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Admin
Wow, these are just coming earlier and earlier these days. I love it.
After going through all that, $23k for 48 hours a week? Even in the 90's that's beyond laughable. That comes out to around $9.20 per hour by my calculation, which is just a few notches above flipping burgers. Who do they think they're going to attract at those rates? People who can't get jobs anywhere better.
Oh, and I guess I should say "OMG FRIST!$%~!~*&!~" or something.
Admin
Hmm...controlling, regimented folk, full of contradictions, paranoid but with really nothing to hide. Sounds like...corporate OCD?
(I have someone very close to me with diagnosed OCD. She's never this bad, but I see a lot of similarities between her worst days and this story.)
Admin
In all seriousness, if this story is true (I doubt it is), the people involved are obviously mentally retarded in some way, and there's nothing funny about that.
Admin
Reading this makes me want to just kick those people in the head, this is beyond retarded...
Admin
i'd have probably walked shortly after being handed the 4-page NDA on the first interview. Honestly, what sort of idiocy/corporate paranoia would one be in store for if i'm required to sign a 4 page NDA before even attending a first interview, not even seeing the production environment. Had I not walked at that point, then it would have been at first sight of the 14 page employment agreement. And I just have to say, working as an engineer for ANYTHING without being allowed pencils and erasers? WTF?
The $23k is just icing on the cake, i haven't made that little since high school.
Admin
If the contract said both 40 hours a week AND 48 hours a week wouldn't it be invalid anyway since it's self-contradictory?
Any amount of pencil marks isn't going to fix the mistakes that are already in the illegal document.
Admin
i think the second NDA would've scared me off...
Admin
My money is on 'true', having worked a small web design shop that was pretty much exactly like this: employees are expected to work 55 hours a week, if you work more than 80 you get half a day of comp time. Salary at $22 k/year.
The boss was insanely paranoid due to multiple traumatic brain injuries. Yes, multiple. God is trying to kill that woman and has failed at least 3 times.
The reason for working there is actually kind of simple: it is coder purgatory. You go there because they'll hire people without a degree (because no one stays more than 8 months) and prove to the world that you don't need the paper.
Admin
I have worked for a company that asked me to sign an 11 page non-compete contract. I said no, and after a couple of days, they sent me a reasonable 2 page contract. The 14 page contract shouldn't scare you off.
No pencils or erasers???? Very hard to believe, but there are some strange people out there.
Admin
I would imagine this was some strange legaleses to try and avoid paying overtime on a job requiring 48 hours per week.
Admin
The first rule of Employee Agreement:
YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE EMPLOYEE AGREEMENT or make pencil markings in it
Admin
"You don't want to sign The Contract? Sigh... Then I'm afraid we have to kill you."
Seriously... did the third interview take place on April 1? Why didn't you walk out after the pencil mark incident? Is the company still around? I'm skeptical a madhouse like this can last long in a country with a free (job) market. Not to worry, though, I've heard that North Korea has a constant demand for rule-worshipping fascist nut jobs.
Captcha: hotdog (yuck!)
Admin
I can't imagine going beyond the first interview. Anyplace that paranoid need be absolute hell to work at. Better to go across the street to Burger King.
Admin
You probably have a mental CEO and from there the culture of insanity spreads itself out with each new hiring and indoctrination of fresh blood into the insanity.
Admin
The interview is a great way to size up the company. Most companies don't realize that an interview isn't just a place where they try you out, you get to interview them as well.
Looking back I can see the bad jobs I had and the weird quirky things that went on during the interview process. At the time I was desperate for a job, young and naive. Now I can see that the personality problems of the interviewer(s) were a hint of some serious corporate culture issues that lead to an unbearable work place.
Any time you get something weird in an interview, run, don't walk, the other way. Or at least ask them about it. If you can't have a frank and honest discussion about something during the interview then it will reveal to you the management style of that company.
Admin
DO NOT TAUNT THE EMPLOYEE AGREEMENT.
Admin
I'm wondering if maybe all the cloak and dagger bull$#!t might work in their favor sometimes. I could see your average idiot thinking they must be really cool if they need all that insane security. Me, I'm an open source kinda guy.
capctcha == whiskey
Admin
You know man.....you really shouldnt have modified the contract.
Admin
Ah, the musings of the legally inexperienced computer geek / engineer. No, I'm not a lawyer, but my wife is, and I can honestly say now that hearing a story like this one is pretty much a monthly occurrence for me based in part on the stories I hear from my wife. This story is so hilarious to me that I can only imagine it being nothing but true, true, true! I still can't begin to comprehend how so many people in this world can act that truly STUPID, but it happens every day despite my continued amazement.
And you know it's true because the company president was saying the exact same things that the VP was saying... shit always rolls down hill. The president, being a complete 'tard about legal matters apparently extended her retardedness into her ability to hire other complete 'tards willing to work for less than peanuts. Somehow I'm going to bet that a very large part of the reason this business was even IN business was due to other 'tards giving her money to begin said business because she worked in the industry for a long time, and short of outright stealing, already had in depth knowledge of the kind of stuff needed to make high-quality circuit testing equipment.
Admin
<font face="Times New Roman" size="3">I think they were paying the same kind of salary to HR and Lawyer too. I do not see any actual Lawyer which will have that problem with the copy of unsigned contract. </font>
Admin
I can understand the no pencils or erasers rule - in some contexts. I used to work for a department-of-defense contractor, and for auditing purposes, everything had to done in log books, with numbered pages (pulling out a page was a fireable offense). You could cross out to your heart's content, but you couldn't erase. The rationale was something about proving that you had the original idea for copyright/patent purposes.
Of course, we could still have pencils and erasers; we just couldn't use them in the log books.
Admin
Do I win a prize for the best CAPTCHA ever?
I would have accepted the job and secretly planted piles of eraser shavings throughout the office just to put the psycho president over the edge.
the Daily WTF captcha
Admin
hahahaa .... I would have dropped the job as soon as they president walked in and said "YOU ALTERED THE CONTRACT!!!" ..
Engineers ( backend folk ) hate to deal with middle / higher management so therefore trying to reason with them is just a waste of time
Admin
Absolutely nutso, but believable.
This sounds like a woefully inexperienced management team, with a pretty bad product idea, and an expensive and dishonest downtown lawyer -- most likely a board member -- who had given them some really crazy form contracts in the hope that every single contract would have to be negotiated, and he'd get more billing.
At $9.50 per hour for the employee and $450 per hour for the lawyer, any negotiation cost a week's salary for one of their grunts. No wonder they got mad when somebody wanted to Change The Holy Contract. A lot of inexperienced entrepreneurs get seriously self-serving advice from their lawyers.
The WTF is that the entrepreneurs don't have the guts to sack these ripoff artists and get on with their businesses.
---
And this thing is asking me to prove I'm not a robot by typing the word "pizza". WTF?
Admin
"i'd have probably walked shortly after being handed the 4-page NDA on the first interview. Honestly, what sort of idiocy/corporate paranoia would one be in store for if i'm required to sign a 4 page NDA before even attending a first interview"
You've obviously never interviewed at Google have you?
Admin
Uh. Yes there is!
Admin
the correct response would have been...
I HAVE ALTERED THE CONTRACT... PRAY I DO NOT ALTER IT ANY FURTHER
Admin
Actually not really retarded, all it takes is a persistant person with delusions of grandeur (which is a mental illness). It may also be an outright sociopaths like William Shockley .
These folks believe that their idea is a pure stroke of genius, and are not detracted if subject matter experts tells them that it doesn't work. However when they crash and burn it becomes all too clear. It's not their own fault! They are geniuses, remember. So it can only be that somebody, to me more precise everybody conspired against them.
So when they nursed their wounds and come up with their new next big thing, they will do it right, control everything and everybody to succeed against all odds, and run their business exactly as described above. Black helicopters are no laughing matter anymore!
The only upshot is that most human bodies don't do well with the constant paranoia-induced stress...
Admin
My first entry level job was in 1986, where I was offered $28k/year. My father was an elementary school teacher in a rural town making around $30k/year at the time.
I was in graduate school from 1989-93, and I was making $18k (this was considered very high compared to liberal arts students). After leaving grad school, it took me almost a year to find a job. I was hungry enough by then that I took a lowball offer of $32k for an entry level job.
So when I see $23k/year for an engineering job in the US at that time, I'm amazed at the audacity. Maybe back in the early 70's it'd be fair. On the other hand, federal minimum wage in the early 90's was $4.25, so the $9.20 an hour more than doubles that.
Though I did find that far more companies wanted pre-interview paperwork signed during 1993/94 than I had ever seen before or after. Maybe that was just the paranoid era. Things like non-disclosure agreements, waiver of my employment rights, agreements not to sue, etc.
Admin
Yes, but you're talking about Google. They could threaten to drop the non-hires into a vat of molten lead and half of us would still show up for the second interview.
Admin
You should have marked the second, fresh copy and sent it back to them before turning down the job :P
Admin
That's about as good as my interview question, "What kind of linked list do you not have to iterate through to find a value?"
I go, "Uh...an empty one?"
He goes, "No one where the bracket [] operator is overloaded...it navigates to the position passed in the operator. That immediately finds the value at a given index, and returns a the value."
Admin
You run from the first interview if you're pressed for time. If it's not interfering with your job search, you stick around through as many interviews as you can for the entertainment value. (Then we can enjoy it on TheDailyWTF.)
Admin
Down in my neck of the woods, Burger King is paying $9.50 / hour with a $5,000 signing bonus.
Admin
No way I could have lasted through that....I would have lost it and asked them just exactly how stupid were they. And going through all that and getting that offer, I likely wouldn't have been able just to laugh and hang up. I would have told them where they could stick their offer AND their contract.
Admin
Admin
Part of the trouble in gummint contracting is that anything Uncle Sam pays for, Uncle Sam owns. That includes what in the commercial world would surely be proprietary. As a consequence, it can be very tricky to protect your intellectual property (because legally speaking, it's not your intellectual property). The government can take your source code, give it to a third party, and get them to maintain it, possibly even giving them ideas that they can use to outcompete you. That seldom happens in practise, but in a wartime situation it most certainly could happen, which is why the rules are set up that way.
And when it comes to auditing of logbooks, permanence and accountability are very big. Test results in particular. You might have a formal qualification test going on, and the tester finds a deficiency in the procedure. Now, the procedure was already formally released, so you can't change it without going through a change approval process, which probably contractually requires the customer's official signoff, which of course takes time. Time you don't have during a formal test. So you redline the document, initial all the redlines, do the procedure following your redlines, and then submit a change request to release the test procedure again but incorporating the redlines from the test.
Why do it this way? So that there's always a complete chain of accountability. The safety people in the military are very cautious; they want to be able to trace things back all the way, because you never know what bit of documentation might prove to be the root cause behind a crucial failure in the field.
But that's only for logbooks and things like that. I cannot comprehend banning pencils. I can comprehend a paranoid obsessive loon banning pencils, though. And requiring a ludicrous number of NDAs, while laughably undercompensating the employees. What great motivators their management must be!
Admin
Do not treat EMPLOYEE AGREEMENT's as if they are human . . .
They hate that.
Admin
It is like the required training at my place of employment. We now have "Ladder Safety Training," which is a 3-hour course in how to use ladders, and is required by anyone who has to ever step on anything other than the ground. Whenever anyone mentions some stupid training that could be implemented, we immediately make them shut up, because management might hear it and think it is a good idea.
Admin
Wow is right.
Are you kidding? I'd of concluded that 3rd interview at the first sign of panic from that first VP. I probably would be running out of there screaming in terror.
But to put someone through all that and then equate an engineer to a Walmart greeter is absolutely laughable. I think you're safe with about the disclosure agreements--they only hold if both parties still exist. How in God's green earth could this company possibly be in existence today?
Admin
Beautiful! Do you know of anyone who has done this or similar? That would a friggin' hilarious thing to have.
Admin
What's the big deal of having to sign an NDA? Unless you're some kind of corporate spy, you probably wouldn't disclose anything you saw, anyhow (unless it was for thedailywtf.com). Sure, it'd be a mark against them, but you've apparently never REALLY needed a job, because if you REALLY need a job, an NDA is nothing.
The Contract, however, is another story. After all, since this company wanted you to sign your life away to them at slave wages, you'd be better off running out of there as quickly as possible.
Admin
How 'bout we flip the logic around? I see a lot of replies legitimizing the behavior: i.e. the people at this company are paranoid, overzealous, and/or retarded. Let me suggest that they are none of these! In fact, perhaps they are simply overbearing control freaks who have some need to intimidate all employees. You might pull something like this if you were torturing someone for no good reason (STTNG: "There are FOUR lights!!!"). However they approached it, they were certain to hire only those with such low self-esteem that they could be easily manipulated. In this way, they extract the maximum amount of work for the minimum pay with an overabundance of savagery. Having worked at some pretty WTF places myself, I've come up with the cynical theory that the success and longevity of a business is directly proportional to the misery of the employees. Stock down? Just reduce vacation hours!! So, its not legit behavior, but is scripted to be completely unreasonable to get the most meek servants possible. Gosh, thats's retarded!!
Admin
If they liked, they could fix it by striking one of the two contradicting clauses, even after Kurt signed it.
The whole contract could possibly be invalid because of lack of consideration. In this case, if he signed it, it would have been obvious he didn't understand the terms because of the contradictions. It might only invalidate the contradictions. It probably varies case-by-case.
A contract that requires breaking the law against an agreeing party doesn't make it any less illegal. Even if the employer tried something sneaky like that to avoid paying overtime, and even if Kurt knowingly signed the contract, they'd still be breaking the Fair Labor Standards Act. (At least as of the story in the 90s. The 2004 amendment may have changed that.)
I think it's more likely the workweek part was changed from 5-day to 6 without anyone changing the 40 hours part.
Admin
Admin
Yipes. According to my calculations, $23k is somewhere around my income range. Then again, that is for 40 hours, not 48.
And over here, that is in the range of "well paid".
Admin
http://guff.szub.net/2003/03/06/general-steps-for-making-coffee/
http://www.wildandassociates.com/articles/improvass.html
Admin
I have a similar (less insane, sorry) story. During the hiring process I was called and asked to come in and sign the standard confidentiality agreement. Ok, no problem. So I show up, and they present me with a four-page document. No problem, I think, it's a little long but I'll just read it carefully.
So I carefully read over it, and it all sounds good. I sign.
Ten minutes later, I go to turn in the paperwork to my soon-to-be-boss and he says "Done so soon? I expected that to take an hour."
Apparently, I had signed the cover sheet to the confidentiality agreement. The agreement itself was 30+ pages in addition to the "brief" summary I actually signed.
I still have no idea what the actual confidentiality agreement entails.
Admin
In my book, a 3-hour course is not a simple training course . . . And, of course, if someone does get hurt while using a ladder, we ALL have to be recertified in ladder safety. Besides which, even if OSHA did a survey to see what causes workplace injuries, did they do a follow-up survey to see if taking the simple training course actually lowered the injury rate? Sometimes what seems like a good idea is simply a waste of time, energy and resources. We found out, long ago, that all of the training we have here is simply CYA for the management, so when something happens, they can say that the person was trained, and so it was all their fault.
Admin
That would have to include:
There's probably more. I'll need another pot.