Okay well a few days ago I blogged about the absolute worst development job I (or anyone else I dare say) ever had.  If you have one to top it, post it up and send me a link.  We’ll make it a meme.  Now I want to tell you about the second worst development job I ever had (Jeff demanded it, so I gotta).  This one is bad in a completely different way from the last one, and in many ways it’s worse.  Only a few people know I even had this job, and you will see why shortly enough.

 

 

This one actually is the job I had immediately prior to the worst one, so I doubled up on bad jobs in a short time.  As I said, I was fresh down to Florida from Boston, and I had just really been chilling and relaxing for a couple of months, taking it easy.  But I eventually needed to go back to work, so I ended up at a Value Added Reseller (there’s an overstatement if I ever heard one).  They ran 3 or 4 different computer parts sites, newegg wannabe stuff, under different banners and targeted to different audiences.  If you are unfamiliar with the business model, it’s a little something like this:  set up a website, set up vendor relationships with manufacturers and wholesalers, sell the computer parts on your website, place orders with your suppliers, have the product drop-shipped to the customer.  It’s basically 100% middlemanning and I don’t really know what the value-add was, except I guess there’s a little bit of sales support that goes one when helping a customer configure a system and making sure the processor they are buying will actually work with the motherboard in their cart…but other than that…it’s just playing message router essentially.

 

The job itself was in Gainesville, which is roughly 40 miles north of where I live.  My car at the time was an ’89 Dodge Daytona which had miraculously driven to Boston, survived the winter, and made it back to Florida, but which was really on its last legs.  In fact, I borrowed a friend’s car to drive to the interview because I wanted to make sure I made it there.  The company was run by a couple of young guys, and had a very Boiler Room (if you haven’t seen the movie, do so) feel in that the CEO was kind of iconic but absent, and there was a lot of just…strange vibes about what we were doing.  The development team was 7 programmers and a web designer.  All of the software was built in-house in c#/asp.net and it was pretty good to tell the truth.  It was the first time I had seen an Object/Relational data layer in action, and the lead developer was a solid architect overall and at several years younger than me, I was impressed and glad to be working with him.  The software was so good, in fact, that they were in the process of preparing to license the engine to other VAR startups.  Sales were good, the people were cool, and the pay was pretty decent too.

 

So…what was wrong you may be asking yourself?  Well, quite simply, they were crooks.  I feel dirty to this day having worked there.  This job wasn’t bad because of the code or anything affecting the code, it was bad because I was working for criminals.  Let me explain:

 

The first red flag was on my first interview.  The CIO came and talked to me privately before my group interview with him, the business development guy, and the development lead.  He told me they were dumping the dev lead and they wanted me to replace him.  I felt bad about that, but it happens.  I didn’t like the way they approached it however, and I made a mental note to never really trust these people.

 

The next red flag was a big one, and to be honest, I should have bailed on the process right there.  But I didn’t.  Not my proudest moment.  Basically, I get called back for a second interview, and the CIO takes me for lunch.  He butters me up, tells me how much they love me, and makes me an offer.  He says they are going to tell the recruiter that they are going in another direction, and to play along so they could save the recruiter fee, and I did.  No excuse really, I could say I was younger, that I needed the job to you know, eat, but really thinking back (and even at the time) I just thought my moral fiber was made of stronger stuff.  I think it is now.

 

So anyway, I go to work there.  I’m given a top of the line workstation, sweet dual flat-panel LCD setup, and the corner cubicle.  Strangely enough, I don’t have a CDROM.  The CIO is also the tech guy and the network admin, and he’s very…paranoid.  Nothing in or out.  No CDROM in any computer in the building.  Bare minimum network access (nothing wrong with that, but we didn’t even have any rights on our development environment which made certain things like setting up IIS sites and installing software problematic).  I ask how I get VS.Net on my PC with no CD.  I am given a link to www.daemon-tools.cc and a bootlegged MSDN ISO.  Same with Office.  I was told that we had volume licensing and just used this.  I found out later that the whole place was 100% non-compliant on licensing.  That’s an accomplishment.  Everywhere falls behind on licensing here and there, you do bulk purchases every quarter to catch up or whatever, but these guys never bought a licensed piece of Microsoft software and they clearly never intended to.  I’ll let you do the math.  Roughly 40 employees on Windows 2000 Professional.  10 Windows 2000 Advanced Server.  SQL Server 2000.  8 copies of Visual Studio .Net.  40ish Office 2000 Pro installs.  Countless Visios.  Yeah.  It was bad.  How did I find this out?  One of the developers happened by a fax machine as a fax from Microsoft legal came through.

 

That wasn’t the only legal issue.  After a couple weeks of working there my buddy is talking to me on MSN and says he just bought this hard drive from some website and it’s been like 3 weeks and it still hasn’t shipped and their customer service sucked and is giving him the run around.  I ask him which website.  Funny, there’s one with the same name in my vs.net solution as we speak.  I ask the lead dev about this, and the whole room pretty much laughs.  He shows me how to get into the database and modify the record so it goes to the top of the stack and is flagged for customer service to actually handle seriously and ship to ASAP.  I’m a little flabbergasted that such a method exists.  Apparently it is fairly well known among the staff that money comes in from sales, and products hardly ever go out.  The tag line for one of the websites is “From warehouse to your house.”  The office joke is “From warehouse to…well it just stays there.”  Wow.  And this isn’t the only issue.  I start browsing around on the consumer reports type sites for VARs and discover that A) we are very poorly rated 2)we change websites and company names every 6 months or so when the heat gets on too much and iii)there are several pending investigations of the company and the CEO by the Florida Department of Justice.  Oh yeah.  And the FBI showed up one day.

 

Is that all?  No.  One day there was a full staff meeting at 4:00.  There were Krispy Kremes.  I knew what the meeting was for, because I had been to them before on more than one occasion, and once you have been to one, you can sense them coming and you know when one is about to happen.  At this meeting, it is said that we are having some financial troubles.  60% of the staff is cut right there.  Development is left untouched because of course we are very important to the company and its success.  After that, developers started dropping like flies.  They had all been looking for new gigs and started getting them.  About one a week left.  The lead dev went on vacation for a week, and during the week he was fired.  But they didn’t tell him.  They just cut off his network access, changed the locks, and didn’t answer his calls or emails.  I was captaining the Titanic at that point.

 

So I tried to lead the team on as best I could, but we all knew were were in the endgame and were trying to get out.  To make things worse, the lead dev had some black magic voodoo on his machine that only he knew about, consisting of various batch files and SQL scripts.  Nobody even knew where the code generator was for the DAL or how to reproduce it.  Then a scheduled DTS package that basically computed price data every night broke out of the blue, and nobody knew that it even existed much less what it did, and the websites weren’t getting updated with the right products and the right prices, and we weren’t making any sales.  I pored over that thing for almost 24 straight hours figuring out what all it did (it involved downloading and parsing a lot of text files, outputting the results to various tables, and was all very black magic and terse and uncommented).  What had happened is one of the vendors changed the file format they export, and the job was choking.  I fixed it finally and things were running smoothly again, but the damage had been done.  2 days of lost revenue (dirty money anyway).  Another staff meeting.  I was outside having a smoke and a few of the people in other departments accosted me.  Word got out that somehow the failure was my fault, and they knew that some of them were getting cut that afternoon, and they blamed me.  I felt about 3 inches tall at that point, but what do you say to that?  At this point I really start to ponder the ethical dilemma I'm in, because on the one hand I'm enabling these crooks, but on the other, if I don't do the best job I can do while I'm there, real tangible people I know lose jobs and income and thse people have kids and families and whatever as well.  It wasn't a fun feeling.  At the meeting, staff gets cut to just development (3 left out of 8), some but not all management, and the bookkeeper essentially.  Customer service was cut altogether, so the phones rang when people didn’t get their orders, but nobody answered (which, looking back, is about the same thing that happened when there were customer service reps).

 

At this point I’m rearranging deck chairs like a madman because, well, I don’t know why.  I just kept coding and trying and doing and pulling all nighters to get things running and get the software ready for a licensing deal.  I don’t know why, I guess I had nothing better to do and hey, there’s an outside chance that something can be salvaged from this.

 

Nothing could be salvaged.  A couple of days later I get to work and the CIO calls me into his office and tells me it’s over.  The place is shutting down and he and the CEO are basically going to try to just sell the software when it’s ready.  They can’t pay me anymore, but I’m welcome to keep working on it if I want to try to get it done.  My response is something to the effect of “how about a fucking phone call next time so I don’t drive an hour just to turn around and drive home”.

 

So that’s my story.  I still hold a special place in the darkest reaches of my heart for that job.  I have never felt like such a horrible person as when I worked there, and those 3 months are ones that I really wish I could do over.  I took a bunch of lessons from it, from a technical standpoint as well as a business and management standpoint, but I almost would rather not have learned those things.  If any of you were ever ripped off by that place, I’m sorry.  My only defense is I came in at the tail end and didn’t know what I was getting into, but even still, I’m sorry.  Some of you will probably think less of me knowing this, and I tell you, I thought less of me too.  But it is what it is, and I feel better having gotten it out there.


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