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Comment by andirk | Hacker News Reader

1) I did an interview and got turned down because my salary expectations were normal.

2) They hired a couple of offshore people to do the job, and a couple months later that failed.

3) So they came back and signed me for my regular salary. I cranked through most of the non-trivial parts of their fairly complicated application. Then they laid me off, thinking the heavy lifting was done.

4) They replaced me with a handful of offshore devs.

5) ONE month later they needed me again because their devs couldn't make this other part.

7) Again, I made that, and again they laid me off once that was complete. Again, they replaced me with _even more_ offshore devs. Last I checked there was about 7 offshore/onshore-offshore devs covering that one position.

There is no way my request of about +50% salary cost more than all that nonsense. But that was their culture. I stood out like a soar thumb on their balance sheets.

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Just a little nitpick, but you stood out like a sore thumb on their income statements. Income statements is where companies, record costs and profits, balance sheets are where they count all of their property and debts. Thankfully slavery is over so people do not go on balance sheets.

I agree with the other poster, you probably needed to be a consultant for that one. And you would have been better off billing yourself out of some kind of corporation so that when the higher ups see your bills they can imagine they are paying for 10 offshore devs and feel better about themselves.

I left a job in 2007. Things were so stacked against me that I had no choice but to leave. Two years later, the manager contacted me to apologise. He told me that they'd had to hire five people to replace me because they could not find one person who could do everything I could do. He said, "We didn't know what we had in you." I reminded him that he had asked me in the interview why he should hire me and I had responded, "Because I am the best candidate who will interview for this job."

Someone shared this post with me because I was complaining in a Slack about how the theme of my career seems to be not getting hired for the position but later getting hired to fix the things that were fucked up by the person they did hire. Begs the question, is hiring really that difficult?

There wouldn’t have been anything on my list past step 4 because I would have doubled my salary requirement in order to return for any subsequent requests for help.

I increased the salary ~23% (again, market rate for me doing basically all of the work) when I wanted to quit half way through #3 but they knew I did all the non-trivial work so they agreed.

Good on you, then!

Damn dude, at what point do you insist on a contract that protects you in case they decide to fire you again?

Seems like you should have been contracting with them from the get go and that was kind of obvious.

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