Four months ago our expanding communications electronics company hired on several new engineers and technicians, including you, our new (and first) dedicated software engineer. I was happy. Our engineering group had been overworked even before the company decided to start developing an entierly new product line. Having a dedicated software engineer meant that I wouldn’t have to split my time between hardware design and coding anymore. Management was potitively gushing over your credentials: Look at this list of patents she has! She’s done network programming for Lucent! Everything looked good.
Time passed. The company paid for us to all be trained on the new hardware. Development of the new products began. And you gave me reason to worry. It’s one thing when you keep asking questions that suggest that you don’t really understand what the product is supposed to do. When you derail design meetings with bizarre or impractical suggestions, or when I have to explain to you (repeatedly) why we’ve chosen this hardware architecture to use, and you don’t seem to even understand the engineering problems involved let alone our solution, I get concerned. When I ask you what compiler you’ll be using to develop the working application code, and then I have to explain to you what a compiler is and what it does, I get seriously worried about the future of the project.
There’s also the fact that you’ve come in late for work every single day you’ve been here. It’s not my job to keep track of your hours, but as someone who makes a point of coming in early every day, it bothers me. I also can’t help but notice, being in the cubicle next to you, all the personal phone calls and mysterious whispered conversations.
It’s not like I didn’t make my concerns known to management. I don’t think it was more than a month after you started that I went to my boss and told him I had serious doubts about your ability and willingness to do the job. Your concerns are noted, they told me. Give her time, she’s just starting, they said. It’s just her accent, she has trouble understanding English. And finally, She was the best of the people we interviewed.
Now to December. The week between Christmas and New Year’s. The office is open, though much of management has taken vacation this week. I’m here, I still have a lot of work to do. I can’t help but notice you’re not. I know you haven’t been here long enough to have vacation days. I’d ask management about it, but they’re all on vacation, we’re running a skeleton staff.
Then Tuesday of this week an email comes in from you announcing your resignation from the company. You have the gall to list of your accomplishments while here, most of which weren’t yours to claim, or weren’t particuarily difficult or ompressive, yet you make it sound as if you were singlehandedly responsible for making the new product line possible. You claim that your resignation was sudden and unavoidable, due to family emergency, yet when I go to search your cubicle for any sign of actual work you’ve done I find that you’d already removed all your personal belongings and left your building pass behind. Which means you knew you were quitting last time you were here, a week and a half ago.
And did I find anything useful in your cubicle? No, I mostly find datasheets, manuals, and project specification sheets, most of which are months old and relate to features and parts that aren’t even in the current design. The software design document that you’re so proud of is worthless fluff; pages upon pages of vamping about features with no actual content on how you were planning on actually implementating anything. On further investigation much of the text describing the various software functions apears to have been copied from various web pages. Were I an english professor and this a term paper, I’d fail you for plagerism.
Furthermore, checking your computer, I can find no evidence you even logged into it the last week you were here. It appears that you stayed just long enough to attend the company Christmas party before cleaning out your desk and leaving.
As a final laugh, I’ve just been informed that management recieved an email from you, demanding to know why your paycheck from the week you weren’t here hasn’t been deposited in your account. You quit without telling us and you expect pay? You’ll be lucky if we don’t take you to court to get a refund on your previous paychecks!
Fuck you, you selfish, slimy, unprofessional bitch. I hope your behavior here comes back to haunt you. I hope the free glazed ham you stayed with the company just long enough to get spoils and gives you food poisoning. I hope you never get another engineering position again in your life, and wind up having to do menial labor scrubbing toilets to get by. And I hope the next software engineer we hire is actually competent and trustworthy.
