All companies are different, not every company hires undergraduate programmers, you know, engineering students who are looking to gain some experience while earning a few bucks, this, of course, wasn’t one of those companies.
Among those companies that hire undergraduate students there are some which see the opportunity of having a highly motivated individual working on a lower salary but gaining experience and industry mentorship from other experienced engineers, fostering their growth and potentially hiring them after they graduate. But this wasn’t one of those companies either…
I knew one of their marketing associates, we were going to the same uni, just different careers, she sold it to me as a great opportunity to put all my knowledge to work and gain some experience and it certainly looked like!, the salary wasn’t too high, but it was ok, I was in for learning, plus making some money for a student was good, the timings were flexible and I didn’t have to go to the office, they didn’t even have one! so it was 100% remote, I didn’t think too much about it, I passed their interview and joined immediately.
I believe, now that I’m seeing things in perspective, the first red flag was that, without counting the CTO, I was the only programmer, not only that, it was my first day and the guy goes like… hey! I’ll be your manager, here is the link to the subversion, make sure you clone the code and install the dependencies, you know maven, right?, I’m going for a 3 weeks vacation tomorrow, here a link to the tasks I hadn’t even cloned the repo and I was already on my own… red flags? it was more like a red billboard!
The company basically ran a news hub, they scraped news websites for headlines and presented them on their site, linking to the original source, so, a lot of parsing and web scraping, stuff I’ve never done before, of course…
And there was I… new code, new job, no mentorship. At least I was working on something new so I got to learn a few things. The tasks were mostly implementing crawlers for new sites we used as sources for news, it was mostly copy/paste from other crawlers and trial and error with regex to extract the text from the HTML.
The three weeks passed, the enemy was under control, the new crawlers were tested and ready to be shipped, my boss was… happy?… impressed?… actually… neutral.
I spent the next two months writing new crawlers for other sites, updating the old ones… rinse… repeat… over and over again. The good thing was, I was making some money on my own… it ain’t much… but it was honest work, I could buy books and go out from time to time without asking my parents for money.
Summer break was approaching and we had family vacation plans, so I discussed it with my boss, he was ok with me going on vacation but I had to work on a project those two weeks, at my own pace but, after two weeks I had to show some progress on it, if not finish it.
Then we spent some time discussing my new project, I had to build a tweet-bot, a program to scan the most popular news and tweet them automatically on the website’s twitter account, this was interesting, I wanted to do something with Twitter API for some time and this was a great opportunity to get my hands dirty with it.
I worked on the project over those two weeks, either over night or early morning before going out. I had one progress call with my boss and showed how I was computing the most popular news and, at the end of those two weeks I had a working prototype to show when I was back.
My boss’ last email gave me instructions on how to deploy the tweet-bot and test it on the site’s production environment, so I did that, it worked fine.
I tried to reach my boss after I came back, no response. I checked the TODO list, no tasks assigned to me… so I started working on the ones I knew how to do: some maintenance on the website, new crawlers for other news sources and updating the ones the were broken due to changes in the structure of the target website. My salary was already three weeks late and my boss was nowhere to be found, so… I emailed the admin guy about the late salary…
The response was short and painfully to-the-point:
Your salary won’t come this month because you no longer work with us
What the actual fuck? I was fired without telling me I was fired?, why was I fired?, my boss never gave me any feedback about my work, he seemed happy about what I’ve done. I replied back mentioning that no one told me I was no longer part of the team and that I’ve been working on tasks left by my manager, if this was the case, I would expect someone telling me I was not expected to do anything else. The answer really threw me off…
… if you check your contract, there’s no mention of any notice to terminate the employment relation, technically we haven’t done anything wrong…
Fucking lawyers and their “technicalities”… fuck the contract and and what it mentions and fails to mention… this was fucking wrong… the cherry on top was:
You should be grateful you got paid the first three months, most undergraduates would work for free just to get the experience…
Are you kidding me? you “follow” the contract to silently fire me but then you don’t when it comes to pay because it doesn’t suits you?
Long story short… it took several emails, a bit of googling to find everyone’s phone numbers because we were not working from the same country, many threats to report them with the labor authority and actually reporting them to get my last salary… one and a half months later…
The salary wasn’t that much and it probably wasn’t worth the hassle, but those son of a bitches were for sure not expecting me to make them pay… they’re probably used to look down at everyone and get everything their way screwing everyone up but… not me… ultimately, it wasn’t about the money it was about what was right.