Funemployed again

That seems to be the theme of 2020: things coming apart or not quite finishing how we'd want/expect/planned etc.

Long  story short, I started what I thought would be an easy role as a technical project manager at an agency that builds apps. I was expecting to be able to have a good work/life balance (as promised by the CEO) and was looking forward to being able to work remotely, gain some coins, and still have time to write. 

This was all before I was handed 13 (THIRTEEN) projects to manage, 8 of which were over a year in development hell and 5 of those 8 were seriously on fire complete with angry clients. Most of those projects had been in development stage but no one (developer wise) had worked on them since 2019.  

I clashed often with the scammy CEO who took these people's money months ago but still hadn't delivered a product. In the scammy CEO's mind we should just send flowery emails telling the client how we're "working around the clock to get your app past the finish line" (his direct words), and use other smoke and mirrors to cover up the fact that no work had been done on the apps and we really had no idea when they would be ready. It was honestly the biggest bullshit job of my life, having to get in front of client's in a weekly meeting and  try and cover up AGAIN why I didn't have any clue when we'd have shit ready to deliver. 

Here's the main issues :

1. Whoever worked out the scopes and agreements for these projects did so without having real knowledge of development and coding. That's fine, but that's also why you ask the SMEs to weight in. So for instance, on one of the apps, this company, let's call them Cut Canine, pretty much agreed to give a client Photoshopesque image manipulation for their app. The problem is, the dev team are not paid enough to provide that work. 

2. The dev team are also freelancers so many would get sick of the bullshit (see point #1) where they were paid to provide x hours of work, only to find they needed 2x work but weren't going to be paid for it. Those people would just cut their losses, which meant work would stop and new dev would have to be hired on. They'd be lied to and told all they needed was to provide "clean-up" work only to find out they needed to do much much more

3. The main shit-hole projects were 2-3 years old, which meant that the clients had already been done (YES BEEN DONE) paid all but their last payment, so the scammy-assed CEO realized he's losing something like $60-90K a month (by his own admission) because no new $$ is coming in.

4. Scammy assed CEO was blaming a former employee (who worked under him) for the issues, but a few weeks in I realized that this person who was being scapegoated was trying to manage 20+ projects AND staff.  In general, as I mentioned the CEO has no idea what project management actually IS and he and I clashed quite a bit. For one, his idea of waterfall project management is that the project manager sets the dates and pushes them on everyone, without actually, you know, talking to the SMEs first. Needless to say all the projects were fucked up. 

My mom passed (will have another blog post about that) and I was having major issues with allergies and sinuses for the last 4 weeks of my work there PLUS the fact that I only had 40-45 hours a week to dedicate to it meant that somethings were going to fall by the way side and this is something I warned scammy CEO about when I realized he was giving me 13 projects. 

Long story short, they used me as a scapegoat to one of the angrier clients when I missed some emails to him. It was the shortest job I've had in my life, I ended up taking them off my LinkedIn page mainly because they suck and I wouldn't want to help advertise them in any way. 

The funny thing is that the place has all good reviews, mainly from 2 years ago and mainly from clients who are now angry about their apps not being done. I wondered why none of them had updated their reviews and one of the other PjMs from Cut Canine mentioned that the clients have a clause in their agreements to not give negative reviews about the agency. That should have been their first clue LOL.