Sex, Drugs, and Rocking Code: The Uncensored Autobiography of an Anonymous Programmer by Paul W. Carter

Author:Paul W. Carter [Carter, Paul W.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Capraro Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nothing is black or white, everything is a shade of gray.

Tupac said something akin to, “We’re all shades of gray. Nothing’s black or white.” Even in your darkest of dark grays, you should understand there’s still some percent of white in there somewhere, and you might be wrong. Take that moment and get used to that feeling where you question yourself if you’re judging. Realize you’re forming a strong opinion that you can’t base in reality.

To put this into context, I was a partner in a company that did a lot of marketing. When I showed up, we did about $1.2 million in business that year. Two years later, when I left, we were five to six times larger. Part of this was because I ran myself ragged, and another part of this was the team running themselves ragged for me, while the entire time I had a business partner who couldn’t do anything right. He only wanted to be in the building with the rest of us. But he wouldn’t put in the time, and he was a brat, for lack of a better way to put it. But he also happened to be the CEO.

I spent two years at odds with this guy. He kept trying to do stuff, and he would break things I’d worked on and say, “Well, you can fix it.” I thought he was terrible at everything he did, plus he was very mean to the staff. I got so bogged down on how he treated the staff like they were trash and useless and how he was worth everything. He had left an assistant manager position at a cellular phone store to start the company, which made me wonder why he had the hubris at all.

Through all this, I’m thinking he’s a bad guy who’s not good at anything. This was my perception, but after getting screwed on my buyout through all kinds of contractual messes, I realized he wasn’t the idiot I thought he was. He wasn’t good at what we were doing, but he was sure good at screwing me over and making sure it protected him. There was a game in the back of all his actions. Every contract that came out put me in a worse position. Due to my perception that he was a fool, I underestimated the entirety of him based on one area.

My perception was he couldn’t be good at anything, but he was a mastermind at screwing people over. As I look back, he nailed it. He got people to work for less than minimum wage while paying them slightly more than that over sixteen-hour days and ninety-hour weeks. He’d tell them, “This is a good job. You’re making double minimum wage,” which isn’t true when you’re working ninety to or hundred-hour weeks.

Don’t write people off because they can still get you. Had I been thinking everyone has a superpower, I would have been looking for his. I had perceived him as a certain thing early on and then went with my perception without taking the time to see him for what he was.

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