@DOA said:
Just be glad you can veto a hire. Some of use have to work with whoever the boss had a drink with last night.Well, I haven’t talked about the consultants that the company has used since before I was hired (and are still used, despite me and another person telling the owner in no uncertain terms that she should not be using them). I probably should; there’s an endless supply of WTF there. The only reason I haven’t had to do much work with them is because their complete lack of maturity early on made it so that I was entirely justified in refusing to work with them.
The first incident was about a month after I was hired. One of them sent me an email asking me to call them for a “quick 5 min call”—at 8:30pm on a Friday. I replied back that I didn’t provide phone consultations during the weekend, but that I could schedule a call on Monday if he let me know what time was good for him, or alternatively that he could email his request directly and I’d be able to respond to it more quickly that way. He took my email and forwarded it to the person that recommended me for the job as well as the owner of the company and called me “an arrogant asshole”.
The second was about a month after that, after I prepared a report showing a myriad of security vulnerabilities in their codebase. Instead of copping to the fact that these issues existed, they decided to deny everything—and then disabled my access to make changes to the codebase, claiming that I was a security risk, and that before I would be allowed to work on anything again, the company would need to pay them an (exorbitant) fee for a new dedicated server. (Yes, the consultants were hosting the site on their own server, and the company I worked for, that paid for the work, was never actually in control of the entire codebase up to that point.)
Despite this, and the fact that a second person just the other day said that he couldn’t stand working with them anymore because they are incapable of following very simple instructions (like, “go to this Web page with nothing on it except for a link that says ‘Download files’, click the link, and deploy those files to your Web server”), the owner has continued to send them work. In response to this person’s complaint, the owner said “i don't think that [contractor name] is terrible. i just think he doesn't listen or pay attention often”. Which is, of course, a ridiculous thing for someone with no technical prowess to say when she’s being told by two different qualified entities to stop using them. Funnn.