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It's time for the "Ron Brown* Vacation" story from dotcom boom 1.0.

I was a tech project lead at a semi-famous internet portal startup, so worked across departments picking up staff for my projects. The DB guy assigned was Ron Brown. Went to onboard him and he wasn't at his desk. I ask the guy next to him. "Oh, he's on vacation this week."

I came by the next week. No Ron Brown. Where is he? I got a very specific story in response: "He was in a fire, he had his feet burned." Terrible! So I got someone else assigned as DB guy.

Never saw Ron Brown again. About six months later, I was down by his desk. Asked whatever happened to him. "Oh, last week we discovered he just stopped showing up to work, so we just fired him yesterday!"

This was in a company of <200 people, and certainly there were less than 10 DB experts, all onsite. So I'm sure these days it's totally possible.

*Name changed to protect guilty.

At my last job there were stories of an employee who worked for both that company and a tech company across the street: just using “meetings” and other excuses to split his time and collect two salaries. The story goes that he was only discovered because the HR people at the companies would occasionally go out to lunch together and, one day, his name came up.

If he was doing a good job I may not even care.

reminds me of the stories of people working at both Facebook and Google over the past year because of remote work

Related: The Forgotten Employee (2002)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17332440

At my last job my boss, who is a notorious micro manager, hired a guy against strong ojections from my side. The guy was only one week for every two months onsite which nobody told me. After some while my boss asked me how it's going with him. This was the first time someone indicated to me that he already started working for us.

I thought first it was kind of funny, but this guy turned out to be a complete disaster. E.g. when I asked him about his progress he was talking about abstract concepts while trying to evade my question. Multiple times I tried to make him commit his code to our repository so I could at least provide feedback about his work, but his answer was every time that the code isn't in a shareable state. At some point I agreed with my boss that my patience is ending, and one of my direct reports was tasked by my boss to supervise his work.

Six months later, about one week before the deadline, a demo was scheduled and every action or click in the software resulted in errors. Since the result was planned to be presented in a broader context in the following week I promised to invest the weekend and fix the code. After looking into it for about 2h to determine where to start, I decided to completely rewrite the whole thing from scratch which I did in 12h. Only thing I reused were the webservice definitions since those were already communicated to others and their clients were waiting for our application.

In the end my boss was angry at me that I saved our face, because he was kind of forced to fire the guys ass. My boss even accused me to have done this deliberately because he hired him against my objections.

I hope "my last job" means you no longer work there. Sounds like a really bad boss.

I quit after a team meeting where my boss completely undermined my competence. I wanted one dev to consider something which would made his work massively reusable for us, but my boss had other ideas and justified his decision by saying "it's his money and not mine".

I had three months notice period where I handed over all my stuff. Initially we agreed that I will work until my last day and get remaining vacation days paid out. But after about 4 weeks I received a letter from HR asking me to use up my remaining vacation days which meant that I had to clear mybdesk within a couple of days.

What makes the whole thing worse is that during my vacation I was legally not allowed to start another job, and one month after my last official workday the global pandemic started.

ouch what a situation. I just wanted to let you know that there are good jobs out there with reasonable bosses and friendly teams. Not perfect but good enough that working in those places is not soul crushing on a daily basis (just sometimes haha).

I hope you find something nice soon. Don't be afraid of trying. I know it takes effort and is draining to get a new job but it's worth it.

I left my last job after being paid doing nothing for more than 6 months.

The management was terrible in so many ways, it would be too long to explain here.

At first it was nice to spend my days on private stuff (I was "working" remotely because Covid), but after a while I was bored and it was hard to continue this way.

I highly suspect that a large amount of the employees were in the same situation, starting with my direct manager.