Hi Penny,

this was a shocking read but I for sure know what you’ve went through. Four years ago, I was working for a company here in my home town in Germany for 6 months. They’d hired me for an “ok-ish” salary and payment was mostly not the bad of the job. My boss was an ex-cop and ex-soldier who had nothing better to do than to shout at his employees. I was told to join his office every other day, to sit down and then he started with the same procedure again and again: trying to read my mind, telling me that I would feel and behave like a king — which was not true. I had the job of a senior web-dev and two girls in education should work with me to create websites for the customers they were cheating (selling cheap websites by phone, telling them they will get their sites in a few weeks but in the end, the mostly never got them).

I remember that I wanted to teach the girls basic HTML, so that they not only create web designs in Photoshop, but also learn something. Here in Germany, you have a split education: on site at the company and a few days in the week at a school. The boss forbid it. The language here is a bit different, you’ve “Du” (which is like “you”) and you have “Sie”, which is a more respective kind of calling someone. Of course, the “Du” was the normal way to communicate with colleagues, but the boss told me, that the girls would’ve to call me “Sie” and “Mr. Klein” and not Dennis anymore.

The boss behaved more and more like a dictator and every day it was more painful to work at the job. Building a complete Wordpress based website incl. theming, doing phone support for the customers, who were always angry, because the had paid months ago, I still liked the job itself.

On one day, we had to move out of our office room. The girls and I had a separate room to work in a kind silent environment and to focus on the work. Funny things happened like: the had very old, small and bad colored TFT displays from a discounter and we had constantly complaining customers, because the colors didn’t match the CI. I told the boss to buy displays with IPS or at least new ones. No way — too expensive. They lost data, because their Windows XP PCs were locked by trojans, because someone has surfed on porn sites in the company — and I had to fix this — when data way lost, the girls had to redo the whole work.

The other room was huge and around two dozen people were calling people to sell entries on the companies website. Not a very good environment for design work. But that would’ve been ok if the dictator — pardon — the boss would not penetrate the whole company with his strange ideas and firing people every now and then, shouting at them and giving them names I better don’t repeat.

One month before I got fired, I had a little dispute with the boss and his girlfriend, who was the team leader of the hotline part of the company. They were reading my emails and told me that I simply couldn’t tell another person from the company that I found it strange and ridiculous, that I were forbidden (by the boss) to talk to him. That day, I called the owner, who was nearly never in the office and the one who had hired me, that I will not continue to work from the office. I told him that I will do home office from the next day or I quit. He agreed with the home office, but after a month, I got my fire notice via snail mail. I was fired. Luckily.

It was my hardest 6 months of my life and today, after four years, I still wake up sometimes in the night, having a nightmare of that job.

Luckily, I found a great job as sysadmin a couple of weeks later, which is my dream job, that I enjoy every day.

What I want to say with this way too long comment: this happens all the time and it’s unfair and it hurts, but for sure, you will sooner or later find a new job in Dallas or even again in the Silicon Valley.

I wish you all the best and respect for sharing this here!

Ciao
Dennis

PS. With regards to the salary: they didn’t wanted to pay the last monthly salary, so I had to hire a lawyer — in the end, I got ~70% of the last salary. Not to mention, that salary was always pretty late.