Some Kind of Logic?

In my last post I alluded to the fact that I had gotten a new job and was happy to be leaving my previous position. I'm not going to go into how bad my old job sucked -- if you don't know me you won't believe me; if you do you already know.

I'm not the only one to leave recently; in fact I was the second in the current exodus. As of April 1st we they had 15 full-time employees broken down as follows:

I'm not going to go into how @#$%'ed up that composition was to start with. We They have an engineering VP who -- in addition to sleeping through staff meetings and being (by his own admission) unable to remember what everyone does -- believes that QA is a waste of money. This from a guy who sits at his desk and surfs pr0n all day. Go figure.

Any sane, competent manager would be asking themself "What's wrong with this picture?"

Just over a month later you can subtract 4 people from that chart: 1 from the "Admin/IT" (leaving 0) and 3 from Engineering, leaving 1. Any sane, competent manager would be asking themself "What's wrong with this picture?" At my recently former company, however, they just continue the dog & pony show hoping that someday, someway, somebody will be crazy enough to buy the company. (Well, they do that in addition to making vague, veiled threats to their exiting employees. Oh, and giving frequent "We're in the best position we've ever been in" pep talks. You gotta love those.)

They don't seem to be grasping the dire nature of their current situation at all. I don't claim to be the best or the most accomplished programmer in the world but I do have a pretty good track record including the last 10 years as a professional C++ programmer. (I've actually been programming for way longer than that -- I started on a PDP 11/70 back in the 70's. ) Instead of hiring someone experienced to replace me they've turned my duties over to a couple of junior guys with exactly 0 real-world programming experience between them. (What they do have going for them is that they are cheap: fresh-out-of-college and H-1B. And they wouldn't say "shit" if they had a mouthful.) If I had any respect for my former bosses I'd be offended; as it stands I'm merely amused.

As additional evidence of their cluelessness, try this: they insisted that I keep on coding right up to my last day on the job. I tried to point out that I would merely be adding more knowledge into their product that would disappear in short order; they didn't seem to understand why this was a problem. I got an IM today from the next guy to leave (his last day is next Thursday) and they're pulling the same crap with him. They want him to fix all the "bugs" in one of the modules that I handed over to him that he's now handing over to those 2 H-1B guys mentioned before. All of the "bugs" in that module are actually feature requests. They just don't get it.

The truly sad part is that it could have been a great place to work. There were some talented guys there (some of whom left in last year's exodus) and the product idea wasn't bad. If there had been any amount of management at all the whole deal could have been outstanding. Instead you've got a pr0n-surfing VP and a CEO who only wants to do as little as possible for the moment. (And don't get me started on what cheapasses they are.) Add to that a 12-month long death march with major feature additions every 3 weeks and you've got a recipe for disaster. Which I'll be amused by from afar.

Posted by John at May 5, 2004 1:40 AM