If they won’t work, neither will I
Being a temp worker is always entertaining.
Recently I got a short-term contract at an organization that will go unnamed. Mystifyingly, they assigned me to do the entire front end of a project by myself, despite the fact that I have never written a line of javascript in my life and did not do anything to indicate that I was interested in it. But 10,000$ is 10,000, so, here we are. This type of thing has happened to me every time so far, I don’t know if they just don’t read resumes or what. They certainly never bother to do an interview. Heck, at my first contact, they didn’t even notice that I was still in high school until I requested a day off to go to my graduation.
My current boss is…. a terrible boss. Probably fine in other areas of his life but I don’t know if he’s ever managed anything before. He was put in charge of the project because he’s the “””CEO””” of a “””company””” that made something similar once. Personally I think calling yourself a CEO when the business is still a startup and the product is still an MVP that hasn’t been sold to anyone is a little ridiculous, but what do I know, I’m not a business major. So it’s me, him, and a slightly naive guy who is really hoping to get his contract extended.
My boss is chronically late. We meet a minimum of twice a week, and he’s literally only been on time once. He’s usually about 15 minutes late. Even though he’s the one that schedules the meetings. He’s also the type of person where you ask him a simple question, he talks for 20 minutes straight, and nothing he says is the answer to what you asked. Whenever we ask him for direction, or what specific features we need, or this design vs that one, he says “I don’t know, figure it out”. Seemingly his only purpose is to be there at meetings with our client so they don’t think we’re completely leaderless.
Our boss’s boss, at the beginning of all this, said “Don’t just let AI do everything.” After that meeting our boss called us and said, unprompted “I don’t know what that guy’s talking about, he’s crazy, of course you should use AI for everything.”
Before we were even technically employed, he sent us a 24 page (single spaced) project document that was supposed to contain all the information we would need. Recently he revealed that parts of it were actually wrong. Because he let Microsoft Copilot write the entire thing. And didn’t even bother to read it.
So yeah, screw this guy and his project. I was contracted for 40 hours a week but can stay on schedule with less than ten since I’m vibecoding everything. HR couldn’t be bothered to actually read my resume. My boss can’t be bothered to actually be a boss. So why should I bother to work more than the bare minimum for not getting fired?