This is not about me but a friend. He is a full stack programmer and has quite some experience. Recently he got a job for which he made a full app, Netflix style, including Account management and all the other stuff, backend, frontend, and testing. The salary was set at around $5/hour. Yep that sounds bad, but were not in a first world country and while this is low, it is enough to live here. Now after I have seen him work nights in a row to finish this product, the employer was late on answering the invoice and said that they did not track his hours. So he had to give an estimate which he did to arrive at $800. Then the employer said that the usual pay somehow is only $400, but my friend would only get $250 (WTF?). If he would didn't accept that he would be fired.
I told him to immediately ask his co-workers their pay and consider leaving since this employer is seems manipulate. He did not want to talk back because he is concerned about his job security, but this is just ridiculous. If I were not here, he probably would have accepted these conditions.
I am disgusted by how much these employers are willing to exploit vulnerable people and then justify it because “we're a small start-up”. He insists that it is fine.