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Admin
And, buying drinks for prospective customers at the bar is pretty much a prerequisite for that kind of work.
Admin
"Over time, John’s strategy paid off, and big-name clients started paying attention to AwesomeWeb again. Enough profit existed to hire another developer..."
So apparently, Martia was right, and the company was full of dead-weight that needed cutting. Even though he was arrogant and unreliable, John managed to bring the company back to profitability with only a staff of two.
TRWTF is Nate, who upon John’s departure ran the business into the ground. He and the new hire should have been able to take the business to new hieghts.
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When I cofounded a small company, we all had a very standard document our spouses signed which prevents this type of thing from happening. At least in my state, a spouse can be limited from having any power of a company, despite community property effectively giving that spouse a financial interest in it.
Admin
Picture of 3 portaloos in 2.3 Megabytes. At resolution of 360 by 240 pixels. now there goes the real WTF.
Cheers!
Admin
How does one "win" a company during a divorce? Let me guess: the company belonged to her husband, they got divorced, and for some reason I can't fathom a judge decided he had to give her his company?
I hope that's not it because that would be TRWTF.
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Not when the plane is on fire and heading straight for the ground... when things are that bad, you just head for the door, and take your chances...
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Negative employees exist. They are called franchises, where they pay you to work for you :)
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So many alarm bells ringing from the outset that my head hurts!
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While needing a relatively high level of sociopathy to pull off it could even have been deliberate on his part. He reluctantly lets Martia use her share of their house bank accounts, mutual funds, his not having to pay alimony, etc to buy his share of the company out; fighting just hard enough to make sure it's almost the only thing she gets out of the divorce. Then he sits back sipping a drink and watches while she totally destroys in a matter of months it leaving her with nothing but a stained pantsuit.
Admin
The quality of the stories here has gone downhill lately. Perhaps the daily WTF has been "won" in a divorce, the writing staff was fired, and the only guy left is Nate the web developer.
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TRWTF is uploading a 2.3MiB 1,516 x 1,022 PNG file and shrinking it with the width property.
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Or, he could have simply read John's posts (and those of the people he met there) on those "social networks". Chances are very high at least one of them kept updating their FB status or tweeted there whereabouts.
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You came all the way here to let us know that?
You really made our lives much better, thank you.
Admin
Reading between the lines, I wonder whether John is unfairly maligned. Granted he rates himself highly, and may have a personality that grates against the Dilbertesque-sounding Nate, but he has been achieving his goals by making the product saleable, and making those sales.
The only WTF here is the fact that John needed to be managed rather more tightly than he had been, and at the crucial point at which there was a series of sales meetings, he dropped the ball.
Now: did he know about these meetings and just decide to blow them out? Or did he forget about these meetings? Or had Martia omitted to tell him about them, with the expectation of him just happening to be in the office on the Friday afternoon when the customers were scheduled to "just" drop in?
I wonder whether Martia had forgotten to tell him about them, and such was the sin of omission that she couldn't come clean to the customers that she hadn't told John in advance that this was going to happen.
In conclusion, Martia is TRWTF as she's clearly not fully-rounded (so to speak) management material.
Admin
It sounded like they were quite successful until the "pub" incident.
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Does a woman ever appear in a DailyWTF who isn't some sort of wildly incompetent misanthropic cartoon villain? Do all the "writers" have mummy issues or something? (as well as the issues with good writing, obviously).
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Yes. Hanzo's sidekick. What was her name again? Gertrude or something like that?
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The spin on this story unfairly casts me as the villain. I stepped in to rescue a failing company with poor leadership, and this is the thanks I get?
Fortunately, I was able to use my awesome talents elsewhere to develop the site www.healthcare.gov.
Admin
On the other hand, the fired people are freed as well. They can immediately use their talent better in a functional workplace, instead of being tied to a sinking corpse of a mismanaged company, doing nonsense. Being forced to spend 3-6 months under Martia and Great John = overall loss of productivity for the whole economy. Work which destroys wealth.
I am aware that this is the case only when the job market looks good and you do not spend years as unemployed. For developers, this condition mostly holds.
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The alternative is to end up with a situation where you can't keep the company afloat and it goes bankrupt. Then, everyone's out of a job anyway.
Go read about Japan's "boredom rooms". They're not allowed to fire anyone, ever, so they've come up with... "interesting" ways to try and make people quit.
Layoffs are a fact of working life, unfortunately. And, keeping laws "business friendly" (within reason) means that it's more likely that you'll be able to turn around and get another job.
Admin
"a smaller team means we can be more Agile". Hah, even some people on the TDWTF think that's what it means. Agile development doesn't mean "fast" it means you do small iterative releases rather than huge monolithic versions.
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A lot in this story reminds me tango.me But not all of it.
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No idea if this was said yet, but TRWTF is that as soon as Martia took over the whole team didn't quit as one consolidated group to join the previous owner's newly formed company.
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Around 30% of full time company employees used to work in large companies with traditions of not firing people (hence boredom rooms etc.). Now that's down to around 10%. Companies that don't need to care about their reputation no longer need that tradition. Companies that weren't large and famous never needed to have that tradition in the first place.
Part time employees, contract employees, and dispatched subcontracted employees, can be fired without a reason. If a contract employee has had contracts renewed for more than 3 years then the employer does have to state a reason for firing, but the stated reason doesn't have to bear any resemblance to reality.
The average fired employee can't afford to sue like the fired whistleblowing president of Olympus did. They just get screwed. Just like in any other country.
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So where is the great snoofle with his wisdom and insight ? its not like the little twat to miss an opportunity to give us some bullshit tail of how he single handedly saved an entire company from its misguided management.
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Martia got the company as part of a divorce settlement.
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In a firm of only 20-40 people, web developers probably should be able to do this. Making developers do customer service is one of the things which got Fog Creek where it is today as well...
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I feel abused... 2.3Mb of abused.
Captcha: erat. We should eraticate these abusive websites.
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By reading this "Martia had won the company a few months earlier [...]" I knew that this story would be hardcore. Oh, and the author writes well, congratulations!
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I'm like... 99% sure I worked for this company. I might have even submitted the story that inspired this post, but if I did it would have been like 5 years ago.
If it is the same story, "The Great John" was actually at a twitter meetup on a train. Yeah. Great plan, right? This was when iPhones didn't have 3g yet, and even when they did data coverage on a train outside the major metro area was kinda spotty if that.
Man... good times.
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It could also mean the product was near-completion (at least insofar as some plastering over and adding some nice windows makes ist so for marketing purposes), so some marketing (in pubs) could produce an "interest" in the product and perhaps some customers. Well, one-time customers...
It dowsn't mean that this all was future-proof...
Admin
No, being an enormous know-it-all gasbag got Fog Creek to where they are today. They can launch an absolute pile of shite, evangelize a bit, and then hipster-developers - you know the ones, they read some Attwood, they read some Spolsky, they do no actual development, just management - well, they start talking it up as the most amazing thing ever and make everyone drink the kool aid.
Give me bugzilla or trac over fogbugz any day of the fucking week. The fact we pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to these hipster bellends drives me crazy.
Admin
The vice presidents daughter is also still unwell.
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Well, she was the president of the company.