Farn
04-21-2009, 01:29 PM
In a bit of a jam with the job lately. Tell me if any of this seems shady to you:
(All paraphrased)
Situation one:
Boss: "We'd like you to go train guys in the Philippines office. I'll likely fly you out for a week every now and then - if it's necessary to be out for longer than a week, I'll send your wife and kid with you and set you up somewhere."
Me: "Awesome, sounds like fun."
(Later)
Boss: "You know, my brother Ryan is out there, he's been living there for a few years now. The cost of living is really low, but he still gets paid as much as he did when he was here in the US." (Add in similar little hints by him and his brother)
Wife and I decide, hey, we'll give it a whirl - found a nice 4 room 4 bath place for the equivalent of about 300 US dollars a month. We tell the Boss we'd be willing to try it out over there for a few months, see how it goes. He says great, can we get out there next month? Woah now, that's a little quicker than we had planned. Boss says we really, really need you out there as soon as possible - everything'll be set up and ready, and we need you to train those guys yesterday. Okay, we'll do it.
2 days before we fly out there:
Me: "Hey boss, have you paid for those tickets I quoted to you?"
Boss: "What? I thought you were paying for them."
Me: "Erm ... no. You talked about paying for us to fly out there for work."
Boss: "Oh, well not if you're going to be -living- there. Okay, I'll pay for them all now, but I'll be taking some out of your check for your wife and kid's tickets over the next few months."
(I should have axed the whole thing right here, except we already sold our car, made a downpayment on the house, etc.)
So we rush out there months earlier than we had planned, and paying for tickets we weren't expecting to have to pay. I get there and find out we're working out of one of the guys' homes (infested with cockroaches, no clean water, A/C doesn't work half the time, Internet connection constantly going down and extremely slow, toilet doesn't flush, etc.). They have an office, but they haven't finished construction on it, it turns out. Also, the corporation hasn't been officially set up over there, so no benefits or anything like that. We're all technically being contracted for work. Aside from that, there's nobody there for me to train. Why was I rushed out here again? Why was I told it'd be ready?
2 months go by and we're finally in the (bare, unfurnished) office instead of the extra room of a guy's house, but we're "borrowing" the Internet connection from the Internet Cafe next door, corporation still isn't set up, and still not a single guy to train. On top of all this, my family gets robbed of thousands of dollars' worth of stuff at our home and the police want to be paid off to do anything about it. We decide this isn't going to work out, tell the boss, he says it's my decision but he won't pay for the tickets, and we fly back to the good old United States with some debt to pay off thanks to having to pay for the tickets ourselves.
That sucked.
Situation 2:
Boss: "Hey, the economy sucks, etc. We're changing our insurance."
Me: "Um, okay. What's it going to look like?"
Boss: "You'll have to pay for any dependents."
Me: "That sucks."
Boss: "Yeah."
Me: "When is it going into effect?"
Boss: "Next month."
He starts taking the amount of my check the next pay period (before next month started). I'm now paying 400 a month out of my paycheck for insurance, supposedly. The strange thing is that this has been going on for two months, yet earlier this month I took my little girl to the hospital and we successfully used our old insurance (since we never received cards/paperwork on the "new" insurance we were supposedly moved to). We told him we didn't want to the insurance, we'd just take care of it ourselves for cheaper, but he's been mysteriously unreachable regarding the subject.
I'd clear out, except that the job market is the pits and I can't find a decent replacement. Considering the pay hit, the stress, and the fact that I don't want to work for someone that's screwed me time and again and has bad business practices, I'm starting to be willing to take any old crap job over this one. Ugh.
Oh, and he also moved all our servers out of a professional data center and into ... his garage. Yeah. We're a professional company providing service on our servers that are hosted in someone's garage. With residential Internet services. No backup connections or power. No cooling system other than a few mounted AC units. Client complaints are through the roof due to the crappy connection speed and constant crashes. I'm convinced the company's going down soon anyway.
(All paraphrased)
Situation one:
Boss: "We'd like you to go train guys in the Philippines office. I'll likely fly you out for a week every now and then - if it's necessary to be out for longer than a week, I'll send your wife and kid with you and set you up somewhere."
Me: "Awesome, sounds like fun."
(Later)
Boss: "You know, my brother Ryan is out there, he's been living there for a few years now. The cost of living is really low, but he still gets paid as much as he did when he was here in the US." (Add in similar little hints by him and his brother)
Wife and I decide, hey, we'll give it a whirl - found a nice 4 room 4 bath place for the equivalent of about 300 US dollars a month. We tell the Boss we'd be willing to try it out over there for a few months, see how it goes. He says great, can we get out there next month? Woah now, that's a little quicker than we had planned. Boss says we really, really need you out there as soon as possible - everything'll be set up and ready, and we need you to train those guys yesterday. Okay, we'll do it.
2 days before we fly out there:
Me: "Hey boss, have you paid for those tickets I quoted to you?"
Boss: "What? I thought you were paying for them."
Me: "Erm ... no. You talked about paying for us to fly out there for work."
Boss: "Oh, well not if you're going to be -living- there. Okay, I'll pay for them all now, but I'll be taking some out of your check for your wife and kid's tickets over the next few months."
(I should have axed the whole thing right here, except we already sold our car, made a downpayment on the house, etc.)
So we rush out there months earlier than we had planned, and paying for tickets we weren't expecting to have to pay. I get there and find out we're working out of one of the guys' homes (infested with cockroaches, no clean water, A/C doesn't work half the time, Internet connection constantly going down and extremely slow, toilet doesn't flush, etc.). They have an office, but they haven't finished construction on it, it turns out. Also, the corporation hasn't been officially set up over there, so no benefits or anything like that. We're all technically being contracted for work. Aside from that, there's nobody there for me to train. Why was I rushed out here again? Why was I told it'd be ready?
2 months go by and we're finally in the (bare, unfurnished) office instead of the extra room of a guy's house, but we're "borrowing" the Internet connection from the Internet Cafe next door, corporation still isn't set up, and still not a single guy to train. On top of all this, my family gets robbed of thousands of dollars' worth of stuff at our home and the police want to be paid off to do anything about it. We decide this isn't going to work out, tell the boss, he says it's my decision but he won't pay for the tickets, and we fly back to the good old United States with some debt to pay off thanks to having to pay for the tickets ourselves.
That sucked.
Situation 2:
Boss: "Hey, the economy sucks, etc. We're changing our insurance."
Me: "Um, okay. What's it going to look like?"
Boss: "You'll have to pay for any dependents."
Me: "That sucks."
Boss: "Yeah."
Me: "When is it going into effect?"
Boss: "Next month."
He starts taking the amount of my check the next pay period (before next month started). I'm now paying 400 a month out of my paycheck for insurance, supposedly. The strange thing is that this has been going on for two months, yet earlier this month I took my little girl to the hospital and we successfully used our old insurance (since we never received cards/paperwork on the "new" insurance we were supposedly moved to). We told him we didn't want to the insurance, we'd just take care of it ourselves for cheaper, but he's been mysteriously unreachable regarding the subject.
I'd clear out, except that the job market is the pits and I can't find a decent replacement. Considering the pay hit, the stress, and the fact that I don't want to work for someone that's screwed me time and again and has bad business practices, I'm starting to be willing to take any old crap job over this one. Ugh.
Oh, and he also moved all our servers out of a professional data center and into ... his garage. Yeah. We're a professional company providing service on our servers that are hosted in someone's garage. With residential Internet services. No backup connections or power. No cooling system other than a few mounted AC units. Client complaints are through the roof due to the crappy connection speed and constant crashes. I'm convinced the company's going down soon anyway.