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At one of my former jobs, we devs had to do all sorts of non-dev work, such as writing quotes and even contracts!

The CEO of that company had this naughty habit to contact devs directly without delegating through the CIO. Sure, if it's really urgent like when some system is down because of a bug, go ahead and disturb a dev. But interrupting coders to write some freaking quote? Come on!...

Once, that CEO asked me to stop everything I was doing to write a quote to a customer ASAP, as this was really urgent.

I spent several hours writing that quote. It had to be done right as any specifications in our quotes were used in our agreeements and were referred to in the case of any dispute. So not only were we devs and salesmen in the same time; we also needed to be lawyers.

When I was done and delivered the quote to the CEO, he told me he had no intention to take on that customer in the first place. Instead, he wrote a polite we-are-not-interested e-mail to the customer and cc:d it to me just so that I could read for myself how very sleek a businessman he was.

Me: why did I have to write that quote when you knew all along that you were not going to use it anyway?
Him: It's for your own personal development.

Another naughty habit of that same CEO is that he made "jokes" and remarks that I found inappropriate, such as "You walk like a drunken sailor".

Later, he decided to discontinue our team/product because "it isn't proftable". Well, what do you expect when devs are forced to waste half day completing pointless tasks?!

It was for the better anyway, and I was actually relieved when I left the company. I'm still thinking though, that the real reason he sacked me is that I am too honest and not the docile kind of employee that would be ideal for him. I did question some of my tasks, and worst of all: I didn't laugh at his stupid jokes.

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  • 5
    I just remembered another joke he pulled, this time to a customer in front of the staff: "We should try your defibrillators on my staff, maybe that would wake them up."
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