Hey! I quit! Or did I?



  • So finally after months of delayed payments, it hit my limit of patience and I told my employer that I wish to quit.

    The current project is a $200 million project from a big bank in this place.

    So I heard that on the same floor as I work, there are about 80 people and they are all working on making 30,000 copies of read-file-reformat-insert-to-database.

    Yes, you read that right. 30,000 copies of near identical read and insert.

    I should be lucky I'm not in the team that's doing 4,000 copies since the team I was in was only assigned to 630 copies.

    So the hierarchy of the sub contract goes

    The bank -> Conglomerate A -> Company B -> Company C -> Company D

    I had the employment contract with Company D.

    As for how botched the project is, as it is, Company C put in a guy for a month and he didn't finish one line of code.
    The whole project is supposed to complete in 3 months and Company C blew 1/3 of the time.
    And Company D (my direct employer) is half way threatening me that Company B and C are threatening them(Company D) to pay off for the delay accompanied by the hand-off.

    The common practice of IT business, borrowing the insight of the manager at Company C, is that a project is sub contracted 2 to 3 times.
    Then each time down the hierarchy, someone with less experience has to be put it to cut the cost and leave a margin. Each time down the hierarchy, the company one level higher up the hierarchy would want to leave some amount of time to test the result from the subcontractor.

    The way IT sales works is that they don't complete based on the quality of their product, but rather how cheap it can be, how quick they can deliver and how easy it is to accommodate any request to customise.

    So that usually means a very short time to deliver and lots of customisation. But Korean companies don't have a product anyway, at least in this field that they call SI, System Integration.

    This manager guy used to be a programmer for a decade, saw how fucked up this is, and switched to technical sales.

    So the whole process, so it seems to me, is botched from the beginning at the very top level.

    That's why I'm leaving the IT field now.
    My next job won't be related to IT, not until I'm out of Korea.
    Of course, there is WTF all around the planet. I will still face many a case of WTF in the course of my career even outside Korea.

    The Buddha said, "Life is suffering".



  • Is Company D the same company you were with your last contract? Who also didn't pay you on time?

    Good for you for quitting. Like I said before, you can forgive one late payroll, but if there's even an inkling of a second one, get out. It's a sinking ship.



  • Remind us, what was the problem with you quitting before?

    Some kind of slavery arrangement? No free market in the IT sector?



  • @blakeyrat Yes, Company D is the same company I had been telling you all about all along until now.

    I believe I had been a cow cash. Company gets a deal, sends a guy, take the commission and the difference in the amount they get and what they give me.

    @cartman82 What I find more hilarious is that I'm not sure if I don't work for them anymore... yet.
    The HR manager said she'll let me know tomorrow even though the manager at Company C said he does not wish to hold someone back who doesn't want to be there anymore.

    Company D said they would give me a call. I waited until 10 p.m. No call. So I called back. The HR manager says, she'll let me know in the morning.

    Great.



  • I don't know how the law works there, but good luck. Hopefully you did actually quit. I... guess?



  • @Ascendant said:

    The way IT sales works is that they don't completecompete based on the quality of their product, but rather how cheap it can be, how quick they can deliver and how easy it is to accommodate any request to customise

    FTFY.

    Btw, same problem on nearly every software vendor companies that I worked. Only once we have a PM who tried to fight back and let us work on a more reasonable schedule. And there is no way it can happen if the project is subcontracted - the contract has already been signed and there will not be room for delay. Either take it or lose it.



  • I can understand that decision. I've worked at such a place long time ago. Now I work in a place with quite a few technical WTF, but the human WTF are well split between me, coworker, boss and clients. And technical WTF is what I'm being paid to introduceresolve so I take that as part of the job.

    Sometimes I remember the easy decision tree I had when I did temp work as garbage collector. That was funny for a week and then a numbingly boring job. I lasted one more week.


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