I will NEVER* work for a “”ceo”” again
*except that in this job market I can’t afford to be picky.
I’m finally on the last week of my contract, and I wish it was over already. Why? Because my boss is a MORON! We just spent the last nine weeks building a “”””cybersecurity tool”””” that
- Was designed by AI
- Is based on a project plan that makes less sense the longer you spend reading it (because it was written by AI and my boss did not read or edit it)
- Already exists and only costs $800!!
That last point wouldn’t be a huge deal, except that 9 months and $20,000 in contractor salaries alone later, all we have is a prototype that doesn’t even really do what we want, because neither my boss nor the client can actually define what they want!
Or rather, they can, but it sounds like this: “We want the tool to identify and block all the tracking-heavy websites, oh, except that one, and that one, and that one, but no we don’t want to use a whitelist”.
It’s like saying “I want a calculator that works perfectly, but also says 2+2=5 when I want it to”.
Either you care about security, or you don’t. Either you want to prevent tracking, or you don’t. You can’t say “let’s allow tracking for ads but not for spies”. Even if that was possible, the ad people will just sell the information to the spies! “We don’t care about information being stolen, unless it gets stolen by someone we don’t like” isn’t a valid security policy!
I don’t mind the clients, they’re fine, they don’t know anything about computers or security, they just know they want to prevent spies and if we could just flat out tell them that the only way to really be safe from spies is to block 70% of the internet, they would probably accept it. Employees don’t need to be surfing the net on the work computers anyway.
But instead my boss goes to them and makes completely impossible pie-in-the-sky promises that AI assured him would work, and everyone trusts him because he’s a “”ceo””, even though his “”company”” is just a vibecoded virustotal knockoff that has sold…. drumroll please…. ZERO units.
Oh, and did I mention he now wants a million dollars to finish the thing…. If he gets it he’s offered me a second contract. I would need SO much money to even think about accepting that. I really do not ever want to work for this guy again. He put all of us contractors into a groupchat because he thinks he’s too good for email or something, and he sends communications at bizarre hours of the night.
Like, recently, our client emailed at 3pm with a simple request, he responded at MIDNIGHT with a gigantic AI generated email that didn’t contain what she wanted, and said I would do something that he never mentioned to me previously. And then at 3am he texted me asking for all this crap he said I would do without consulting me, and none of it is my job! And half of it isn’t even possible!
Seriously, I didn’t believe in AI psychosis until I met this guy. A real business idiot, as Zitron would say. Worst part is he was probably a decent engineer back in 2019 or whatever.