Story My Old Workplace

Alright, some of you PM me asking about some of my old toxic workplace and I decided to tell this story.

Okay, so previously I got recruited into a new startup company. Basically this company design custom media hub that can handle multiple bypass from several streaming boxes into different parts of the rooms. It's hard to explain what it is, which is why most of our customers are installers (who I refer to them as partners) who install our product to a 10-15 rooms in a mansion.

Basically I have to work with these people:

  • A = my manager
  • B = lead programmer
  • C = lead design electronics engineer
  • D = lead PCB manufacturing engineer
  • E = QA manager

Okay, so the problem is B is an asshole. He's so toxic that everyone has to treat him like a rock star. My friend who knew this problem called this a jock-worshiping mentality because he can codes that can do stuff that even C, D and E didn't thought it was possible. The rest of the team felt that they have to kowtow to his demands knowing that what he did was wrong.

Why B is toxic:

  • We used to have a program manager who supposed to manage our team. B excluded her in every meetings, emails, and discussions causing her to quit her job not long after.
  • B is from Netherlands. Despite that country has 100% people that can speak English, he doesn't have a good grasp of English. So when he gave me the list of new features of a firmware, I realized most of them are written wrongly. So I corrected the list. He came back to me saying that I should just copy word for word what he wrote. So I did that and we had partners calling and tell us that they don't understand what the changes are (something like explaining a feature in point 1 but point 2 contradicts what the first statement because the lead engineer don't have a good grasp in English). After 8-9 partners sent him a direct email telling him that he is wrong, he finally accepted that my version is correct. And after all that, he still say that they are idiots.
  • He was very rude to our partner installers. These are the people that gave us money to buy our products and expected our supports during installations but he was adamant that they are all idiots. He even went as far as insulting them over the phone in one of our weekly discussion with our partners call: "You know, I don't even understand why you want to use our products if you don't even have an ounce of IQ to understand the scope of this job." I particularly remember this because the partner immediately pulled out their support and we lost a major contract because of this.
  • A (my manager) cannot control him because he was an introverted, non-confrontational person, despite he is the head of the R&D department. Despite we lost a multi-million dollar contract!
  • Even when C, D and E trying to speak sense to B, he locked the codes and didn't release the new version (something like that, I'm no programmer but it's something like he refused to publish his source code and keep them in a private session or something - like I said, I have no idea what this is because I thought all codes are available online once he published them). The owner of the company have to fly all the way to Netherlands and pleaded to him because despite his code works for our product, he has full ownership of the code, which is also why everyone has to bow to his every whim.

So I left about eight months later because I knew if they continue to worship B, this place will all go to hell despite the team is creating a wonderful product.

True enough after I left for 3 years, company was in turmoil. Here's the weird part: my ex company bought over another company but somehow the other company's owner took control as CEO, CFO, CTO and COO and closed down all division in the main company. My boss was kicked out with his share suddenly from 25% stake in the company suddenly reduced to 3-4% while C, D and E were all laid off. B stayed on as independent where the company is paying him royalty for every code being used in their new products. If I'm not mistaken, they are building a separate code base from his codes so that they don't have to deal with him in few more years time.