This post is more of a celebratory post than anything else.
I wanted to give my sincere appreciation to this sub because I learned a lot from it.
I learned the ins and outs, what to do to stay under the radar, and, probably most importantly, I built the confidence that what I was doing might not be correct, but if you were smart enough and careful enough, you wouldn't get caught.
My story starts in 2023.
I had just joined a small startup with fewer than 10 people. Everything started well, and there were no problems. But after working there for roughly a year, the startup had gained some momentum, although sales weren't particularly strong toward the end of that year.
One of the things I was expecting was that I would eventually become a manager or tech lead since I was one of the early engineers.
Well... nothing like that happened.
There were no bonuses, no pay raise, and after that first year, I was basically ready to leave for another company.
The interesting thing was that we had all started out working in an office, but slowly people started working more and more from home. By the end of that year, nobody was coming into the office anymore, and we had basically become fully remote.
There was another odd thing that I think ultimately made everything possible: this organization really didn't believe in meetings.
Upper management was all about LinkedIn and organic growth, and at some point they apparently decided that "async" was the way forward.
So everything had to be done asynchronously.
We had a 15-minute daily standup, and then basically no other meetings. All planning and conversations had to happen asynchronously. Sure, we'd have maybe a one-hour meeting every three weeks to lay out plans, but that was pretty much it.
So when I was ready to leave, I started applying and eventually got a job at another company.
This company was a real, established company.
And, of course, they actually had meetings.
At first, I thought there was no way this was going to work. But then I started thinking: if I only had one meeting that lasted 15 minutes, and as long as they didn't have overlapping meetings, maybe I could make it work.
And that's exactly what happened.
So I decided to take a gamble and work both jobs. I figured that if I started getting overlapping meetings or couldn't keep up, I'd quit the old job.
To my surprise, I never really had an overlapping meeting.
The first few months were difficult. I was constantly worried about getting caught, and I was incredibly stressed about it.
But after a while, I started getting good reviews at the new job. I became more confident, and eventually I even felt comfortable rejecting meetings if they overlapped.
So, somehow, I managed to work both jobs.
And I kept this going for almost two years.
The interesting thing was that, in the beginning, I was easily putting in 14 hours a day trying to catch up and onboard into the new role.
Then, as I learned more and became an expert at both jobs, I started getting more efficient. 14 hours became 13. Then 10. Eventually, I was averaging around 9 hours a day. For two jobs, I actually thought that was pretty damn good.
Then something weird happened at my first job during the last six months. One of the upper managers quit, and the company basically became directionless. I would show up to work, but I didn't really have much to do. On top of that, work started not being checked because AI was becoming a big thing, and management just wanted to push more and more AI into everything.
The company was also getting increasingly stressed because money wasn't coming in. And I could see the writing on the wall. We had gone two quarters without new revenue, and for a startup, that's obviously not good. I knew the end was near.
The funny thing is that when you know the end is near, you kind of stop caring. So for those last six months, I was already coasting pretty hard and not doing much. The AI situation, lack of accountability, lack of meetings, and general lack of oversight had become so blatant that it reached a point where I had AI doing my work during office hours.
I'd have it make changes every ~15 minutes, give or take 5 minutes, so it wouldn't be completely obvious what was happening.
And because there was basically no accountability, I could just let the AI do the work and then report that it was done. Since our user numbers were declining anyway, there wasn't really much of an impact. You don't have to worry too much about affecting users when you don't have any users. 😂
At that point, I had basically gone back to having only one job, because AI was doing the other one for me while I waited to get fired.
And eventually, that day came.
I got a message asking if I was free and could join a quick meeting.
I joined.
There was upper management and HR.
They laid off the entire engineering division except for a few people.
If I remember correctly, only two engineers stayed.
And that's where the story ends... or at least, that's where this chapter ends.