"Stop asking stupid questions, it doesn't help."
This raised an eyebrow. This guy wasn't even pretending to be nice anymore. He sure wasn't holding back. Fine. He wanted to play this game? Confidence bolstered by knowledge of my finances and my eventual plan to leave, I was more than willing to oblige. I held my peace, biding my time till the time for the performance review came.
HR was in the call, and before my CTO arrived, she told me that he could be a little high strung and come across as curt at times, leading me to suspect that this wasn't the first time he had rubbed someone the wrong way. However, she assured me that my CTO was "not a malicious person". I don't think the lady actually understood the problem. It wasn't malice. I had never considered my CTO to be a malicious person. My problem with him was that for a dude in his mid-thirties, he had the emotional control of a teenager.
Then my CTO arrived in the call. He started off by saying that while he had noted some improvement in my performance, he still wasn't confident in my ability to work in the company and he would continue to keep monitoring. He brought up certain concerns such as my perceived slowness in replying in the Slack chat, and actively encouraged me to "defend" myself against his accusations. I was amused at this. This guy wanted a fight? He had no idea what was coming.
It was my turn to talk. Here, I applied the Sandwich Method that I had learned during my ACTA days - start with something nice before saying something negative. I led with how much fun I'd had in these six months compared to the last three years at the previous, much larger company, which was the truth. The variety of tasks assigned to me had made things a lot more interesting. He seemed to be tickled pink by this.
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| Time for the stick. |
And then it was time to give him the stick. The guy never suspected what he was walking into.
I began voicing my concerns, like how the things like code cleanliness and organization that he kept saying he valued and were missing in my work, just weren't present in the existing code base either. It was a huge mess, with me having to fix problems that had existed for years. Like the recent Cross-site Scripting vulnerability issues, that I'd already brought up in my first few weeks at work. I had thought it was bad; now that I stepped up my game (as he had wanted me to do) and actually started proactively looking for ways to improve the code base, it was worse than I initially thought. I stopped short of saying his code base was garbage, but the implication was clear: I blamed the tech leadership. Honestly, I figured that since this guy enjoyed pointing fingers so much, he wouldn't mind receiving some of the same. Seems fair, right?
Nope!
In a nutshell, he blew the fuck up. Accused me of trying to turn this performance review around on him, and questioning why I chose to bring it up now rather than during Tech meetings. He told me I should be more careful with my words (rich coming from him, really) and yes he was doing a bad job which was precisely why he needed people like me to step up. As he raged, HR had to step in and try to smooth things over.
On my part, as I calmly sat there and smoked a cigarette, listening to his raving through the computer screen and HR trying to stop him before he went too far, I couldn't help feeling unbelievably smug. This had turned out better than I had anticipated. My original intention had been to gently point out that the existing code base was every bit as crappy as his opinion of my work, and that he should maybe assume some responsibility being the CTO and all. Instead, he had chomped down on the bait like an idiot, and his little meltdown in front of HR was showing exactly what I thought: this guy was a loose cannon.
Aw, poor baby. I think I hurt his feelings.
Some of you may be asking; what did I hope to gain from this? Well, nothing at all. I understood that he had all the power in this contest of wills. But I had absolutely nothing to lose here; mentally I had already checked out and was prepared to be fired on the spot.
More importantly, my point had been made, and I hope it wasn't lost on him. All those times he had been putting me down in front of the entire team, he had forgotten one thing: I was a no-name web developer with no reputation to hurt. He, on the other hand, was the CTO and co-founder of the company. Should I ever decide to actually stop holding back, I could do a lot more damage to him than he could ever do to me. This was merely a scaled-down demonstration on my part; I had humiliated him in front of HR rather than the entire Tech Department. Actually, scratch that - I had exploited his weakness and caused him to humiliate himself. After all, regardless of the critical content of my message, I had unfailingly been polite and professional.
He had been punching down constantly. But once I started punching back after six months of taking his shit, I made sure it fucking hurt.
I was smiling the rest of the day, after the review ended. It later struck me that I hadn't had the opportunity to apply the last piece of the Sandwich Method as originally planned. HR had ended the meeting in a hurry.
In hindsight, though, I recognize that what I did to my own CTO is nothing to be proud of. No matter what a childish asshole he had been, I had allowed myself to be dragged down to that level.
Shit, I was supposed to be better than that. What had I become?
I'm not sorry it happened to him, because he pretty much had it coming. But I'm sorry it had to be me who did it. I've always prided myself on being above this sort of thing. This incident had shown me that when push comes to shove, I'm as capable of petty cruelty as anyone else. Hopefully, going forward, this does not become a pattern. It would make me a truly frightening employee to hire. Most people think that the revenge of a disgruntled tech geek is to hack databases and destroy code bases. No, what I had done was far more insidious... and legal to boot.
Getting the axe
And then it happened. One Thursday evening, he messaged me on Slack to berate me about yet another mistake I'd made, and admittedly it was a sizeable one. He told me to fix it by morning, and I actually made an honest attempt to do so.In the morning, out of the blue, the DevOps Engineer sent me a message on Slack. As I no longer have access to that conversation, I can only recreate it from memory.
Him: I'm so sorry to hear what happened, and I just want you to know I had nothing to do with his decision and hope you find something soon.
Me: Oh, am I getting fired?
Him: Oh fuck, you didn't get the email?
Me: Oh, am I getting fired?
Him: Oh fuck, you didn't get the email?
Well, there you go. I wasn't sure I could look down on my CTO even more at this point, but kudos to him, he certainly was making a case for it. Not only had he fired me via email (what a spineless move - even the last guy to do it back in 2011 had extended me the professional courtesy of doing it face-to-face), he'd screwed even that up by sending it to multiple people... except me.
The charitable interpretation is that the CTO had finally had enough of me making mistakes and decided to just put me out of my misery instead of dragging out the probation process any longer than he already had. The cynical interpretation is, well, I'd finally given him a plausible excuse to do what he was itching to do.
I received the email in question, after the CTO re-sent it. The first two lines went along the lines of "your contract has been terminated as of September 11, 2020" and I didn't really bother to read the rest. I mean, I did scan the contents of the following paragraphs, all pertaining to how I failed as an employee, in cringey broken English to boot. But it was ultimately unimportant. The most relevant lines were the first two. There was only one thought running through my mind.
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| Saved by the axe. |
I was free. Free of this douchebag and his appalling behavior.
The first thing I did was to inform my family, and my soon-to-be ex-colleagues. And then I took a nice long coffee break. Rather than mull over the fact that I had effectively just been fired, I was actually more tickled by the fact that it had happened on September 11th.
Aftermath
Sure, this was a stressful six months. But I have really very little to complain about. Swear to God, I've had worse.After all, however unpleasant I found my experience with the CTO to be, I did absorb whatever lessons I could. I picked up new tools, new techniques, and got to apply some stuff that, up to this point, had been little more than a hobby. I collected yet another interesting war story to add to my ever-growing collection. And I got paid for it.
On the CTO's side, if my work was really as useless as he claimed it to be; well then, I guess some poor sucker just paid me six months to deliver jackshit, didn't he? It could just be me being a hopeless optimist and overly determined to seek out that silver lining, but I honestly don't see myself as the loser in all this.
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| The silver lining |
I may have failed to hold on to the job, but my failure was professional. I had merely failed to meet my CTO's technical expectations. His failure was far more spectacular - he had failed to meet my expectations of emotional maturity. He had failed as a person. The company had gotten rid of an underperforming dev, but it had retained a far larger problem - someone in a position of authority who simply did not have the correct temperament.
Landing that next job
The next two weeks were pure bliss. I swam every day. I wrote code, practised on my new MacBook Air and played games on my phone, all the while applying to jobs and attending Skype interviews. I wasn't worried despite the COVID-19 situation. From experience, getting a job took months. But I had already checked my financial reserves. I was good for a few years, especially since my parents and wife were being very understanding about the entire situation.All the while, I kept in contact with my ex-colleagues from that company, and their daily complaints about taking on my workload was like music to my ears. Hey, I no longer had to deal with that shit.
And then one evening, my ex-boss took me out to dinner and introduced to me the Director of an F&B company, the guy who would soon be my next boss. We talked about career goals and business plans over dinner and a cigarette. And next day, he messaged me to tell me to get up to speed on WordPress, while he got HR to prepare my application.
Shit, that had escalated quickly. But I liked the dude. And while my nice break was a lot shorter than I had originally envisioned, I was perfectly willing to work for him despite the fact that the office was at the other end of the island.
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| YouTube tutorials |
I got to work, watching YouTube videos on how to code in WordPress, and one day before I was due to start work, I was already being drafted to attend meetings.
There was some consternation the next day with HR when I discovered that my probationary period would be six months. And that my job title was "Manager" of the newly-created InfoComm Department. I was slightly mollified at my generous pay package, which was far more than I'd ever been paid. But still... Manager? Christ!
The first two weeks were a bit of a struggle as we sussed out each other's working style. I found that my sometimes obsessive style of working meshed nicely with his propensity for hustling late into the night. Eventually, I ended up working from home again because the traveling was eating into the working time. I was tasked to bridge the company's e-store to its CRM (a success story in its own right), and by the third week, we deployed to Production.
Six months later...
My probationary period has officially ended. In the space of that half-year, I have deployed an ungodly number of features, met insane deadlines and in the process expanded the code base by roughly five times. The code base was a mess, but my boss didn't care as long as shit worked, and was delivered promptly.It was hell at times, doing all that work all by my lonesome, but I'm happy. The fact that I have money and don't actually need the job, probably helps. And what I like about my current boss is, while the deadlines he throws at me are sometimes nuts, he has the sense to trust me to do my job and stay out of my way.
And just as importantly, nobody questions my worth to the company. Even in the short time that I've been there, my presence has most definitely been felt. If not in terms of my personality, definitely in terms of the work I've done.
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| Meeting targets. |
More than once, I've been given the chance to show the company what I'm made of, and I like to think that on most occasions, barring a couple mishaps here and there, I've stepped up. There have been no major conflicts. Things could be better, but as I've recently experienced for myself, they could also be hell of a lot worse.
OK, I'm done!
I don't write all this with the intention of besmirching my ex-CTO's good name. Note that the name of neither CTO nor company was mentioned. Not once. Some developers don't have a problem openly trashing their former employers. Not my style. If I speak of any former employers, whether it be good or bad, they will always remain unnamed. That's just how it is.Also, I have no personal interest in what befalls him or the company. This is merely an interesting story about yet another asshole boss in yet another short chapter of my career. Gotta admit, this lovely character gave me plenty of material. If you managed to learn something from this, great.
And this also marks another period in my life where I worked in three different companies in the space of one year. It's been nine years since the last time, and I'm getting too old for this shit. Still, I can take something positive from this. The fact that I could lose my job, and secure another one just like that - in the midst of a global pandemic, no less - tells me good things.
Talk about third time lucky!
T___T
T___T
