H Staff disappear!

Feels like there is some sort of Stalin like purge going on. Let me recap

• Tori quits. This was a few month back, but had a better offer from one of our Advisors so the whispers are saying
• CFO disappears. We think he was fired, but may have quit. Perhaps he just had a difference of opinion with Henry.
• Constantine definitely quit, but has lawyers chasing him, probably after his parking permit
• DJ quit, according to Henry to "find himself"
• Stan is "on leave". After the slam-dunk of the Hank Orange Soda (tm) color scheme, I'm not sure whats going on there, perhaps he needed to rest after that effort.
  
• Guy who ran support, nobody remembers his name, been here for ages, but has an accent, gone as well. Probably fired.

In terms of H-Staff that leaves

• Henry
• Arnold the VP of World Wide Sales

Henry should have just rolled in some NRA buddies, told them we were all "commie-pinkos" and had us all shot. The blood seems to be running down the corridors and I don't want to spoil my Nike Air Jordans in white that I won on eBay last week.

Just to break the monotony of the constant departures, Henry has been showing us on a weekly basis the latest customer acquisitions and transactions. Weirdly they were as red as the blood in the corridors and also remarkably never changing week after week. If I read the charts right green is good, red is bad. I'm not sure how you can stand up and talk for an hour on basically nothing. We do love Henry, but Henry does love the sound of his own voice. Time for a drink.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 13 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares, we still don't even have a VP)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 192 lbs

Constatine leaves!

Never seen a guy so happy in my life. People say that this was "how he used to be". I guess working for Henry can be tough, he's a task master most extreme.

But wow. What a shock. We all though he was in for life, without parole, plenty of long term benefit but lots of short term effort and stress. He's said he would stick around for a month to hand over to the new guy. No word on who that may be. I'm thinking Euro-Fool, which Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir would be pissed at, but that would make the most sense. Despite his garlic breath he has actually worked on platforms and infra-structures for decent sized and successful companies. I pray to Jesus that we don't have an Applications person run the team, that would totally take us down a path of zero interesting architecture work. It would be totally like, dude, put your head in the sand.

Saw Constantine a day or so after it was announced. He looked angry and then he totally vanished. Apparently there was some big shouting match in Henry's office and "Fuck you asshole", slamming doors and he was gone. Saw Henry and he brushed it off. Apparently there are lawyers and everything. That's some bad shit for it to end up like like after all the effort and success Constantine has brought the team. I'm sure they both have their reasons but it feels totally rudderless with Constantine's guiding light.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 16 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares, we don't even have a VP)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 192 lbs

Calculator company shutdown!

Its not clear what Henry is doing, at least to me. I hope that he and the board have a plan.

So we buy this online calculator company after another round of funding last year. The idea was to embed this in all our applications. It basically would become a service so every application would calculate correctly. It was marginal at best, but I'm sure there were other reasons.

However, the technology was a total mismatch but their team were awesome entrepreneurs, real salt of the earth types. They were in some part of the country that most of America flies over, but they are just a few states over from my hometown. They were my brothers.

So Constantine and Iron-Mike fly out there this week and basically shoot them all. They had to have a security guard because those guys pack full on assault weapons in their trucks, just in case the Soviets invade or they see a sweet buck.

So they killed them all, apart from a couple of "keep the lights" on. Its totally bogus. What do we do with their customers? Not clear, but certainly getting features is not going to happen fast if you don't have the staff. Apparently Stacy and his team are going to re-build it at HQ and hire a new team. That's bogus, that dude has totally not delivered iPhone since I have been here. There are companies that have made a fortune and then sold themselves to Apple in a shorter period of time. I hear from one of the architects that they are going to rebuild in Rails and MySQL, that's a totally High School project tech stack. I mean that is already so last century dude! I know Stacy reads Techcrunch, always forwarding links to the "this is so cool, we have to buy/integrated with this" headline. The dude is so last year.

My heart goes out to the Calculator dudes. Great idea which they were executing on. Got screwed twice, first by getting bought and second by thinking the purchase would allow them to expand and hire. Its a shame, but another example of a poorly thought out strategy, executed by the incontinent.

I'm starting to see why we burn through cash. Sure you have to throw some spaghetti against the wall to see if its sticks. You don't need to throw the whole pasta aisle at Safeway to see if two strands stick. Some people say "scatter gun approach", I say "squirrel".

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 14 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 191 lbs

That guy was packing!

So its was a super shocking day. They did it a little differently this time. All those being rifted was rounded up by there manager and marched into a room. Sort of Nazi gas chamber moment.

Then Henry, Javier and Iron-Mike (aka Old-Dude-In-HR-That's-Cool) stood up at the front of the room and went over the details. Basically you are all crap and we don't have the cash so you have to go. Not really, they did not say that. They said that their contribution was enormous but the organization needed to move on and without them. I'm sure that everybody though the former. I heard this all from a buddy who was let go. I trust him, so it must have gone down like that.

This time they had a security guard, just in case we had any of the bad shit happen again. I don't know where they found this geezer, but I'm sure he could have been out run by a dead turtle. Yes, he was that old. And even more shocking he was packing! The Ops guys must have been in hog heaven seeing that side-arm.

So, lets say some bad shit went down. First this guy had to pull himself up and get his walker into position. Then move over to where the ruckus was. Then pull his gun and shoot. I saw his shaking in his hands, so probably would shoot the wrong person first so would have to try again.

Its some bad shit when you have to packing heat just to fire people. I'm sure every week, Donald Trump does not need a guy packing "just in case".

There was some rumoor going around that Loney-James and his band of Merchandising gurus were all let go. Somehow, and boy this must have been a deal with the devil, they all got to stay. Not a single person let go. Its funny to see them wash Henry's Aston each morning, but I guess that's what you have to do to stay working here, kiss lots of ass and suck the occasional dick.

Life sucks here, I just drink to make it through each day. Nobody seems to give a shit.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 17 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 190 lbs

Oh shit we are dead - part deux!

I'm not sure I believe Henry any more. I came on board and genuinely thought we were going to change the world. And to some extent I think we did. Just after I join we landed a bunch of cash. Sweet, that should see us past the finishing post. In the interview it was all about IPO and killing the market. More money, carefully managed made sense to reach that goal.

Turns out that Henry has been acting all Bernie Madoff. I'm not sure quite how he did it, but he convinced our investors to give him more cash, its some round of funding that nobody has ever heard off, "H", "J" who the f**k knows. Its at the end of the alphabet that only Sesame Street knows about.

Apparently Henry had to give up stock to make the deal happen. Means that we burnt, literally, though all that cash in less than a year. Betcha our income did not balance this out.

Henry's pitch at the company meeting (he was on the phone from New York) was that this is all we need to make the company cash flow positive and make a pile of cash. He's brought Henry on-board, his brother from another father (really, his mother liked the name so much she used it twice) to become Chief something, Cash Operations I think. It confusing with so many Henry's but this one is from American City Bank. Perhaps he has the balls to keep Henry's expense account under control.

So why don't I believe in Henry? I don't know. Its the same old story, the next feature, the next customer is suddenly going to turn the corner for us. That customer or feature, the one we don't have, is going to make the difference. I have heard this all for 18 months and its wearing thin. You know, you read these stories or watch interviews with people who have been abused. Its the same story, you love them so much that you think they will change and tomorrow will be better. In reality each day is ever so slightly worse than the next. Its also tough to make friends and build relationships with people when they are gone in a few months, either because we have another round of lay-offs or they leave for a better place. You start to loose interest in building relationships or product for that matter.

And our investors did not give all the cash we needed, so we had to fire a bunch more people. I survived, at least this round. Another cut in pay and some more worthless options. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir was all gung-ho after. He got the team together to "motivate" them, in his normal fashion he missed the point and instead of listening to our concerns he just talked about himself and Henry and spent no time to understand us. He makes me puke.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 23 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 189 lbs

Office move!

Another office move. I'm not sure that this is a great use of the investors money, but it kind of makes sense. With the trim down last year and the constant departures it no longer makes sense to be on three floors. Stacy put the plan together and we all packed our crates. The floor plan makes no sense, basically its puts our team at an opposite end to Euro-Fools platform team. It may mean we just get more exercise having to walk down there, but it may also mean that we can just ignore those idiots!

Euro-Fool has been under fire, Mega Enterprise is running so late its making the rest of us look great! Truth be told its nothing to do with the code that was written for Mega Enterprise, its all down to getting the product through QA. I think all the directors are relying on Apps to be the long pole so that they can fix up all their code without Constantine knowing anything about it, just blame Apps. Its an easy target but a great target! There also seems to be less Apps QA people as well these days.

So its weird being back in the new old office. I see where I was interviewed, where I sat in those first few formative months when I started, the place where I got my first build to work, the smashed wall where Beam-Me-Up punched a hole with his bare fist and the first time I saw Geek-Babe. Ah those memories.

Since then they have painted in the new corporate look for Mega Enterprise, Hank Orange Soda (tm), its pretty sweet if you don't have a hang over. I did notice that Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir now gets in even later, probably working really diligently with Ops I guess.

Seen Stacy, Lonely-James and Cab-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir (aka Three-Amigos) in a bunch of meetings. Weird group to have together, sometimes Zen-Dude is there, sometime not. Not just in the office, but at Una-Mass and at Starbucks. Probably some product planning or something big and important for Hank Commerce.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 7 (I can remember why I drink, but I do)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

Another CFO is fired!

Well that is the big rumor, I don't know for sure. Its kind of weird that Henry would fire his Brother-From-Another-Father after such a short time as CFO, that has to be the shortest time at that position in Hank Commerce's short history!

I spoke to one of Lonely-James' lieutenants and he was told that it was to bust up the coup plotters. Wow! I mean Henry is a bit of a tyrant but you only have coups and mercenaries when you try to overthrow a despot, not Henry. Everybody loves Henry! I love him as well, but only in a fatherly way, not in that Castro way.

It blew my mind that some of the backchat appears to be true, a coup? Wow. Who has the vision of Henry and the ability to execute and grow the company like he has been doing? Who has his Track record? None of H-Staff comes to mind, apart from perhaps Franks-Mom. She could kick some ass in an ass kicking contest. Super fierce!

I'm not so sure its true. I mean, I walk past his office most days and he's never there so an empty office means nothing. And what does Henry have to gain by an empty CFO slot, how can we go IPO like that? The markets would never dig it.

Looks like Stacy, Lonely-James and Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir have been meeting to work out the new office plan, more of that next week. I know that's a tough job, but meeting five hour a day for the last week seems overkill. I'm sure the Three-Amigos will get it right.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!))
Shots : 9 (I can remember why I drink, but I do)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 187 lbs