Friday, December 16, 2011

War Story: The Stock List

A day like any other: In order to test that all the categories of products are behaving correctly on the website, I spend an hour writing a page to display a table of in-stock (further subdivided) and out-of-stock items.

About 6 business days after finishing, while waiting for review: instead of reading the entire history of every single Planet MySQL blog, I spend another half hour fancying up the CSS of my page.  My boss catches me, asks what the page is about, rejects the hypothesis that testing is important, and lectures me.  We are not making enough money to pay you your pathetic rate; do not do extra work.

Several business days later: the system is finally approved and live.  Nobody in the office is trained on it when an order comes in.  The order is for an out-of-stock item.  The Big Boss is rather angry, and demands to know whether there is some way to find out "what the site thinks it has in stock."  My boss answers "No."  I am silent.  I'm already looking for a new job.

Business Day 88 (about four months into the 90-day evaluation period): after 2 days and 2 emails, I finally get a meeting with the Big Boss to announce that I'm going to terminate my at-will employment after Day 89 to start my next job, 45 miles closer to home, at $pay * 1.38 + $benefits * 1.25.  (I ultimately decide to tell him the exact offered salary, though I can't tell if he's BS'ing me on whether it's an acceptable/common question to ask, because I figure he won't match it.  He doesn't even try to come up with a counteroffer.)  He threatens that I might need to stay 2 weeks because he doesn't know if I can leave.  The last project was finished somewhere around Day 76, and has been waiting for review.  Every time I pinged my boss on a review, ever, including this final task, the answer was: "later today."

Day 89 was thankfully uneventful.

No comments: