*SMASH* Another!
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This amazing thread lead to this amazing post (and the follow-on) and I'm going to share just a snippet of it to wet the old whistle
I didn't know this format was a thing and am so very excited to discover it. I hope you folks enjoy reading horror stories.
I got a job as a Software Engineer in my current company 4.5 years ago; friend-of-a-friend sort of thing. The company had an apparently disastrous piece of software that was their main LOB. They had gone through pretty much every local consulting agency - at least once, on a few occasions they had gone back to one they had already used. It was about 10 years old and consisted of a mix of VB6(!), VB.NET, C#, F# and somehow now Node. At the time tackling a disaster like that sounded fun and I was miserable at a consulting gig. It was a 20k bump but no benefits (health or retirement), but as a single guy 6 months away from paying off his college debt I wasn't worried. I figured I'd dump a few years in then move on.
Three months in, I'm absolutely baffled at what the company does. I was told they handle insurance claims, basically acting as a TPA. (Important detail: I had no idea what a TPA was at the time. It's gonna matter later.) The software does handle claims, but they also have 10 other projects that cover a bunch of random business use cases. Apparently the CEO is a self-described "idea man" and would task the previous developer to 'prototype' his ideas from time to time. The problem was his idea of a prototype was a fully-functional application that he could sell to investors and clients - until he got bored with it and shelved it. This ended up with the company having around a half-dozen actively used products in a half-dozen markets. In addition to the TPA side of the company that was about 50% of revenue, the other half was split over 1) check cashing software, 2) HR/onboarding software, 3) some sort if discount medical visit scam, 4) some sort of MLM scam that the CEO's brother-in-law co-opted him into, 5) a random cannabis and self-help website run by some yoga guru type dude the CEO knew and finally 6) a piece of software that let helped churches organize events and donations that took about 50% of any transaction that was run through it as "fees" for our company. Now I could talk about any of those monstrosities at length, but this is already shaping up to be a wall so I'll skip that.
1.5 years later. I've wrangled the mix of VB6, VB.NET, C#, F#, PHP4, PHP5, PERL, ASP.NET WebForms and MVC, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL still using MyISAM, god knows what other horrors I've forgotten. All of this without version control - just folders copy-pasted over and over on a 10 year old server in the closet that has no redundancy, two failing disks and one PSU out of order. The last guy had started some positive changes: moving everything over to Azure, porting everything related to the claims business into a more modern MVC app. I finished his work. I squashed about a dozen Wordpress instances into a single, multi-tenant host. Squashed out all the other languages and databases into just C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server. Ended up reducing the Azure spend by about $2000 a month. Felt good! CEO loved me. COO (my direct manager) loved me. CFO was pleased. All throughout this, I had convinced the COO to cut out all the shady, near-illegal, morally bankrupt garbage we did. No more check cashing (awful, awful industry), no more MLM of any sort, no more stealing money from churches (we kept that going, just changed our fees to a nominal amount). All the work I had done lead to a decrease in onboarding time from 2-3 days to 10 minutes and the TPA side of things was now about 85% of our revenue. Happy ending, right? Just you wait...
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From the follow-on:
I really hope some sort of divine event unfolds and we have to shut down, because as awful as this company is, it pays well and I just can't see myself abandoning that. With stingy living I'm set to retire at 40 and that blows my mind, though I have yet to factor in the sheer amount of dollars I'm going to lose to the impending mental health counseling I'll need.
"The company I work for constantly and intentionally breaks the law and screws over medical patients, but I'm not going to do anything about it because it made me rich."
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All it takes for evil to succeed is for a good man to do nothing.
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