At Will Employment

"At Will Employment" sucks. Last summer, I interviewed with a local software company for what appeared to be the perfect position. It was a programming position with a company that has only one product (help desk software). The company appeared to be very progressive - fancy coffee machine in the break room, very casual clothing, ping pong table for the employees to use to recharge their brains. Unfortunately, after I interviewed, the interviewer called me and said that she was in the middle of writing me an offer letter when the "higher ups" had deferred the money for the position, and that while I was the first choice, it would be 4-6 months before the position would be filled.
So, I went back to the job search. Later that fall, after several months of setup for a different job, that required a security clearance, I lost the job at the last moment because my security clearance didn't come in time. It was their own fault because they waited until 10 days before the project was supposed to start before they turned in the paperwork, whereas, I had filled out my end of the paperwork over a month in advance. Anway, with no clearance in hand, they gave my job away to someone who already had a clearance and I was stuck starting my job search over again from scratch.
At this point, desparate for an income, I interviewed for a job as a receptionist in a dentist's office. The interviewer was concerned that I was overqualified, and therefore would leave as soon as something better came along.
I was caught in a no man's land. Where I live, nearly all IT jobs require a security clearance because nearly all IT jobs are related in one way or another to the government. Government jobs nearly always require security clearances. Without a security clearance, getting an IT job is nearly impossible. Jobs that are not connected with the government are for the most part adminsitrative jobs. You know, receptionist, typist, clerical assistants, adminsitrative assistants. And those jobs don't require a degree in computer science. So, unless a person has a security clearance, that person is stuck taking clerical posistions, but if a person has a degree, then when they apply for a clerical position, the interviewer immediately questions why they are "only" applying for a clerical position when they are so overqualified. The interviewers immediately assume there is something "wrong" with someone who would apply for a position so far below their qualifications.
So, I basically had to beg for the job as a frontdesk receptionsist. How humiliating. But they gave me the job, and I was doing a great job with it. How could I not? How hard was it to pull patient files, put them in order by appointment time, call tomorrow's patients to remind them to come in, and then to enter the visit into the computer, so that it would generate a bill and an insurance claim?
I was nearly through the two weeks of training when I got an email from the local programming company - their money came through. The programming position was funded, and I was still their first choice. Did I still want the position? Wow. What a position to be in. I would have to tell the dentist people that after begging for them to hire me, I was going to ditch them. I am not that kind of person.
I went to a lot of trouble to find them a replacement person; someone who had experience as a corpseman in the Navy. Then I met with the programming supervisor to discuss the position. Forty hours a week, repairing coding defects, searching for defects, that kind of thing. Sounded good to me. It was an entry level job, at below entry level wages, but since I had no enterprise level experience, I was okay with that. She agreed to have the acceptance letter sent to me that afternoon.
I started on December 17, 2007. In our first departmental meeting, I learned that we were trying to get version 8.0 ready to release. There was no official release date (drop dead date was March 1 because of a trade show), but the department manager was hoping for end of January, and therefore wanted everyone to work extra hours (after all, we were all salaried), to get it done on time. There were only about 380 defects, so surely that would be doable. And off we went to get our jobs done. I waited to have defects assigned to me (can't just pick a defect to work on, it had to be assigned, so that we knew that only one person was working on any specific defect).
Most of my original defects were really simple. A mispelled word, something bolded where it shouldn't be, that kind of thing. Easily fixed, gave me a chance to learn a bit of the over 800 ASP pages, and the over 5000 SQL stored procedures and tables in the projetcs.
Sounds good, right? Wrong. Each week, we'd have a developmental meeting. Each week, the department head would ask whether we thought we could be done with the defects by the next week. Each week, no one would say that they didn't think they could finish their assigned defects. Each week, I would find more defects while repairing the ones I had been assigned. Now, I am not saying I had immediate solutions for all the defects assigned to me. I didn't. But I had also told them up front that I didn't have a lot of ASP/SQL Server experience beyond classwork. But I do have some PHP and MySQL experience, and I felt sure that I would pick it up quickly. And I did. I was learning it very quickly - but I was also finding some very disturbing things as well. Variables that were being used to track ordinals that were using the data type "float" or worse yet "real". Uhm, no one counts with "reals". There were inconsistencies between the tables, the stored procedures and the ASP code in the sizes and the datatypes of the variables. I tried pointing these inconsistencies out, and I was told that "we inherited this code and have to just live with it." When I found situations were the validations that were being used were insufficient and that I had a better validation plan, I was told to only use it on the two files listed in my defect, and that the program would just ship with the bugs in place, and that they would only be fixed if a customer found them and complained.
I was confused and concerned, but I just continued to do what I was to to do. Then, came the big shock. On Feb 19, 2008, my supervisor called me to her office to tell me that things just weren't "working out", that this "wasn't an entry level position" and that she wasn't able to move me up to move difficult tasks, which she had hoped to be able to do. I was again confused. She had never given me anything more difficult, so how did she know that she couldn't move me up? And this isn't an entry level job? Then why was it paying below the minimum in the area for an entry level position and why was it not advertized as a mid-level position in the first place? Why did they hire me when I told them upfront that I wasn't a looking for a mid-level position, but was looking for an entry-level position? Then she came out with, "I have a special project for you to prove yourself." 34 special defects that would not be part of the 8.0 release, but which would be part of the 8.1 patch. She said there was no particular order in which they needed to be done and there was no time limit in place for completing them. She also said that I should feel free to interrupt her at any time if I needed to get her help. She said I should put the solutions in a specific folder, and she would look at them at the end of each day.
I began to work on the defects. I didn't ask for her help. In less than 2 weeks, I had completed 44% of the defects. Some of the defects had been on the defect list for 2 years. On the 29th of February, she called me back into her office, and fired me, saying again, that "things just weren't working out". She didn't say if she had even bothered to look at my solutions for those defects.
Yesterday, I had a conference call between myself, the HR person from this employer and the Virginia Employment Commission. Apparently, whenever someone applies for unemployment benefits, the VEC has to acertain whether or not the person was discharged for misconduct. The HR person agreed that I had not been discharged for misconduct. When the VEC investigator asked why I *had* been discharged, the responce was "at will employment". The VEC investigator wouldn't accept that as a reason. She asked if they were going to replace me. The HR person said no. So the VEC person asked if that was because there was no work, therefore it was a lay off situation. The HR person got a bit flustered and said, no that it was more like a reorganization of the department. That the department was going in a new direction and that my performance wasn't in that direction. And that they may hire someone, but if they did, it would be a part-time position.
So, basically, what she was saying was that they hired me as a temporary worker to clear defects in their code for their March 1 release. Once they got the 8.0 release ready for the drop dead date of March 1, then they no longer needed me, so since Feb 29 was the end of the pay period, they let me go. Their "reorganization" was to not need any temporary people until their next release. Their use of "at will" in the letters of acceptance gives them an out of the contract without having to give any real reason.
I recommend that people reconsider accepting contracts that include "at will" working unless you don't care about how long you will end up having the job. I also recommend that people consider seriously whether they want to accept positions with certain software companies in downtown Virginia Beach (also known as the Pembroke area of Virginia Beach. Of course, I can't reveal their name, but it shouldn't take too much investigation to figure out who they are.