What startup snakery have you experienced as a developer / employee?

In the first example you gave, why didn't the company just tell the person it was a 6-month long contract to begin with? Wouldn't that have been better for both parties?

No internal HR department to which to report bad actors.

People being put on "performance improvement plans" out of spite.

Oh yeah nothing like being fired for some made up hr bs just because you disagreed with the megalomaniac of a cto.

It's not just startups. IBM laid off massive numbers of experienced and long-serving staff and made them train their off-shored replacements in order to earn their severance packages. The executive suite and institutional shareholders made out as bandits.

As a tech lead at a startup in the uk i had a developer in my team snap at me out of the blue. Then i had a conversation trying to understand the root cause.

Turns out that dev, a senior dev with more than 10 years of experience, was getting paid, in london, 37k gbp a year.

Went to the MD and explained the unfairness of all this and demanded a pay raise on his behalf, since i was his manager.

Was bluntly told, with a laugh nonetheless, “he is on a work visa, whats he going to do about it anyway?”.

Thats when i understood the power of visa tied work. Certain types of employers love it as a means to control workers and undercut wages. A good reason for some to want to leave the eu - couldnt control foreign stuff and couldnt depress wages since everyone was on equal terms.

Fast forward a few months. I went on as a head of dev at another company, hired the guy, almost doubled his pay and made him a team lead because that was his fair level of experience. No more snaps.

I'm a senior dev with 25 years experience. This happened to me at Blackfire.io. All of my reviews were glowing from day one and my boss loved me until suddenly one day, he calls me at an odd time of day looking shaken, to tell me that my performance has been bad since the day I started (a year prior). When I pressed for specifics, all I could get him to say was "You haven't been stepping up enough." (despite the many innovations I added, including one that changed the turnaround time for a specific task from a full day to an hour). When I asked how I could improve, he said "We'll talk about that later." 2 weeks later I was fired. It was an illegal firing under EU law, but I wasn't in the mood to go through the annoyance of the legal system so I just moved on.

This was about a month after I balked when the company tried to take ownership over an open source project of mine (which they never ended up using because it also by necessity has very dangerous code to be able to do its thing).

A startup I worked at used equity as an argument for 80 hour work weeks, but kept employees in the dark as much as possible about everything relating to said equity. It took two years to find out that our equity was essentially worthless.

The only silver lining to this story is that no one was actually pulling 80 hour weeks because the information asymmetry that the executive suite maintained around this topic created an atmosphere of mistrust and a common opinion that our equity must be worthless, since if we had been given something actually valuable then they would have wanted us to know about it.

More than once I've been asked to demo features that are not completed.

Once was by someone who told me to do this verbally. He was not formally my manager but some nepotism was happening at the company. I wasn't able to push back on most things with him, this is one of the few things I pushed back on some directly, and then just didn't do it. Also, this was all told to me verbally - I didn't really trust this person, and am sure if someone had noticed I hadn't really completed any of these things I was claiming to have finished, he would have disavowed that he had told me to do this.

On the other hand, I was under a good lead once where we were getting a lot done but had two weeks where were just doing prep work. The lead said to do a UI mockup and to mention during the demo that the UI was a mockup because "they won't understand any how" but it was the only method of some to understand we were making progress. In this case I did demo the mockups, saying they were mockups, since I did trust this lead, and we were making steady progress, he just wanted demos to show something UI displayable every sprint.

Around 5 years ago I worked for startup where many bad things were happening:

- some people were having second full time job, their performance was visibly poor but lead was assuming good faith and was taking active steps to motovate these guys, like giving them interesting projects and focusing on code they were shipping (he didn't know their bad performance was coming from having two full time jobs, this came out after company was shutdown)

- management of said startup never shared real revenue numbers (all zeros), they kept doing this until company was dissolved and we were told it's our last day without notice, even though our contracts had from 1 month to 3 months notice

- in one software house I have heard people taking pride of having two or even three jobs simultaneously and sharing 'hacks' how to keep doing this without being spotted

After covid started, team started working from home. week into it, HR told team that screen tracker software is to be installed. so that CEO can track what team is doing. I objected to this and left the job. since i find this unethical also very childish approach to micromanagement.

Even in office CEO was tracking the "work" via installed cctv from remote since he was in US.

It turns out that guy was control freak.

Hiring only those people who have been made redundant from a previous employer due to downsizing / merger etc. Such people tend to be easier to manipulate.

Nepotism is the big one. Hiring family who barely work. Outside of that, hiring people who are connected to your investors. Then not being able to fire them, even though they are a net negative to your team and productivity. Insane.