• (cs)

    There do seem to be a lot of repeats lately - perhaps because it's vacation season and the guys are taking a break?

    Ed: Yes - we did fall a bit behind as a result of "real" work, vacation, summer, etc - but are working on getting caught up again. Also, -snipped- a bunch of off-topic whining, as this isn't quite the forum. That's what the forums are for.

  • Mike (unregistered)
    On the business end, both companies sold products to the federal government by “utilizing” their minority status: by federal law, a certain percentage of business must be given to minority-owned businesses.
    I'm not familiar with the Federal version, but here in Texas, "historically underused businesses" (HUBs) can be something like 10% to 30% more expensive than the lowest bidder and win.

    So most of these places are companies that buy things from the same place that we could have dealt with directly, tack on a 10% to 30% surcharge, and resell them to us. Net result, we get the same thing we would have, it's more expensive, takes an extra week to arrive, and there's an added chance of handling damage.

    Oh, and our purchasing folks get awards (hubcaps on plaques) for directing the most business to these HUBs.

    I've always wanted to ask the law's authors if this is the ecosystem they wanted to create, but I'm not sure they thought about it that hard.

  • poopoo (unregistered)
    The Wife was the “legal owner” so the company would be woman-owned (and therefore eligible for minority business status)
    So women are a minority group?
  • Swombat (unregistered)

    Umm... The real WTF is that he took the job in the first place. Interviews go both ways - you need to convince yourself that the company is a place you want to work for before you join.

  • (cs) in reply to poopoo
    poopoo:
    The Wife was the “legal owner” so the company would be woman-owned (and therefore eligible for minority business status)
    So women are a minority group?

    OP here.

    Yes, they are. It's a common scam from what I understand. Get your wife/girlfriend/mother to start the company but don't really do anything, that way it's easier to qualify for grants and things because women-owned businesses are a minority.

    And, what the Best of left out was that I was a little desperate for a job at the time (this area sucks for IT work, it seems), and I was hoping I could use the fact that I'd be working directly with the CEO to my advantage; clean things up, streamline processes, get some other IT people hired and the like. Naivety, I guess.

    Addendum (2008-07-14 09:56): To be fair, though, in this case the wife actually was a part of the business. She did run things (technically I reported to her, not to her husband, but reported to him because he was the only one who actually knew the business processes - in part because they were all in his head); I don't want it to sound like she didn't do anything. There are more than enough WTFs in the story without making things up ;-)

  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    poopoo:
    The Wife was the “legal owner” so the company would be woman-owned (and therefore eligible for minority business status)
    So women are a minority group?
    Yes, they are. It's a common scam from what I understand. Get your wife/girlfriend/mother to start the company but don't really do anything, that way it's easier to qualify for grants and things because women-owned businesses are a minority.
    A friend of mine is one-sixteenth Cherokee (one of his great-great-grandparents) which had absolutely no effect on his life --- he didn't look, talk, eat, worship or act different from everyone else in the neighborhood --- except when he was fully-grown and suddenly realized that if he checked that little box, he was instantly much more likely to win contracts. So he did. And there's absolutely nothing illegal about it.
  • (cs) in reply to dpm
    dpm:
    A friend of mine is one-sixteenth Cherokee (one of his great-great-grandparents) which had absolutely no effect on his life --- he didn't look, talk, eat, worship or act different from everyone else in the neighborhood --- except when he was fully-grown and suddenly realized that if he checked that little box, he was instantly much more likely to win contracts. So he did. And there's absolutely nothing illegal about it.

    Really? I'll have to use that to my advantage; I'm one-half Puerto Rican but don't look or act it. And all this time I've been checking "Caucasian - Not Hispanic" like a sucker.

  • Charles (unregistered)

    Yeah, and Grizzly Adams has a beard...!

  • (cs) in reply to Swombat

    Sometimes you can't tell how bad a job will be based off the interview.

    The owners probably came off as nice normal people in the interview. They probably didn't know any of the technical aspects about the job, so they couldn't tell him what it was really going to be like. I doubt he could have asked to see code he would be working on.

  • (cs) in reply to brettdavis4
    brettdavis4:
    Sometimes you can't tell how bad a job will be based off the interview.

    Nah, it sounds like this poor guy knew this place was messed up but hoped he could turn it around. Bet he won't make that mistake again!

    For me, the biggest (brightest?) red flag here was the whole licensing thing. Business process can be fixed, and code can be refactored, but once you've got multiple copies of the same files lying around you might as well just give up. I will become rich and famous if I can ever find out a solution to this problem.

    Every time I've worked on projects where different clients have slightly different versions of the same code, things will eventually become an unmaintainable mess. Factor out all common code and stick in a separate library? Good luck managing different versions of that library. Give each client their own set of files? Good luck propagating bug fixes to every version (which may have deviated substantially from the original).

    I can take the clueless boss. I can take the lack of proper business procedures. Hell, I can even take the no-hot-water thing. But, tell me that the code has been licensed to one or more outside companies? Fuck that, I hear White Castle has an open position!

  • (cs) in reply to Outlaw Programmer
    Outlaw Programmer:
    Nah, it sounds like this poor guy knew this place was messed up but hoped he could turn it around. Bet he won't make that mistake again!

    I had a hunch, but I didn't know until I was offered the job and got to see the code. I should have known something was up when they were telling me how they A) Hadn't had an IT person in their office for a year (the consultant worked remotely most of the time), and B) They were getting rid of said consultant the Friday before I started, and had been trying to get rid of him for three years but couldn't, and they didn't want me talking to him at all because he might "poison [my] mind about the company". So I got thrown in the deep end and had to find my way around everything myself, because nobody else knew. At least when I left I trained my replacement (another consultant, who was a friend/business partner of The Husband's side business that sounds like a scam) during my last week, and told him I'd answer my cellphone if he had any questions.

    I was hoping I could turn it around, though. I even had a big two-year plan created of what I was going to do and what benefit it would be. Of course, once I found out that there was no budget for anything and they actually wanted systems automated so they could have less employees, I knew that there was no hope of ever building an IT department, let alone implementing my enterprise revamp of their systems (because trust me, EVERYTHING needed to be replaced).

    You're right; I won't make that mistake again. Now if only I could find another job soon so I don't lose my car.

  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    poopoo:
    The Wife was the “legal owner” so the company would be woman-owned (and therefore eligible for minority business status)
    So women are a minority group?

    OP here.

    Yes, they are. It's a common scam from what I understand. Get your wife/girlfriend/mother to start the company but don't really do anything, that way it's easier to qualify for grants and things because women-owned businesses are a minority.

    And, what the Best of left out was that I was a little desperate for a job at the time (this area sucks for IT work, it seems), and I was hoping I could use the fact that I'd be working directly with the CEO to my advantage; clean things up, streamline processes, get some other IT people hired and the like. Naivety, I guess.

    Addendum (2008-07-14 09:56): To be fair, though, in this case the wife actually was a part of the business. She did run things (technically I reported to her, not to her husband, but reported to him because he was the only one who actually knew the business processes - in part because they were all in his head); I don't want it to sound like she didn't do anything. There are more than enough WTFs in the story without making things up ;-)

    I was in a similar situation in 2005. No job and nothing else in sight. Here, the Labor Office actually forced me to present me there. In the first place all sounded good (being responsible for ASP/web development, take care of customer site config like DHCP, DNS, and the like, system administration and so on. Hence a jack-of-all-trades. Several days later I learned that the person I had to replace actually ran away screaming (sarcasm). Everybody was afraid of The Boss who wanted to rule all and everything. And that with an iron fist. Obviously, there was no money to buy decend equipment so there was only the bare necessary. Could carry on ranting. Anyway, I left after 3 months. Could I have known? Maybe, but when you are on unemployment compensation you can't refuse an offered job or you loose all your benefits.

  • (cs) in reply to Swombat
    Swombat:
    Umm... The real WTF is that he took the job in the first place. Interviews go both ways - you need to convince yourself that the company is a place you want to work for before you join.

    TRWTF is that bosses like this stay in business for several years during which they ruin the life of quite many people.

  • Zac (unregistered)

    I have worked for one company owned by a husband and wife; my wife has worked for two. NEVER AGAIN!!! Even if the two of them get along extremely well, it will always be a "them against the world" scenario. As an employee, especially one involved in I.T., you'll always come out third best, if that high.

  • blockhead (unregistered)

    wow - this is way too close to a job i held a few years back. the similarities really are eerie.

    as one example of the dysfunction, we had an app for a real estate company. the properties table had over 160 columns. no need for normalization! when i tried to take this approach i was told there was not enough billable time to redesign the DB (not important that the db was so unwieldy any additional functionality added in necessitated either adding more columns to this table or adding weird stand alone tables for mapping or working around. add to that the original db creator had no indexing and it was a freaking cluster).

    also, we weren't allowed to have a coffee maker for fear of fire that would destroy the data center. the same data center that was behind about 3 feet of concrete and in an adjoining room of the development area.

    i can commiserate with the OP - it wasn't a job i necessarily wanted, but circumstances dictated it to be a move i would take, but i never realized just how bad it was going to be. i get shivers remembering that palce.

  • (cs) in reply to Zac
    Zac:
    I have worked for one company owned by a husband and wife; my wife has worked for two. NEVER AGAIN!!! Even if the two of them get along extremely well, it will always be a "them against the world" scenario. As an employee, especially one involved in I.T., you'll always come out third best, if that high.

    For people of that kind IT is merely a cost factor that doesn't produce any benefit or business. They themselves wonder what IT could be needed for but since everybody has it they employ at least one person that looks like IT.

  • (cs)

    For a moment there I thought someone had ratted us out.

  • blockhead (unregistered)

    Eric - you are dead on about killing the spirit. i was ready to cash it in and go to law school or something else drastic. but then i got my new job and couldn't be happier. but that was a rough stretch.

  • Pony Gumbo (unregistered)

    The only shocking thing about this is that they were making enough money to pay staff. Every company I've seen in this state of disorganization has been a sweat-equity-only kind of gig.

  • Eric (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that you he gave any notice, instead of just clearing out his desk that day, as thats what I would have done. If you are leaving without something else lined up anyhow, putting it off 2 weeks wont help much

  • (cs) in reply to poopoo
    poopoo:
    So women are a minority group?
    In the US, the acronyms are WBE, MBE and DBE, usually 'shortened' to W/M/DBE. They stand for Woman-owned, Minority-owned or Disadvantaged-owned Business Enterprise. It's been a while, but I worked for a W/MBE that wrote certification/compliance software.

    Most of the folks who run W/M/DBEs are typical small business owners - generally honest, trying to do the right thing, fairly clueless about process (and many of the rules that they're supposed to follow, like software licensing)... and many get in over their heads once they get involved in gov't contracting. Some of these firms are a racket - we subcontracted with one such firm - but based on my own anecdata, I'd have to say that most W/M/DBEs are generally legit.

  • egh (unregistered)

    Oh, dear god. This sounds exactly like a company I used to work for.

  • J (unregistered) in reply to Zac
    Zac:
    I have worked for one company owned by a husband and wife; my wife has worked for two. NEVER AGAIN!!! Even if the two of them get along extremely well, it will always be a "them against the world" scenario.

    Agreed. The worst developer job I've ever had was for a husband-wife team whose management style reflected their codependent-bordering-on-sadomasochistic relationship, something you can't really pick up on during an interview. I put in a year so my resume wouldn't look suspect, then found another job ASAP.

    Related red flags: more than 50% of the staff has been at the company for less than 2 years, the boss insists on involvement in every aspect of the business (i.e., he doesn't trust anyone to do their jobs), illegal and/or insane cost-cutting measures.

  • Employment Guru (unregistered)

    Stories like this remind me why it's just as important that you interview the employer at the same time they are interviewing you.

    If you haven't asked them more questions then they've asked you, then you're doing it wrong. Simple as that.

  • jkupski (unregistered) in reply to poopoo
    poopoo:
    The Wife was the “legal owner” so the company would be woman-owned (and therefore eligible for minority business status)
    So women are a minority group?
    The best part is that women actually outnumber men in the US. To quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means."
  • (cs)

    I've been there as well. In my case, it was a "Father/Son" thing, rather than a "Husband/Wife" thing.

    The initial interview sucked hard (the son was basically non-technical), but the second interview included the one technical guy who actually knew what he was doing (he was also a minority owner in the business), and he and I hit it off to the point where I wrote off my misgivings about the senior partners.

    Long story short the whole thing imploded, mainly due to crappy sales (as managed by the son), and the complete inability of the management to understand what it was we actually SOLD, and to set up an intelligent contract...Some of the underbidding was obscene; we beat the competition by 80% on the bid, which basically left us with zero profit.

    I got forced to resign for daring to speak up about a sales issue, and the other guy ended up getting in a fistfight with the son over the same thing about 6 weeks later (he didn't start it). Two months after that, having fired the only two people who knew what the hell was going on, the business folded like a wet sack.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to jkupski
    jkupski:
    The best part is that women actually outnumber men in the US. To quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means."

    Women are a majority, but woman-owned businesses are a minority. It's the latter that's getting the preferential treatment.

  • James (unregistered)

    TRWTF is this affirmative-action-lite bullshit. Your tax dollars at work, folks.

  • (cs) in reply to Mike
    Mike:
    jkupski:
    The best part is that women actually outnumber men in the US. To quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means."

    Women are a majority, but woman-owned businesses are a minority. It's the latter that's getting the preferential treatment.

    Excellent clarification, Mike. What bothers me is that: "demonstrating preferential treatment based on Race or Gender" is discrimination. Yet, providing 'advantages' for Minority-owned businesses is Anti-Discrimination. ONLY IN AMERICA!!!!

  • (cs)

    Just to add this company has been around for about 5 years, and evidently continues to do well to this day. How on earth they manage this is beyond me, but I've noticed that always seems to happen.

    Addendum (2008-07-14 12:22): The second company (the one they do all the work for) has it even better since the owner is African American and a combat-wounded veteran. So they get more profit than the woman-owned company, and from the looks of it don't actually do anything at all, since the other company does all the processing and shipping and customer service.

    Ridiculous, just freaking ridiculous. Businesses (and individuals, and everything else really) should be rewarded based on merit, not on the ethnicity/gender/status of the owner. That sort of nonsense is what KEEPS racism/sexism alive and well.

  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    Just to add this company has been around for about 5 years, and evidently continues to do well to this day. How on earth they manage this is beyond me, but I've noticed that always seems to happen.

    Are you kidding? No overhead, modest profits guaranteed by their minority business status. It'd be more ridiculous to imagine them going under.

  • Michael (unregistered)

    Seriously, where do this kind of people come from? Maybe there's life on Mars after all :)

  • Steve (unregistered)

    I work at a major university in Southern California and we don't have hot water in most of the restrooms, either. (Some do, some don't, on a unexplained basis.)

    Even in the medical school restrooms, where you'd think they knew something about sanitation.

  • (cs) in reply to Mike
    Mike:
    jkupski:
    The best part is that women actually outnumber men in the US. To quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means."

    Women are a majority, but woman-owned businesses are a minority. It's the latter that's getting the preferential treatment.

    Good someone finally said it. I was reading all the comments because I figured someone would say this key point. Women run business are the minority in the business world, they are not a minority group themselves.

  • (cs) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    we don't have hot water in most of the restrooms, either. (Some do, some don't, on a unexplained basis.)

    Even in the medical school restrooms, where you'd think they knew something about sanitation.

    Well it's not like the professors and students in a given field control the water temperature.

  • Edward Royce (unregistered)

    Hmmmm.

    Funny thing.

    For me my best work experience was with a brother-brother owned business.

    Another good experience was with a mother-daughter teaming.

  • (cs)

    I didn't know why people would always say, "avoid working for any company run by a husband and wife" until I actually worked for a couple who ran a business together. For the first year, it was pretty good. The wife mainly handled the money side of things and the husband ran the engineering side. (We wrote software mainly for the printing industry. Photoshop plugins and the like.) It worked out pretty well.

    But after about a year, their marriage started having problems, and then the business started having the same problems. She became a control freak trying to control every aspect of the business, even areas she had no business touching (such as engineering). He retreated into his office and would stay and work for hours after everyone else went home so that he wouldn't have to go home and face his wife after a crappy day of working with her. (And by that time I imagine she was probably livid at having to run the company for the whole day and then run the household and take care of the kids in the evening!)

    He was also a chain smoker, which I found annoying, but he mainly smoked in his office and had a HEPA filter he'd run. It didn't completely work, but was better than nothing, and it didn't affect me during most days because my office was on the other side of the building. But a coworker of mine later told me that he was pretty sure the husband would go in his office and smoke pot, and that's the real reason he ran the filter, so it wasn't as obvious what he was smoking. I don't know if that's true or not, but thinking back, I can see how it could have been.

    Anyway, after about 3 years, I decided it was time to leave the small company of 10 people. The day I left, 50% of the employees quit because we were sick of dealing with the owners. 2nd best business decision I ever made. (The best was leaving the company I worked at before working there.)

  • (cs)
    Perhaps the worst part of the site(s) is that it was originally designed to be bilingual (English and Spanish). To accomplish this, there is a “languages.asp” file that contained... you guessed it, a dictionary object mapping certain sections to the equivalent words in English/Spanish.

    Sooo, how should you do that? There is no i18n support in classic ASP. I saw a site that did this once, and it was actually pretty nice. All the strings are in a separate file, and you can use it to print out an overview to see which strings were missing, and to let a translator fill in the blanks.

    I also saw a site that had if/elseif/elseif everywhere, that was certainly much worse.

  • Brill Pappin (unregistered)

    Wow, I took a job a few months ago; Director, Software development; for a company that sounds like a clone of that one... but with a few more people... I had a team of 4+ (unfortunately I can't mention the name for fear of being sued.. but I really, really want to).

    Now I'm back to contracting. What a waste of my time.

  • levi_h (unregistered) in reply to Edward Royce
    Edward Royce:
    Another good experience was with a mother-daughter teaming.

    But that had nothing to do with IT, now did it?

  • (cs) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    Mike:
    jkupski:
    The best part is that women actually outnumber men in the US. To quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means."

    Women are a majority, but woman-owned businesses are a minority. It's the latter that's getting the preferential treatment.

    Excellent clarification, Mike. What bothers me is that: "demonstrating preferential treatment based on Race or Gender" is discrimination. Yet, providing 'advantages' for Minority-owned businesses is Anti-Discrimination. ONLY IN AMERICA!!!!

    this happens everywhere, believe me. my first ever company hired me because i'm a girl, as did my current one.

    check out all the other countries where it happens

    (and can i just add: "Oh, and there were over 15,000 files." /grammar-nazi)

  • Kelly (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi

    I think you could probably call OSHA about the hot water.

  • (cs) in reply to A Nonny Mouse
    A Nonny Mouse:
    my first ever company hired me because i'm a girl, as did my current one.

    Hmmm.... Are you a manly girl (you are in IT, right?), or that rarest of (IT) rareties; a girly-girl beacon of beauty whose mere presence can light smiles, server farms and young men's fancy on fire ???

  • Ie (unregistered)

    Hot water costs MONEY, and, son, you damn lucky to breathe that air for FREE.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    Just to add this company has been around for about 5 years, and evidently continues to do well to this day. How on earth they manage this is beyond me, but I've noticed that always seems to happen.

    That's what I find most frustrating about this. Companies like this are in such an amazing position to excel and grow. If being run that poorly they can still manage to be profitable, imagine how rich they'd get if they ran their company right?

  • Julie (unregistered)

    Wow, I could swear I worked for this company, except that we didn't use that sort of business system. But the six-person husband/wife team, the ancient computers, and the lack of hot water is the same.

    This was my first job out of college. I was hired to do web and print design, and I was given FrontPage and CorelDraw to do it. This in and of itself was not terrible, given the other things I needed to deal with. I once worked on a file in Photoshop at home, on my own time, and was told that I couldn't use it because the owner didn't want "incompatible files." I converted it to CorelDraw, but that wasn't good enough. The owner wanted to make sure he could edit everything I did. That was my first warning sign.

    One day, I was working on some web files, and AOL wouldn't connect (yes, AOL - so the owner could use the same account at home and at work.) I traced the phone cable back to the jack in another room to discover it had been unplugged. Okay, easy. I plugged it back in and went on my merry way.

    The next day, I had the same problem. I immediately went in the next room to see if the cable had been unplugged again. It had, but this time there was a Post-It note on the cable that said "DO NOT PLUG IN." What?

    I went to the owner and asked about it. It turns out I wasn't supposed to go online without his permission. All control-freak issues aside, I was amazed that instead of [i]telling[/] me that I wasn't allowed to go online without his permission, he just unplugged my modem.

    This sort of thing finally got to me, and one day I simply snapped and walked out. It was the best decision I could have made.

  • (cs) in reply to Julie
    Julie:
    one day I simply snapped and walked out.
    I hope you at least plugged in the modem, and used a steel clamp (with suitable combination lock) to make it stay plugged in, before you left!
  • (cs) in reply to Ie
    Ie:
    Hot water costs MONEY, and, son, you damn lucky to breathe that air for FREE.
    Damn lucky, indeed!
  • (cs) in reply to levi_h
    levi_h:
    Edward Royce:
    Another good experience was with a mother-daughter teaming.

    But that had nothing to do with IT, now did it?

    11 minutes between the two posts above: Are we getting old, slow and decrepit here now ? Or what ?

  • Crabs (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    A Nonny Mouse:
    my first ever company hired me because i'm a girl, as did my current one.

    Hmmm.... Are you a manly girl (you are in IT, right?), or that rarest of (IT) rareties; a girly-girl beacon of beauty whose mere presence can light smiles, server farms and young men's fancy on fire ???

    OMG a girl on teh internetz!!!!11oneeleven!

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