So, this story may sound unbelievable, but every word I'm going to tel you is true. If you've ever worked in startups, you will probably be able to relate more as there are a lot of psychopathic founders and CEOs who just do not care at all about their employees and make colossally stupid decisions all the time.
Now, I was C level in Silicon Valley for 10 years. I was CEO of my own startup that went on to sell. I had a good reputation. I'm a very capable engineer. One issue that plagues startups is that when they get their hands on an over-performing engineer, they will basically just heap work upon him/her. This happens in other lines of work too but is especially bad at software startups. You'll see where this comes in later.
So, I decided I wanted to relax for a bit and found a FinTech company with a high level but not C suite position that I applied for an easily got. Now, its pay was far below what I was used to but I didn't care much as I viewed this job as a way to relax for a few years.
The day I got hired I realized I had been hoodwinked. They let me know I was in charge of a new division of the company: building them a bank (they were a lender). This was part of what were called neobanks. There's a lot of them now but they were an early one. I was like, sure I can build you a bank. Sounded fun actually.
The first 5 months were kind of fun. I built and designed a great piece of software (the back end at least). Microservice based, security and stability focused bank running in GCP Kubernetes. It was highly complex and I was the only engineer working on it, including the code and infrastructure. They wanted it ASAP so I put documentation to the side, with their permission as was common at startups.
Eventually, I started issuing debit cards and we had live transactions, and everything went well. Then we added a front end engineer and started building it into the app.
Then things……started to get out of control. We had a wait list for the bank and it had over 500,000 users on it. They wanted to launch to all of them in 3 months. The backend was nowhere near close to being ready, we had no customer service in place, we were not anywhere near feature complete, etc.. But they wouldn't budge on the launch date.
Throughout this whole process, their demands of my work kept skyrocketing. I went from 40 hours a week to 60 then 80. I kept asking for resources but every other engineer at the company was code-camp educated and couldn't understand what I had built (I have a degree in computer engineering from a top school and have been coding professionally for 20 years….most of them for 2). I demanded they hire senior engineers to help me and they declined. I demanded they hire a devops team to get that off my plate. They declined. And I continually requested raises since this was not what I was hired for, I was doing way, way more and way, way more complex work than I was told I would be doing for a very low salary. All requests were denied. I made it very clear to them that if I was not given a raise, I would find work elsewhere.
I worked hard trying to prove to them I deserved a raise. I wrote 160,000 lines of code in 9 months. I coordinated with marketing, customer service, front end, finance, etc. to make this product come alive. I've never worked so hard in my life. I skipped meals, Drs appointments, dentist appointments, haircuts, etc. to get this out the door on time.
We finally shipped and tens of thousands of people signed up. We made over $50,000,000 in our first two weeks. I finally went in and demanded a raise or I walk. I don't know what they were thinking, but they said no and I went home. That was on a Friday.
I had developed a horrible drinking problem from all the stress. So I got drunk and around 1am sent in my resignation. Instead of calling and begging me to come back, the CEO and CTO called me the next day and actually threatened me. They said they'd blacklist me from ever working in tech again if I wasn't at my desk Monday. Fortunately I was well connected and knew they couldn't touch me.
Monday, I shaved and got a haircut and a nice steak. Never felt better.
Though my contacts at the company, I heard everything was chaos. See, the bank didn't manage itself. There was a lot of manual work, which no one had bothered to have me teach anyone or write down. So the product quickly fell apart and they shuttered it a week later, losing around 200,000 customers and all that revenue.
They started hiring a new team to rebuild from scratch. I kept tabs on their LinkedIN. The new engineers listed themselves as “Banking Engineer” and they topped out around 12, plus a few managers.
By the time they re-launched the bank, it was during Covid. They've since gone public and they have less than 25,000 customers.
The real kicker was they had done a fundraising round while I was employed that took their valuation from $400 million to $1.1 billion on the back of expected growth of the bank. They lost so much money, they had to do another fundraise at a valuation of $500 million. So not giving me cost them $600 million in valuation. Today the company is public and it's market cap is $59 million.
This is the 3rd time a company did not notice the value I was actually bringing to the table and let me go only for it to the the stupidest decision they ever made. Two others fired me and went out of business less than 6 months later.
And of course I made a few calls and two months later I had a cushy job paying me over twice as much.
CEOs always seem to think employees are just cogs in a wheel that are easily replaced. Not every cog…….sorry fuckers.