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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

Not me, but one of my favourites would be when a guy joined our team. We were an agency and he’d been hired by the client to eventually take over. On the first morning I walked him through the codebase and showed him how it all worked, how to extend it etc. After a while I said “any questions?” He replied, “yeah, just one - am I meant to be a developer?”

Turned out that when the startup had brought him in as CTO they failed to mention that he was eventually going to be the sole developer.

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So he was the OTO - Only Technical Officer

Gotta ask -- how did the next few weeks/months pan out?

To his credit he just kinda sucked it up and got on with it. I was happy because eventually I didn’t have to work on it anymore. Surprisingly, all the money they wasted on buying rack servers and Oracle enterprise licences didn’t net them more than 10 visitors a day and it feel apart. Once it all went pop, him and I crossed paths on other projects too, got to trade stories about the absurdity of it all.

He got catfished.

I'm feeling it, because I was recently catfished.

What does catfished mean in this context? Mislead into a role you aren't suited for?

Accepting a job offer based on a false representation. Usually by offering you an inflated title and promising responsibilities and opportunities you won't actually have.

Like when you get the Big Data Analyst job, but you are actually supposed to create plots from Excel data and put them in some sales Powerpoint...

I've had the opposite happen! Early in my career, being brought on as a low-paid frontend developer, only to be stuck as de facto CTO on a spin-off company. Infra, development, hiring, travel, the whole bag.

Still accepting advice on how to negotiate a 100% raise.

Negotiation is only a thing if they say no. So, first ask for the 100% raise. If they say no, then you need to worry about negotiating :-)

Oh, that sounds so brutal. Had no idea this was a thing that happened to people. I would-first week quit.

My buddy quit a senior developer role day 1 at Walmart labs because they sat him down and presented him with the task of doing nothing but technical writing.

I worked there, I find this story hard to believe, though I left after Dion/Ben left, and the paypal mafia came in with their button downs tucked into their khaki's, and Jira became more important than actual technology, and the culture was taking a nosedive fast.

Still, I can't imagine the culture falling that far in two years. Their was tons of meaty dev work being done. And day 1? Maybe they were just trying to ease him into the team? This might have been an effective Mr. Miyagi type move to help him get a greater understanding of how all the pieces work together.

This story smells bad, I would be interested to hear more details.

There was tons of exciting work being done, apparently. Lots of promise of opportunities to plug away on a hot react frontend, scores of talented teams that sort of thing. I'm sure it is happening like that.

But they were plugging holes as fast as they could with contract recruiters that were throwing whatever would stick. I didn't even get to meet my team before I had an offer in hand.

From mine and his experience, whatever department that was (an ecommerce frontend), seems chaotic, with massive turnover.

I know some Walmart people as well. Does not sound like an effective place to work based on their experiences.

I just left a job that amounted to this. I stuck around because I went to work with a good friend who's off-the-charts good at what we do. He lasted three months after I joined and I was gone the week after.

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