Re:I'm a former Miso engineer and the founders screwed me ou...
by droithomme on Thursday May 10, 2012 @05:27PM
(#3956149)
Thanks for sharing your personal experience with this, I've also been through similar things.
On the "take it down and he'd get paid" issue, one has to be very careful. There have been a few news stories where this has happened, the ex-employee agrees, and then the company goes public with a "employee was attempting to extort $10,000 from us" angle, painting the employee they cheated as some sort of criminal. The spin is they try to make it seem like the bad report was false and the employee was extorting money to take it down as some kind of protection racket.
Re:I'm a former Miso engineer and the founders screwed me ou...
by mgkimsal on Thursday May 10, 2012 @06:09PM
(#3956387)
Yeah that would suck, and I wouldn't have put it past that individual in question.
In my particular case, I had all my documentation in a row, but still didn't choose to 'go public', tho in retrospect I somewhat wish I had.
I had someone not pay me $9k, and have filed a lawsuit. We're closing in on 4 years now (aug 2008) and still no court date. Courts take time.
I wrestled with 'name and shame', and in some respect, wish I had named. I found out that this company/person had done this to others, and one of the guys 'named' him publicly on a blog. He got a threatening call, telling him to take it down and he'd get paid. Of course, he took it down and didn't get paid - that was < $1k from what I remember.
I hear this a lot - "don't go public with these sorts of things, you'll get a bad reputation, blah blah blah". I'm really torn. I get it, but... if more people started doing this - going public when BS like this is perpetrated - there'd be far less resistance to hiring/contracting with people who have air this sort of stuff.
I've been self-employed for 5 years, have contracted on dozens of projects, and have 2 instances where I got shafted out of money owed. If I was to publicize those, but also have, say 25 other projects under my belt with fine referrals, wouldn't that say more about the 2 shafters vs me? And again, if everyone was doing this, it would seem a lot more normal.
Yeah, if I publicly trashed every company I worked with, my 'trashing score' would be pretty high, and people would want to stay away from me. But really, I'd prefer people know that I publicly praise good clients and trash bad ones, and if they think they're going to be a bad client, to not bother reaching out. I'd rather there be a filter there which keeps crap clients away in the first place.
The thing is, we all have to start doing this at the same time. I do agree that legal proceedings are worthwhile in some cases, in many cases, people are getting shafted out of hundreds or thousands, and it's often not worth the time to 'go legal'. The habitual scumbags know this and take advantage of it, continually rolling through contractors. They know most of them will just leave and won't make a public fuss, because they want to be 'employable' and not be known as a 'troublemaker'. Someone who doesn't pay me for contractual work done is the troublemaker, but somehow that seems to get lost.