This Blog Has Moved!

My blog has moved. Check out my new blog at realfreemarket.org.



Your Ad Here

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Failed Ex-Employer

In the summer of 2009, I worked for a startup. It was lousy execution of a stupid idea. The founder got funding primarily because he was friends with a VC, and he was involved with a successful startup in the past.

I occasionally check their website. They've mostly stopped updating it. They're officially deadpool now. The "Rails Advocate's" startup from 2008 also failed. They haven't updated their website since 2008, but it's still there.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your previous employers seem like fools. They could make easy, free money by suing successful companies that maybe use the same programming language or have something in common with them.

Anonymous said...

I did hear of one company that had broken software on their website that wouldn't even install on a computer suing a company that had working software. Their case never got off the ground as they got stuck on the first point lobbied back to them, which was simply to state how their broken software was similar to working software.

Anyone can write software that DOES NOT WORK.

Lawyers that take on cases like this are scum and use an implicit threat of violence to steal money.

It is the case of ignoring the obvious and just trying to have a case on paper that looks so-so, but on any investigation looks like junk.

Anonymous said...

A long time ago I worked hard for one employer. They were funded by venture capital. The software I had written was shown to a famous company, who agreed to give up a big sum of money for further development.

Well instead of getting a pay raise, the money went to hiring a couple of friends on big salaries. They earned a fortune more than I did despite my work bringing in the cash that was used to hire them!

My manager even said he thought one of the people he hired was rubbish, but hey it wasn't his money!

One of the new guys was given a non-job. Quite literally his code was never to be included in the released product.

The other guy produced buggy code that failed on the first step.

Anyway there was still a lot of the software that still worked. But the fools that ran the place wanted to ruin the software even more.

Another group in the company had produced a useless technology that just slowly everything down.

Management decided to port our software to run on this pointless, slow technology.

The software I worked hard to produce was doubly wrecked.

I got fired, but the idiots kept their high salaries and jobs.

Eventually the company got bought out by a larger company and the fools that wrecked the place made even more money.

Quite a few wasters without the b**** to tell management about their stupid decisions made a lot of money off the back of my work.

They decided to make money by selling the company to another company instead of producing real, working software which is what I wanted to do.

Doing real work is for fools as I found out.

In yet another company, the people that wrote useless software but sucked up to management and repeated their lies did well. Honest workers that wanted to produce real software were crucified. They were a bunch of crooks that just endlessly told lies to themselves.

Marco said...

That is all OK, that some firms have a lot of friends on payroll. That is an agorist economy.

Put yourself in a place of a guy who runs it. You can't raise your own salary - you will be taxed more, so, more worthless government workers and welfare moms are going to benefit from your risk.

You can't do anything to take that money that belongs to you, away from THEM.

But, you can easily hire few worthless friends with these benefits:

-They pay back in cash some of their salary after tax.

-You do them a favor, and they are going to return you a favor at some time.

-Their parents, who might be very influential, are going to owe you a favor.

-If anything else fails, at the very least, you have raised your costs, and decreased the amount of benefit government gets.

Many of you are ragging about that with the point that you should have been given extra money, and not that worthless worker.

In doing so, you are committing one of the socialist sins: namely, you are deciding something while having no responsibility for the risk on the capital involved. Doing so never going to result in capital being used most efficiently.

Also, no one has an obligation to keep you happy. You took the job? What's the problem? They started to ask more of you that you initially agreed for? Quit!

Don't let yourselves to degrade down to commie level, because then you can kiss your success a goodbye.

Anonymous said...

>In doing so, you are committing one
>of the socialist sins: namely, you
>are deciding something while having
>no responsibility for the risk on
>the capital involved.

Be careful. If the capital comes from a bank, then it is spun out of thin air and is not money created by surplus production or savings.

If the capital comes from a loan, then it is money spun out of thin air.

If the capital comes from a large company, then it comes from a monopoly and government favors.

In connection with the Icelandic bank bankruptcies, when a certain man went around buying up large amounts of London real estate, it wasn't with his own money it was from loans from Icelandic banks.

It wasn't a big man spending his own money. It was with bank loans. And as we know a bank loan is newly created money (fractional reserve system).

Marco's reply effectively says a worker is not allowed to reap the rewards of his work!

Anonymous said...

In reply to Marco, a couple of managers were looking to make money from hiring friends and friends of friends.

One manager got a recruitment bonus paid direct to himself for getting a friend hired. As this friend did no work directly built into the finished software product this was a rip-off.

Another manager had a personal friend who was a recruitment consultant. Therefore when this manager hired new staff, his friend would be paid money (potentially 20% of one year's salary).

Another manager was looking to make a private deal with recruitment consultants so that the 20% payment for finding staff would be split between the manager and the external recruitment consultant.

Essentially the managers were looking for rip off the company.

Anonymous said...

At one famous company, one new director was hired. He used to head up a consultancy company.

He got one of his old company's staff hired and one acquaintance.

Normally it was a rule at this company that each new hire pass a technical interview. However the director's friend was spared having to answer technical questions.

A couple of staff members were fired after these two new people were hired.

A connection cannot be directly proved, but if the number of positions is constant, hiring friends will cause existing staff to be fired.

If these people have had to work weekends and evenings throughout the past year, this sort of thing is blatantly unfair.

In the example I cited here, one staff member had to do extra work in the month before he was fired to make up for a new guy who didn't want to do his own work!

Worse still in return to doing the extra work, he was told he wouldn't be fired. After the work was done the promise was broken.

FSK said...

VC money is really bankster money. A lot of it comes from pension funds, including State pension funds.

Marco said...

Well, you could be right, people, if you had defined what is your stand: to amend the rules in order to counteract existing corruption, or to point out how the system is corrupt.

There is a merit in an argument that if a corporation is subsidized by inflation, then I am an owner too! However, all we would achieve this way is to descend further into the socialism around us.

This is exactly what the state wants from all of us, - to lose our human faces and to become thieves to each-other. Why? Because, among the thieves, the greatest thief is in honor. Honest people are the treat to the existence of the state (Notice I said "honest", not "stupid").

I suggest that we would do better as a group, if we limit ourselves to pointing out what is wrong with the system directly and indirectly because of the state, and not to pointing out the people trying their best abusing the system that deserves to be abused. They are fighters, even though their rank is leaches, they too eat at the root of the tree!

As to the arguments of the type that "I worked weekends and it is not fair to me", - those are so sick. Why did you worked without compensation, nor a valid promissory of the same?

I know why, I went through it too. I was weak and scared to assert my value. It was an easy and a cowardly comfortable for me to agree to their promises I knew they ain't going to keep. All I had to do is to pretend to myself that I have already won the negotiation, pretend that I believe them. Excuses were multiple and my brain delivered them in an instant of demand. However, I am very self-conscious. Not all are like that, many are auto-piloted by their subconscious. They may not see the reasoning of their own weakness and indecisiveness to take the risk and stick to the ultimatum of value, pay-me what I believe I worth or I will leave this very second.

What we need is a free market, not more government snitches on who hires friends. Market does all that. Once we insure that funds cannot be collected through inflation, and that the property can not be confiscated even under eminent domain, then we need not worry who hires who and why. Because everything they do that is not efficient will ultimately be counted against them by mister free market.

So, aim for the enemy and not at the shadows of the enemy. And mind your own business.

Marco said...

You must realize that when you are expressing your concern of how a firm you work at spends the money, you are being quite revealing. Your concern reveals your inner belief that you should be paid what the firm can afford to pay you, and not what you ultimately worth. You're one leg in Marxism. No? Did you think this through?

It is better to be brutal to yourself and have fight for your right to be paid. Demand what you want, and quit when you're not getting it. Work hard to become more valuable. Competition only makes you stronger.

Corporation will never be able to deliver in a free market. Why? Because it is not a capitalistic construct. A corporation is a form of communal ownership of production. It is allowed in capitalism, because the capitalism has freedom and allows even micro-communism if you so desire, between you and however many of your voluntary partners. Communism, on the other hand, can not afford such luxury as to allow a micro-capitalism within itself.

The only correct course of action for an co-owner of a communal property is to sell the shares, which is why I am not in the market. If I were, then I would put myself voluntary at the mercy of majority which is all that community property is (a mob rule).

This Blog Has Moved!

My blog has moved. Check out my new blog at realfreemarket.org.