My Angry Letter to My Ex-Employer
angrylettertoexexployer.blogspot.com
angrylettertoexexployer.blogspot.com
[Edit to add: Even supposing sending the letter was a good idea, it is terribly written, and it is entirely the author's fault that (quoting the last line) "I'll be surprised if anyone except IT reads this far".
Here, let's try this again:
Subject: Why Project X Has Missed Its Deadline
Dear Boss 1 and Boss 2:
Project X is currently 4 weeks past its planned deadline, $87,000 over budget, has 20% of the feature set yet to be implemented, and performance is 30% worse than the legacy system it replaces. These circumstances were preventable.
Functional code was repeatedly discarded during development, resulting in delays and cost overruns. This occurred as late as two days before the predicted shipping date, at which point a rewrite was guaranteed to negative impact the schedule. The technical justification for replacing the functional code did not advance company objectives.
Management of X was apprised at the time that the team was unable to resolve their difference of professional opinion as to whether to keep the functional code or reimplement for aesthetic reasons. Management was apprised that the decision to reimplement would negatively impact timely deliverability of X. Please find attached supporting memos #41 (request from team member to reimplement authentication), #47 (opposition by self to team member's request to reimplement authentication), #49 (decision by manager to reimplement authentication), #51 (warning by self that schedule would be negatively impacted), and #73 (request for authorization of 3 man-months to address slippage).
I am writing you out of professional courtesy. Management is aware of all facts in this memo. I recommend action to avoid further cost overruns to the company in the future; no reply to myself is required.
Respectfully yours,
I did consider the succinct route but decided against it. Yes, I understand that makes it less likely that management will read it all or that it would come off whiny, but I think it shows more involvement and seriousness.
The executives already know everything is weeks behind schedule. I wanted to give them an idea why.
Of course I was just sending the second letter because only useful purpose of the first one was to help me calm down.
Good on him for not cowing under the "business norms" here.
And as to hurting his reputation: that sounds like you're referring to rep to upper management, who will probably not care, and will have hardly anything to do with his next hire, anyway.
People who will be choosing to hire him are pretty likely to identify with him at some level, even if it's historically, for a start. If they'd be worried about his "honesty", he really wouldn't be happy working there, anyway. In my experience, people who've been totally honest about their opinions to colleagues and managers have been, on average, more successful and definitely more respected.
Then again, perhaps that's just a antipodean perspective.
Very true. In some cases, you may be the one to pop back up. I left my old company in part because I was brought on specifically to work on a number of projects that were later shelved because of the economic downturn. I eventually left to pursue them on my own, and they may be interested in buying the finished product. That possibility would be off the table if I had written a nasty letter when I left.
The company had already hired me as a contractor; I quit, they hired me back for a short contract, and this letter was written and sent after they terminated my services forty-some hours early this afternoon.
You'd think the six months I worked there previously would have been sufficient time to decide whether my work met their standards or not, but I guess it wasn't.
I wanted to try this largely because I don't know what kind of reaction I will get. The most likely is the cold shoulder, but the executives are really frustrated with IT right now, and I was hoping this letter would give some insight into the reasons why, and they just might be frustrated enough to change something. The letter isn't really angry, it doesn't go off on personal inadequacies or annoyances, just professional misconduct. We'll see if anything comes of it.
I believe less. It's not like some others that I've read that are absolute bars, but IMO, this one doesn't help out your job search.
I hope this letter does come up in a job search and that the employer allows me to provide context if he runs across it. I think it represents my personality; I'm not afraid to talk to you, I won't submit to scare tactics or disrespect any longer than absolutely necessary, and I expect respect and influence in my next position. I've never considered myself a "code monkey", that is, an inputless pawn of the higher-ups with no authority or place to influence or change systems, someone on staff only to implement things exactly as specified by his departmental superiors. I didn't get into programming to be a chump, I'm in it because I like solving problems, I like the actual engineering process. It's the difference between your civil engineer and your construction worker; the engineer designs the bridge, the construction worker puts it together. I don't mind wearing both hats, as long as it's established that I'm included, respected, and now I'd probably demand invested with the authority to determine direction in the actual engineering phase.
I understand chain-of-command and can acquiesce appropriately, as long as the circumstances are agreeable. As noted in the letter, I'm not willing to play the chump, I'm not willing to sell my sanity or emotional well-being or that of my family to line your pockets, and I'm sick of being put down by arrogant or dangerously naive patsies. If that's what you're looking for, then I hope you don't hire me.
That said, I don't really intend on getting another job. I've had enough of productions like this one, I'm really quite tired of it. I don't think I'll accept another full-time position unless I can be placed as an IT overlord; not necessarily singly, I don't mind and would probably appreciate a cooperative effort, but I don't want to be subject to a developer with six years less experience than me again, because it's happened a few times before this and it's never been very fun. I've had quite enough of that, I think.
Moving forward is the best (and oddly easiest) solution.
The best revenge is to live well. (Making it big rubs it in ;-) )
Plus you can learn a lot from other peoples mistakes, may that be mistakes of the criticized ones or the critic himself.
I hope something good comes out of it, though I realize that the probability of such is quite low.
I agree with the other comments so far that this shows a certain degree of passive-aggression which isn't particularly appetizing.
However, I will strongly disagree with the point in a couple of the other comments that the acceptable alternatives are: shut up, do as your told, and detach from your job as much as you possibly can while still performing it; part ways politely without indicating anything was ever other than you expected it. These take an adversarial stance that you and your employer have nothing more to offer one another than what was strictly agreed to as the job duties and wage, and that any such attempt at offering will only result in bad outcomes for the weaker party.
When did we get so fucking bitter and jaded? And when did we decide that this outlook was optimal? I honestly wonder if this sort of attitude contributes to polemics like this, because we insist that people have an seemingly infinite ability to remain stoic and bottle their frustration. The alternative of trying to separate emotionally from a job never, ever works. Doing bullshit for eight hours a day to fund eight hours of "recovery time" is not zero-sum; the effects are real, as much as people want to blame those effects on the mere state of being alive. You are not preprogrammed to be depressed; this is not a least-energy state!
The other option is to quit, but employees usually don't until the get to the polemic-spewing boiling-point of their frustration. It sneaks up on them, because they've been bottling it so long. Writing it and then deleting it is therapeutic, but doesn't accomplish anything. The next job will likely be the same, like a self-perpetuating prophecy, because a lot of employers suck, because a lot of employees within are trying every day to convince themselves they don't care. This is least-energy for the employer, not the employee.
If you really want to step off this cycle, perhaps it is time to admit what you've known all along: you do care what you are doing 8 hours a day, and who you are doing it for.
AVOID DUMB PEOPLE.
Never work for dumb people. Never work with dumb people. No matter how beneficial for you the deal is (or seems to be) so far, if you notice that people you rely on are dumb, just quit as soon as you can.
Dealing with dumb people almost always backfires hurting you financially and psychologically.
I don't say that you have to quit as soon as somebody around you does something dumb, but you definitely should quit as soon as you learn that someone you rely on is dumb, even if he hasn't been dangerous for you so far.
But, it wasn't possible in my circumstance. I did try to talk to the super-high-level bosses (the bosses this letter was addressed to) once, and my immediate superior (Rocky in the letter) requested a meeting for me and the boss said "Absolutely not", and Rocky warned that I would be terminated by super-huge-boss if I pressed the issue further. This is the way they governed -- they had no care for what the peons thought and strongly believed in chain-of-command. Huge boss called us in one day to basically demand that we never address him and always go through Rocky.
As such, I was scared to talk to the major bosses the whole time. They know what Rocky is like; they deal with him every day, too. I just don't know that they understand that overall impact it has on the quality of their product.
I let Rocky know the issues as they materialized, of course, but as mentioned in the letter, as my favor with him waned my influence was eventually diminished to nothingness.
The bosses just like to get in and out -- they run it as a business should be run, that is, with some amount of autonomy, but they also do a really, really bad job of keeping personnel informed, controlled, and happy. Everyone there, even the VPs with whom they interact daily, is scared of them, and this leads to bad business decisions because the subordinates do what they can to make things appear better than they are out of fear of retribution, not to mention all of the negative effects of bad morale.
I did ultimately leave on principle and refusal to submit to disrespect and scare tactics, unlike everyone still there, and everyone who's been there for years.
I'm starting my own thing now, and it's getting some traction and clients, and that makes me immensely happy. I'm hoping that it can stick so that I can be free of all of these petty concerns, and if I get a job that turns south, I can just blow it according to my will and dictates without any concern about how I'm going to look after my pregnant wife's physical needs.
Independence is my real goal in the money-and-career part of life. It'd be great to be super rich and able to start programs and groups and schools and companies to promote peace, love, kindness, intelligence, reason, and so on, but that is all just a perk on top of the ability to not be held hostage by my employer. I must amass enough money that I can be a free person, and can choose who I work for, and not be forced to torture myself for months on end as described in this letter.
If anyone would like to help me meet this end, my consulting firm is happy to hook you up with programming services, etc. cookiecaper@gmail.com . : )
I don't mean it in an offensive way, could somebody explain some of the reasoning behind why people might want to make that choice?
People make this choice because they have convinced themselves they never had a choice. They remain there because they are convinced they still don't have a choice.
The explanation is usually a story of falling or being forced into a position followed by stating the tautology of it being a job. They are willing to take a painful known quantity over an unknown quantity elsewhere -- which is assumed to be at least as painful --, all the while saying to themselves repeatedly "I need to be stronger than the pain for the people who rely on me." Sometimes this will become even more self-fulfilling, and they will assume they have no other options, painful or not.
Along with this, they will provide rationalizations about how, even if they had a choice, it really would not matter. The purpose of a job is money. Full stop. If you make it anything else, you are martyring yourself to your employer. Thus, it doesn't matter where you work, so long as you are. Any desire you have to make those hours of your day more meaningful need to be bottled away, because they never will be. Those who don't accept this are ignorant of the facts of life, which are assumed to be true by means of circular logic and a desire to rationalize one's own rut in life.
Humans are amazingly good at rationalization, even when it starts from the usually faulty premise that where they are now is the best things can possibly get.
Hope this provides some insight about your question.
I agree that in a bad situation it's best to move elsewhere, because people almost never change.
People get emotionally involved in things by nature, and it's generally for the better. I just wish I could find an employer with some amount of comprehension on these things.
You quit. You got fired shortly into a 60 hour contract. Your losses are small, you planned on leaving early, and the contract should have protected you from something like this.
Move on, very little to gain by attempting to show them their wrong ways. You can't make changes from the outside.
Full time employees need to be 'busy' all of the time to justify investments the company makes in each person (opportunity to learn on the job is the biggest investment). If you go there and finish all of the work, there won't be anything left for the FTEs to do.
You're better off giving FTEs (full time employees) learning opportunities and telling them they are really bright.
And don't burn bridges - just fake it and pretend to be nice - life sometimes works out in really strange ways.
At the other place, the guy was boss of IT/engineering and just resorted to hiring designers and giving them on-the-job programming training so that he could mandate the habits before they were set instead of trying to counteract extant tendencies. And that guy refused to even produce a formalized style guide. I quit after about a month.
The programmer has in both instances been a relatively successful "lone wolf", self-taught programmer; he's built a successful business on his own right out of the gate, either as an independent freelancer or the technical savior to a struggling ad firm, and as such, has almost never been exposed to other styles, conventions, or thought processes, except those present in the (obviously unsatisfactory) systems he was hired to replace. I'd avoid bringing guys like this on anywhere without leadership willing and able to teach professional etiquette, courtesy, and mutual respect on the job.