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God it's so transparent. I'm a software engineer, and I have first hand built software that has made my business teams and execs wealthy. I have sat there and watched them buy new audis and new houses while I'm told "sorry we can't afford a raise this year". And I know I do better than most being in software, but man do they want to keep us arguing about that while they go and buy everything while we squabble.
I make my company 100-200k a month. I make around 4k a month. No performance bonus, nothing.
Meanwhile the higher ups that do bare minimum are raking it all in. I love our society.
So I figured I'm also going to do the bare minimum. Good thing my managers aren't actually competent in IT so I can set my own deadlines (with a big juicy margin for doing fuck all and getting money for it)
I worked for a startup, two man show. Our valuation went from 5 to 15 million as a result of (a) the features I built and (b) the relationships the other guy formed.
Assuming my features counted for half that valuation increase, (they were a major selling point in the change in valuation, according to the VCs who invested) I generated approx $10k of value per hour.
We got a round of funding from AH, and then I was fired when a dev shop took over the codebase.
I had taken over for the dev shop when they dropped my client in order to pursue a contact with the DNC.
I discovered horrible code patterns, and worked to gracefully replace them with DRYer and otherwise better patterns. Some things I changed included:
- Added an automated test suite
- Consolidated the separate, extremely redundant separate stylesheets for every route with a single stylesheet that applied the same styles throughout the app (the code was literally copy pasted between all these separate stylesheets)
My client was astounded with the rate at which I produced new features, and was blown away at how little debugging was necessary. He was also amazed at how quickly I could deploy new code.
Well, the dev shop failed miserably with their DNC campaign app, and needed money, and we had that new AH money, so they muscled their way back in.
It sucked. I’m bad at politics.
Fucking grinds my gears. Was 12 years ago now, so I don’t remember all the shit I had to undo.
In the meeting where I was fired, two specific points on which I was raked over the coals included:
- Some areas of the app were not covered by automated tests (there was no suite when I inherited the project)
- Some areas of the app were still covered by those redundant stylesheets
I told the client that those were both problems I inherited and had begun the process of working away from. The dev shop rep was in the meeting and shouted at me when I mentioned these things, telling me to stop making excuses.
Ultimately, the owner of the startup told me that “Look. I trust <name of dev shop rep>. If you can’t work with him you’ve got to go.”
So I went. Dev shop rep was a douchebag. The CEO of the app was a decent guy, sharp, but didn’t have the technical chops to know he was being duped.
They’re doing alright at this point, so maybe he dev shop was the right move.
Release an "update" with a "bug" that can only be fixxed with a raise.
Nothing goes wrong:
"Man, what do I even pay these IT guys for???"
Everything goes wrong:
"Man, what do I even pay these IT guys for???"
I worked for a small company that saw growth year after year. We'd have a staff Christmas party towards the end of the year where the boss would thank us for our work and give everyone a bonus of $500. One year the boss was super excited to tell us that we helped build up his company to the point that he would now be opening a new location. He told us this new location was a large investment for him to open and so he would not be giving us a bonus that year and there also would be wage freeze. Thanks for the hard work! Merry Christmas! He sold the company the next year for a few million and retired at 50. I quit after that.
Congrats everyone on this spectacular growth! As a thank you, fuck your Christmas! And a happy new year!
Serious question: have you considered starting your own business? Maybe there is a way to shift some of that wealth back to you.
I have, but no major ideas. I've started thinking later I may do some consulting and just charge an insane rate, but that's many years away
I've started a biz. Hit me up is you ever have questions - could be closer than you think.