Holding a $ 220,000 annual salary, fared not as good as an intern?

"I have tried to introduce the development process unstructured environment; I have tried to provide support for people to run the project no experience of running in the background from the production of services to; I have tried to improve workflow and the introduction of repeatable test .... .. I did everything to try, but all failed are developers really so insignificant it. "? that's authors want to share an experience: holding a $ 220,000 annual salary, but fared in the company not as good as intern ......

Disclaimer: This article has been author Matt Stancliff translation authorization.

Author | Matt Stancliff

Translator | meniscus, Zebian | Guo Rui

Head Figure | CSDN downloaded from the Vision China

Exhibition | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

The following is the translation:

The period from October 2013 to October 2016, I worked in a senior software engineer, but my duty is just an intern. I work from home three years, holding a $ 220,000 salary, travel a total of six times, twice to San Francisco, Seattle once, three times in Europe, and contributed thousands of lines of function / repair / optimization is a lot of large projects, but I responsibilities not as an intern.

In this strange treatment lasted for several years, I have tried to analyze the problem together with HR. At first HR ignore my request for up to six weeks, and later announced that after conducting its own investigation found nothing wrong with self, then told me that the company decided to terminate my current contract office, and asked me to sign "non belittle "(non-disparagement) pink slip. Not only no severance pay, they also refused to symbolically give me a week's grace period. Finally, I agree with them, I accept $ 50,000 in severance pay, but must accept some terms, such as "absolutely can not say bad things about the company" and so on. There is no room for negotiation.

Such companies issue

Why can not we work in this strange company? To sum up, this company functions exist in three areas is not perfect:

Unsound corporate governance;

Unsound process management at a loss;

It does not sound self-conscious .

I said that the company thinks valuation of more than one billion US dollars, dozens of employees earn over one million dollars of sales commission each year. Meanwhile, the company's shares worthless in terms of the general staff. In the early days, the company will be approximately 13% of the company's shares allocated to employees, and the rest is allocated to the company's supporters and "client / investor."

A combination of client / investor is very convenient. If the quarterly data looks good, just ask your customers (and investors) to buy more services to support their investment. After all, they do not want their investments lose money, right?

Managers are trained to hype "Every employee should play a sense of ownership in their noble work, even if not get paid, it should be determined to work harder." Each employee is working flat out not knowing stake in their own hands has been diluted.

The company's share price plummeted from the outset. The company's foundation is built on fundamental unprofitable business, other people's meat company, we could not drink the soup. The company's products is basically yourselves, business objective is the stability of product sales. In fact, sales is the most important, the sales staff using the ignorance of customers technology deceive customers, get the millions of dollars in sales commissions and sped away, poor customer never get any sales commitments functions. But do not worry, sold to customers drawn cake can be solved by a never-ending support or sales consulting services.

For example, the sales staff to sell a series of seemingly tall function: "unlimited expansion!" And "zero downtime!", "Unlimited real-time deployment!", "Auto repair grid!" In fact, just one second modification within four places can be realized, even without having to restart a global cluster. Because of this deceptive, some customers refuse to pay five-year plan to deploy millions of dollars in infrastructure. This is entirely reasonable, is not it? Leading to customer refused to pay for the service contract sales fraud on a daily basis. Few people feel so calls between panic, CEO and the CEO can not get through. After all, CEO never lie. We know, CEO has super powers, able to fix the problem on software architecture overnight.

When salespeople earn millions of dollars of commission, managers are also beneficiaries. They just sit around drinking tea, you can raise, but also do not need to take on additional responsibilities. Managers also added bonus, but employees who really create products for the company never get promoted, even 1 percent raise each year do not expect.

Executives and public relations staff disclose sales figures based on future bookings also like to think, rather than actual sales commitments. Executives and public relations staff never mentioned one-time consulting revenue and product revenue, even if only low-margin nature of the company knot on agile programming team liar.

The entire company, can only be access to investment support from the outset financial problems by nepotism. Although the company advertised "can compete with AWS", but in fact has not even own hardware or hosting service; although the company advertised for a "win big data", but other companies are turning to a more real-time processing architecture from big data; although the company advertised to "build software to teach the whole world," but in fact can not even run their own internal systems - designed by a 22-year-old child, Ruby application run by another 19-year-olds.

It turns out that "to win big data" eventually led to layoffs, and completely out of the big data market, though the company promises that they are the only company able to write software in the world. If the agile team within three years, can not hide their lies, or get out before being unmasked, how can we provide value for customers?

However, I totally do not worry about the company's executives. It turns out that no matter what other departments occurred, they have been very moist. Company incentives even corruption to such an extent?

The company was founded in 2013, it is still used in other companies already since 2009 failure of the product, but when a multi-billion dollar company in trouble, no one will notice that they can not deliver the product details a series of questions .

The company's executives have been saying from the outset, the company "from the first day of the establishment is ready for an initial public offering." Over the years, this lie has continued. Soon, workers began collective fled after the 8th plenary meeting of the staff, but in the meantime, executives are still ignoring the employees' questions or concerns, always live in their own grandiose fantasies.

Two years later, this great multi-billion dollar market value of the company's CEO is gone. CEO in two years because "has reached retirement age" and leave, this is probably not the Dongyaojunxin not. If you have retired in recent years, so why set up a new company? Perhaps it is because you think you can take the opportunity to make a killing, do you think again and again to deceive and do not fulfill their commitments will not be found? It does not matter, you take the company to the arrogant, lazy and ignorant assistant, it is they lie.

However, all this is only the beginning. Companies do about it?

Company management

Management of instability will be a great blow to employee information. Every 10 months on for a new manager. Each manager will have different ideas on the management of subsidiaries and corporate behavior itself.

More than three years, I changed five managers, each working in a different department.

The first manager: from October 2013 to June 2014

Managers from a start-up companies acquired at the end of the term of protection it is gone.

Since the company was acquired from the manager, not directly employed, so he does not agile brain residual powder, unlike some managers later.

The second manager: from June 2014 to November 2014

I report directly to the manager's manager.

Third Manager: November 2014 to January 2016

After the second manager to leave, I was transferred to an insignificant department. The third manager of the work we have done hostile, because we work independently of the rest of the company, and our company's overall goal has nothing to do.

The third manager was quick brain residual powder, but also for the CEO toe.

Finally, the third manager also canceled all meetings of the sign, and I cut off contact and up to a year. I was forgotten in a small corner of the company, a person unknown to work.

Fourth Manager: January 2016 to April 2016

Later, I received an email mobilization. Basically that is, they will be in a few weeks I will be assigned to a new team.

At that time the heart of the team is expanding staff. The staff team is only responsible for the implementation of daily work. Some are basically very low value of consultation, these untrained staff we just do routine maintenance work or look after the servers. And this sector 80% of the time required to travel (Monday to Thursday are required to travel). However, this one was not my job description.

Fifth Manager: April 2016-October 2016

Then later, I received an unexpected e-mail, asking me to return to department in 2013 belongs.

Process? Just like a joke

Sales, support, software

Recruitment had my reason is because when they're working on some existing open source project, we need to do sales and support services for the project. They want to provide a typical license / warranty service and support, but they need some sales, as well as developers to provide practical support (that's me!), Pre-sales technical staff (or me!), Client architecture audit (or I !), fix bug (or me!) and enhancements (or me!).

Their plan is simple: I sold the company developed products "Open Source Support", and then direct all support questions thrown at me. As long as the problem of supporting downtime occurs, I need to single-handedly take on the entire project. I am surprised that, where the need exists in the company, they are basically reselling my service.

I spent a few months as a first-line support and sales team training materials. I am sure that our support website will appear on the first Google search results.

When on-line with my support website and related promotional page, we received a lot of set-off sales request (inbound sales request).

Digression: For sale

"Set-off sales" (inbound sales) like supermarkets, and other customers just walk in, you see that the price of chicken is $ 3.99 / kg, the customer accepts the price, and then complete the transaction. Very simple.

As opposed to "push marketing" (outbound sales) refers to the selling outwardly. Sell out the need to build relationships with customers. If you are operating in good faith, we can provide customers with help and let them benefit from your product. If you discard the integrity of business, then it is to deceive customers: the use of fear to miss playing with customers, so that their CEO told the CEO that they should buy your product, but do not need to consult a technician to conduct a feasibility study, told them the next technological revolution the impact they cause, they must immediately catch up with the trend of building software. Of course, only you can provide this kind of help.

Within a few weeks after the start paid support service, we will receive a week for at least six on-site customers. These customer requests are very basic, because our company refused to provide any public pricing - typical sales tricks, such as customer asking about the price, he did not know, how much is your budget? Common marketing messages and from the following:

"May I ask how do you charge?"

"Thank you for your e-mail, may I ask where are you?"

"Why are you asking my address, I just want to know your fee, please."

"Our sales are divided by region, so I have to divide you into the correct area."

"I'm A province."

"Internal forwarding a message: A client province quote"

Then, the customer will no longer be contacted.

Most salespeople do not want to interact with customers, half of which will simply refuse to arrange for the customer support.

I have seen nothing more than a dozen customer inquiries.

why?

Sales Inspired by the commission, only to sell the company's other high-profit, low practicality of fraudulent products, because they do not care about our one-time support for open source products. Pay the same effort to sell the opportunity to win up to $ 500 transaction, how will care about $ 20,000 to 200,000 open source support services?

Ignoring advice from others

On the one hand, dozens of employees can receive each year more than one million dollars in commission income, and of course executives.

On the other hand, create a product of diligent staff intern is considered dispensable, because the development and engineering technology never bring any income. Obviously, only the sales staff and executives are the people who make money. Developers insignificant, no technical content, and even pay their salaries will reduce the company's profits. So why not dismiss all developers, and then simply sell their products built like, no maintenance, we do not need to make improvements, would not unlimited profits? !

After several years, I have tried to introduce an unstructured environment development process , and failed, because the project leaders hope I do their job, and that I do not like communication or teamwork.

I have tried to provide support for people to run the project no experience of running in the background from the production of services to , the results have failed, because the project leader believes his ideas is the first principle, he does not think 'server' is a real problem, because everything is running well on his macbook air.

I have tried to improve work processes and the introduction of repeatable test results also failed, because the project leaders believe that the company's servers to complete all of the tests he wants, any other person's test is not important, although he repeatedly in the introduction of a test failure version of.

I did everything to try. However, in the end the project leader said he is the person in charge of the project, do not find fault with others - he will be all my constructive feedback are considered to find fault. I want my managers to be able to participate in the project, but when my manager made five proposed changes to the project leaders, have been ignored. Managers no right to interfere or to resolve any problems, we can only wait for a miracle.

Overall, our software is not a small scale, these problems are not small. This is the software thousands of companies are using, but our development process like the 1993 workshop. As long as the package can be deployed, no one cares about, is not it? Today the software industry to promote safety, reliability, design, efficiency, and the establishment of a sustainable development team is not important, we need to prepare and submit the software, we can ignore all feedback, because the project leader is always right, the whole the world is wrong.

I have tried to improve our products, but all ultimately failed.

Fraud and money: the story of start-up companies

The new company
Employee-owned shares; employee master =
On the market soon lost; the lies start
High-level changing, staff mobility is very large
CEO of changing
Whimsical 80/20 rule
CEO of nepotism who have access to promotions, raises and bonuses
Although not a formal employee, but nepotism CEO has the privilege to buy company stock
Product still does not work, never even work properly
The only customers but also invested several hundred million dollars?
Although our product does not work, but sold at a price of millions of dollars?
The company whites have the final say
Busy day full of fire
The company will be sent to all employees free of personal information to foreign crooks
Liars sales strategy
Sales-oriented: motivate sales staff to sell products at all costs, even including direct fraud
Dozens of commission for a sale of more than a million dollars
Publicly traded, there is no possibility forever
Others seek to acquire, but no one is willing to bite
How the new CFO is not clear such a company can survive for so long