Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

"It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude." - Similar thing was said by my grandmother. She said that no matter how hard it os to face a rude person. You have to smile back coz' you don’t know what consequences of your own rudeness you will have.

I am in a job now where I am bringing up the next generation of their flagship hardware line. The company will sink or swim depending on the timing and success of its launch.

It’s a startup, and the bank account is drying up fast. They talk about another round of funding, but I can easily imagine management deciding to fire all of the senior engineers shortly after the product launches in order to save costs.

While that would likely end up being a total disaster and doom the company, such myopia is all too common with upper management. The story from the article is hardly unique or exceptional.

I will be posting my details on the next “who wants to be hired” thread, because this seems like an increasingly likely scenario. It does not help my management’s case that they talked up a promotion that then was suddenly delayed until after the project is finished, after two years of raises that failed to match inflation.

I would have asked for a consulting fee. Politely, of course.

I had a similar experience with a huge lotus notes database I supported. Like a year after they let me go, they wanted to hire me back for the end of year/beginning of the year setup that the db required. They were super rude about how they approached me through the contract agency. I just ghosted them and figured they'd get someone to handle it for them. It was mostly documented anyway, but I assume they had also laid off anyone that knew enough about notes to follow the documentation.

I once worked for a lovely company that was acquired by a horrid one. Their MO was to treat all the staff they acquired like shit, and give all the good jobs to their mates.

They demanded I be in their new office (which was 100 miles away) by 9am each morning, at which point they would usually send me to a client site a few miles from where I lived.

I was so sick of it I decided to resign. Somehow they got wind of this and decided to fire me for being late, but they legally had to follow a minimum process for this, so they needed a disciplinary meeting or two first.

At the meeting they asked me about the time I didn't get in until 1pm. I thought about it for a second, and said "oh, you mean the day the IRA bombed the M25 motorway?". Their faces fell, but they had another one up their sleeve. To which I responded "you mean the second time the IRA bombed it?". They really didn't have a leg to stand on, and I handed in my resignation notice at that meeting.

They then employed me as a contractor for the next 2 years on about twice my previous rate. All the other senior engineers privately contacted me about contracting and they all also left over the next year. The company eventually went bust; they also treated their customers badly, and lost several constructive dismissal lawsuits (which are quite hard to win normally).

I still take satisfaction that they got what they deserved.

And this is why if you want to be an evil business around modernization, either use consultants who expect to leave, or wait until at least the next year so that any end of year reports that were forgotten about can be rebuilt.

This seems to just be the logical end-point of any person who's in a position where no one can hold them accountable for too long. Anybody who can't be told "no" by anyone around them for a period of time starts to develop a set of neuroses best described, IMO, as "petulant child" syndrome.

     he set about replacing ... with new IBM hardware.

That was his first mistake. :)

What was the point of this story?

Aside from “you may now proceed to be angry”