like the one I had worked for.

But fortunately, idiots like them are hard to come by. Most managers realize that finding good programmers is a tough job. And they also realize that keeping them is an even tougher job.

And they know this, because they also understand how programming is tough, and it involves more than just writing code; it takes a lot of problem solving skills.