This was a story two years back, so now it's time to share because some people I worked with lurked in here.
So in the beginning of 2021, I took this particular job because they are full-time and not contract. My previous job was wonderful, and my manager promised me that they would need my services 5 years into it but I don't trust anything that says contract on your offer letter.
Coming back to this job, I was hired as a technical writer. I would liaise with engineering and firmware developers to update our manuals.
A month into the job, I realised the whole thing, despite having the founder and co-founder in the project management, the whole schedule is run by a bully who wrote the firmware for the hardware they produce. This was a person who is a bully which I should explain further:
- There is a project manager lady whose job is to take notes on what they are working on and put this in a scrum meeting. This bully not only ignored her but would not email her any important stuff about running projects. He didn't even invite her to any of the meetings.
- When they hired a new embedded programmer (guys who wrote firmware), he was so hard on them that 5 of them left within weeks after talking to him. Two of them were humiliated in the call saying that they should been doing a side hustle by programming C++ for college kids. One of them, the most pleasant woman I've known, cried in the call when he called her skills are made to teach, not to work in a competitive business.
- I wasn't spared either. When he wrote the notes of new changes, it was filled with bad grammar (I used Grammarly) and put it in our manual update. He came back to me, berating me in a live call on why I changed his grammar (he's Swedish).
- He was very rude to some support guys because of the new implementation he made in the firmware which caused further tinkering to make everything work.
I would say that this is a toxic jock mentality running in the company. The founder and co-founder know this guy is a superstar but wouldn't stop him from bullying other people in the company. And him behaving like a jock because one of the firmware changes he made caused a competitor's hardware to be obsolete. The founder and co-founder were so happy with his work that they allowed his bullying around the company.
So it wasn't a huge surprise that I quickly planned my exit.
After I left, I was so happy with my new workplace.
A few days ago, some ex-colleagued called me up that their company went through a whole lot of changes. They bought over a new company and for some reason, they merged management with them. This took out most of the original engineering team as they were focusing on a different direction and the original stuff they were working on was put in the back seat.
And the bully?
For some reason, they stopped hiring new embedded programmers and he alone has to work through all the current bugs on their hardware. According to some, once all the bugs are fixed, he would be laid off.
The co-founder was fired immediately on the spot (which I'm happy about because this guy was supportive of that bully) and the founder was relegated to R&D on other projects.