Comment on Pros and cons of getting a job at a very small software company? (14 employees)
vrek@programming.dev 7 months ago
Ok, I’ll give my experience. I was hired as basically a paid intern. I was in high school, I “knew” computers like a nerdy teenager knows computers… Not real knowledge of their workings but I played with some programming(I got hello world to work using perl) , I could install linux(in the early 2000s, I bought copy of Debian Linux on 7 cds). I was basically told I would be an assistant to the other computer technician.
A week after I got hired, he got fired. For the next several months people got hired and fired after a 2-3 weeks. The company was 3 people, myself, the owner, his wife did the accounting. I didn’t know what I was doing, googling what I could to figure stuff out(i now know that’s normal but also now know how to Google correctly). I leaned on the owner to figure out things. I don’t know if your job is in computers but these are things I learned later were absolutely idiotic.
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If a computer came in with a suspected virus, standard protocol was no research or investigation… Format and reinstall.
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We had corporate clients (main client was a credit union), we gave the windows CD and license code to each teller with no record of what they were. He sold the license at the price he bought then for from staples.
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All servers had local admin accounts. All local admin accounts had similar passwords. I was the only person who knew what those passwords were.
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My boss thought time spent documenting was time wasted.
Anyways I stayed there for 4 years. It was not perfect and I learned so much wrong stuff. It was a decent job, my boss had really weird rules(why so many people got fired), and my time would of been spent better learning correct information.
That said I ended up causing the company to go bankrupt and the owner and his wife are now Christian consulers…
Oaksey@lemmy.world 7 months ago
How did you cause them to go bankrupt?
vrek@programming.dev 7 months ago
Long story short… Most of the money the company earned was from the credit union. I went through a depression phase and tried to kill myself (I’m doing better now) so I was inpatient in a mental ward for about a month.
The credit union got a computer security audit from the ncua(similar to fdic but for credit unions). My boss could not access any system. No servers, no firewalls, no intrusion detection systems, nothing. I had the passwords but was unable to be contacted and “documentation was a waste of time”.
They failed the audit. Credit union basically asked “we pay you for computer security, we failed an audit for computer security, so why do we pay you?”
Contract was lost and company went under shortly afterwards.
mipadaitu@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Your boss caused the company to go bankrupt due to his behavior.
vrek@programming.dev 7 months ago
Mostly but that doesn’t make as good of a story 😁
randomdeadguy@lemmy.world 7 months ago
all that time spent documenting, probably