>I had a job a while back where I (like the others here) ended up working 60+hrs a week for well over a year. I was promised (in writing) by the CEO that when finished I would get a $5,000 bonus - which I of course didn't feel like was very much - but hey 5k is 5k. Well by the end of all this - the CEO had been replaced with another CEO - who decided that he didn't have to honor the previous CEO's agreement. When he told me that ..I said OK - slammed the lid shut on my laptop - went to my bosses office - handed him the laptop and said I was "going home - and not coming back". They actually tried to talk me out of by promising me $5,000 worth of stock - once they got their IPO..hahaha. I politely pointed out that I didn't trust any "promises" they would try to make as the only one that HAD made they'd not upheld. As it turns out they did eventually get their IPO - over 4 years later. The stock started around $28 - sat around $32 for a while - now it's a steady 9 bucks (it tanked over some fishy reporting of numbers)...and they've burned though 3 CEO's since I left. I'm sure I could of sued them for the 5k - but I just wanted to get as far away from them as possible.
That's pretty much how my first foreign employment ended. I made a bet that I'd write payroll from scratch in about 50 days (and the payroll app they sold had all the bells and whistles in the menu, none of which worked). So I was to write no bells nor whistles, just get the data in, and basic reports out, so they'd know who gets what and how much cash (with detailed banknotes specification) to prepare and send out to each outpost. The app was totally parametrized, i.e. any amount which would appear in anyone's payroll had to have a code, which evaluated to a function in the metadata somewhere, and likewise any deductions (taxes, negative stimulations, internal loan installments and whatnots). They'd all run in a certain order and fill the appropriate fields - and could be easily replaced if the rules of the game changed (which they always do).
There was a stipulation that "the hospital app shouldn't suffer meanwhile". In the end I got that done, the payroll for 1000 workers printed to the last pengő (hungarian cent), and in the hospital app I have replaced the ICD 9 diagnoses table with the ICD 10 (BTW, US and Canadian clinics are still, 17 years after this, using the ICD 9) two weeks in advance, and set it up so that on the deadline day, any cases using the 9 will stay on the 9, any new cases will be required to use the 10, and made flipping between the two automatic, based on the date. When it happened, I wasn't even there, and it went without a hitch.
Yet the big honcho found that there was some other glitch in the a few weeks before that (which wasn't much, but happened in the loudest department) and used that as a reason not to pay me the bet (which was about two month's salary at the time). And then I said I'd finally take some vacation and then I'll try to return two weeks later for another two-week work. And then we'll see.
When I got home, my wife asked me "so ok, when you get back there, is there any reason why you think things would get better?". To which I honestly drew a blank and never went there again.
