Iconoclast Blast

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June 11, 2004

Prophetic

Remember this entry: Another Contract Concern? In it I essentially presented my concern that they would hire, temp to permanent, a younger, able bodied, male to replace my iconoclastic self at $Job-1.

Well, that's almost exactly what they did. They hired, permanent, not one but TWO (2) younger, able-bodied, males to replace me, (plus one contractor) and had me train them (and pass my work to them). Then, when they did the code freeze, they ended my contract, on March 3. Can you say age and gender discrimination, at the very least?

They didn't want to pay me more than $76K as a permanent employee, nevermind that I worked an average of 45 hours a week, and even with not getting holiday, sick or vacation pay (about 4 weeks worth) I cleared $89K in the 1.5 months I worked in 2003. Not counting the time off, I would have cleared $11K if it was all year. They wanted me to take a 2005% pay cut, just to get 4 weeks holiday/pto, and a lower insurance cost (for kaiser, IIRC - bleah), but they didn't even have 41K matching (which was worth ~$21+ per month, and just about paid the difference between the insurance costs.) I would have lost money, and still worked slave hours in an abusive culture.

The cherry filling the cake, of course, is that about 2 weeks after I was let go, they sacked the VP of Engineering who I'm fairly sure set up the scenario for my departure (he "resigned" abruptly).

The chocolate fudge icing on the cake is that I am now working at a new $Job for a nice, well established $Company, with a cluefull $Boss, on an embedded Linux product. Yes, it's contract, but if I can get my brain around some of the low level stuff involved, it is pretty good for my career in Linux systems development. I'm also not working 1 hour days yet, and it's kind of nice. My new $Boss doesn't micromanage too much, and I'm working with bright people.

Still, should I look into suing the old company for wrongfull termination?

Posted by ljl at June 11, 2004 3:4 PM

Comments

Hey, congratulations on escaping! And too bad about Bruce. 8)

Your TypeKey setup isn't working. Mine wasn't either until I changed my setting to point at "egbok.com" instead of "egbok.com/anger". You have a more normal situation with a DNS entry for the blog, so your solution will differ from mine. If you paid Six Apart's fee, their support isn't bad.

Posted by: Howard Owen at June 12, 2004 9:34 AM

It should work now. I had to change my config with TypeKey to use my master MT subdomain, not my blog subdomain.

Posted by: ljl at June 15, 2004 2:4 PM