My most ridiculous meeting was a meeting that I couldn't attend.

When I was working as a freelancer my companies CEO and me were invited by a client from another country (6 hours flight & hotel).
The meeting was scheduled for the day after our arrival.

After breakfast the CEO told me he would pick me up at the hotel lobby at 2pm. I waited for some hours, but he didn't come.
Later that day he told me that he met with the client already at 10am.

I am sure he told me the wrong time, because he was afraid that the client would try to headhunt me.

Overheating The Javascript Ecosystem

Paranoid thought: You know, in the course of every day, being the corrupt piece of shit that I am, whenever I see a scandal or what looks like shenanigans-in-the-making, I ask myself

"Wisecrack, is this a fucking scam or con of some sort?"

I was recently asking myself this about javascript.

Not the language per se, but the ecosystem.

I noticed how there are a thousand CLIs for simple shit. Another four thousand for page long libraries, for simpleton level shit (because prototypes are designed after satans own aborted love-child of object models). I noticed another eight thousand guys imitating steve jobs, talking at conferences and 'change the world' high-on-huffing-my-own-shit TEDX talks like rubyists that don't realize the world has moved on, all to hawk books and inflate CVs for cushy positions at major tech firms and the herd of dicksuckers following the next fad off a cliff like lemmings. And another eight thousand 'tech journalists' pushing them off the cliff while begging for outrage and hype dollars and slowly circling like vultures above the drain that is the ad-based economy.

And I thought to myself.

"Wisecrack, who benefits from all this noisy self-indulgent horseshit? Where is all the money coming from for all these books, conferences, meetings, publications, media, bread, and circuses?"

"I don't know wisecrack. But if I were the CEO of a big company, threatened by the prospect of a universal language, or universal platform, like flash, but one I couldn't kill like flash, I would try to do the most corrupt thing I could think of."

"Whats that wisecrack?"

"I would try to 'overheat' the ecosystem by selectively hiring people from that ecosystem, pumping money into a boatload of similar products, all in the hopes of provoking the equivalent of an immune overreaction, imitators all flooding the ecosystem with the same shit in different packages, self promoting sycophants, aggrenadizing social media idiots, tools sold as tools, hyped as 'the next coming of steve jobs', overcooked shit that focuses on ceremony over functionality, ritual over productivity, documentation over innovation like some sort of amazonion infinite nesting doll hellscape of documents linking to documents linking to documents, each one a new circle of dantes inferno, where the definition of anything links to another document that says "see also xyz", and I would convince them that they had done it to themselves."

And then I would push typescript as their lord, savior, and master. "

"How do you know all this wisecrack?"

"Because I am a piece of shit, and, this is what I would do in any executive's shoes."

I work for a small company with about 10 employees working full-time in the office. We all report directly to the CEO, Phil. When the pandemic hit, Phil went into full panic mode and had us all move our desks 12+ feet apart, wash our hands every 20 minutes, sterilize everything in between uses, etc. Nothing super weird, and better than having no reaction at all, but it was a hypervigilant process that made me expect him to be very accommodating when our state went on lockdown.

Boy, was I wrong. Our industry is considered essential so we’re still open, but Phil is being odd when it comes to working from home. For background, about 95% of our work can be done remotely. The other 5% would require about 15 minutes in the office once a week. I was the first one to pose the idea of working from home and Phil nervously agreed, but only let do it three days a week. My coworkers were given similar instructions but were “encouraged to come in every day, if possible.” A few of them do.

Since then, Phil has gotten pretty weird about the situation. He refers to people who are working from home as being “off work” (which is NOT the case, we are all working and available while at home, which he knows because he calls us for work-related things during work hours!). Today, Phil asked me if my coworker Travis was in his office, and I said Travis was working from home, and Phil replied in a sour tone, “So he’s not working then, great.” He has made similar comments about my other coworkers. When I’m working from home, he’ll call me and ask in a sarcastic tone, “What are you even working on today?” Or he’ll give me an assignment and end with, “Can you actually do work on this today? I need you working.” One time, he called while I was in the bathroom and when I called him back less than five minutes later, I was told that I “need to be available and not screwing around.”

The weirdest thing is that none of us has had productivity problems! My job is such that I can tell when anyone is slacking even a little and I haven’t noticed any issues. Personally, I’ve actually been MORE productive! And I’ve never been accused of “screwing around” while at the office before, so this attitude has baffled me.

He is so convinced that we aren’t working that he cut our work-from-home time down two days a couple weeks ago, and now it’s being cut down to one day as of next week – when COVID cases are higher in our city than ever!

My guess is that because Phil isn’t physically seeing us work, he assumes we aren’t working. CCing him on stuff to leave “proof” doesn’t work because he doesn’t read his email. He is also naturally a nightmare of a micromanager (and an across-the-office yeller) so not being as “in control” is probably freaking him out. But what is the best way to handle this?

It seems like there is a whole another grade of fear — Basilisk grade. It’s impossible to experience it and walk away without serious consequences.

Imagine: I’m barely 20. It’s my first real, official, high-paying job. I’m already a team lead. A big Russian non-govt company with a blue logo. Huge new office in Moscow.
My “childhood” is officially over — I’m not playing around anymore. I’m an adult in every sense of the word.

Several weeks go by. Maybe even a month. Just a regular day at the office. I’m waiting for the coffee machine to heat up, and suddenly, it hits me. I’m here, at the office. Moscow, a city of 10 million people, is beautiful in the summer, yet I can’t just leave the office and go for a walk whenever I want to. When the day is over, it’s already evening, and I barely have time for myself. There are other people around me, with way higher positions, but their schedule is just the same as mine: nine-to-six. My adult life just started. I have forty years of this ahead of me. No matter the company, no matter the position: unless I’m the CEO, I’m doomed to get to work in the morning and go back home in the evening. And then I retire, old and not that beautiful anymore. And then that’s it.

I was never the same after that day. People are plotting my betrayal behind my back. They all act as one. Just out of my frame of view, their heads are turned to me, and they all look at me with the same devilish grin. There are no people — it’s all one huge shoggoth that lives under the office floor, and my colleagues are its ugly tentacles wrapped in human skin. I start missing deadlines. I become paranoid. Next thing I know, I’m at the psychiatrist’s office, being prescribed aripiprazol — a strong antipsychotic that is designed to literally make you slower. Anxiety worsens. I develop restless legs syndrome. I lose my ability to sleep. My intelligence is slipping away. I’m fired.

I have the return to Saint-Petersburg, cariprazine prescription that felt like lobotomy with extra steps, losing my ability to read, delirious manic episodes ahead of me.

It is only now that I kinda-sorta tuned my medication scheme in by going through countless psychiatrists of all sorts. But I sure as hell work at a place where I can do whatever I want if I meet deadlines.

I had this boss once who called himself a sitting bull sometimes. He was about 60, an absolute dictator, strong right wing and building an aura of fear around him. He had this emberassing macho attitude which was especially delicate since he was a protective of the female ceo. He talked to everyone, colleagues, customers, partners like they where enemys and was extemely aggressive towards everyone. Meetings where extremly emberassing because he insulted everyone (except us devs), talked much bs an didn't let anyone else speak - including customers.

He was also paranoid af. Once he talked the ceo into firing a team lead he disliked. Before the guy got to know this, he called me, and wanted me to sneak in his office, copy everything from his computer in case he would destroy everything when I realized he's fired. As if everything relevant wasn't on GitHub anyway and is if the poor guy would be uprofessional as sitting bull.

The sitting bull lead the department like a ponzi scheme: He required constantly new projects with funding for some years to maintain the old ones and their piles of tech debt. Dev team grew and grew but every insider knew the bubble will explode at one point. One of the last projects was a partner project with another institution. Naturally he didn't want us to do anything for this project but use our man power to rescue older ones. One pm guy was employed fifty percent as ours and fifty at the partner. So while months passt by and we delivered absolute nothing but lame excuses, his other employer started to ask questions. At one point I told him, and told his other employer afterwards, that the sitting bull never intended to anything for the project. When the sitting bull learned the pm. Guy told them the truth he called him a traitor and fired him instantly.

I left shortly after and the bubble imploded eventually. The sitting bull retired after an heart attack. From over twenty dev positions a single one remains and his main job to shit down one broken service after another...