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Antiwork

My entire team was fired and then re-hired after working 30 hours straight

This was years ago, not that long after getting my first job. I thought you all would appreciate the tale. Before I was hired, the development manager had told the people in charge (who were salesmen, really) a product would take two years to build with their experienced team of developers. They decided to instead hire a new team of graduates to build it in six months. Six months later, they had a moment of “oh shit” and were trying to decide whether to outsource the work because we weren't performing according to their expectations. So they fired the whole team, even the guy they'd only hired two weeks before. Gave us official letters and everything. Now, the dude in charge was American, and we were British. He didn't realise that we could easily take him to court for that. But it didn't get that far. As the title says,…


This was years ago, not that long after getting my first job. I thought you all would appreciate the tale.

Before I was hired, the development manager had told the people in charge (who were salesmen, really) a product would take two years to build with their experienced team of developers. They decided to instead hire a new team of graduates to build it in six months.

Six months later, they had a moment of “oh shit” and were trying to decide whether to outsource the work because we weren't performing according to their expectations.

So they fired the whole team, even the guy they'd only hired two weeks before. Gave us official letters and everything. Now, the dude in charge was American, and we were British. He didn't realise that we could easily take him to court for that.
But it didn't get that far. As the title says, we worked 30 hours straight in order to get done what they needed for a demo they were giving to a customer, and they decided to rehire us.

The real kicker is that I wasn't even working on that product, and I never had been. I was doing something completely different, so it made zero sense to include me.

Yeah, I know, in retrospect I shouldn't have gone along with it. I should have let them fire me and sue them into oblivion. But that was a decade ago and I had no experience or confidence.

Anyway, within a year the rest of the team, four guys, had all quit. I stuck it out for five more years before the company was bought and my job was outsourced to India.

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