Paymetric Tell-All

I suppose I can reveal some dirt on Vantiv's (now Worldpay's) acquisition Paymetric now that it's been so long that I'll never need a review from there, and there is more to tell than just Keith Deklerk getting in a fist fight in the Houston office (so said Angela Garza and Lisa Gschwind didn't contradict when I repeated it back to her). My immediate superior Michael Dozier had an adult son in the Autism/Asperger's spectrum and he literally believed in the Jenny McCarthy theories about how a shot at the doctor's office can inflict this condition on your child. He and his stay-at-home wife Lisa attempted to adopt a boy and a girl even though they already had three sons and the stress from the adoption process tested the wife so much that they had to back out of it. Michael told us all something along the lines of "she has been stable for years" but now she was "having thoughts" and that of course led me to certain conclusions. If this just seems like off limits and that I shouldn't go there, I have to say that I always thought Michael was a coward for getting Dip Manandhar to serve for a reference for me in the absence of doing so himself. I worked for him for two and a half years. Dip for his part wasn't so great at coughing up references for me. He seemed to help me on my first voyage because he had to and then he seemed to make up some story about being away in Nepal when I reached out six months later. Maybe he really was in Nepal. He's not my friend either way. Michael's superior at the time, James Osborn, had been Michael's underling once and was eventually promoted to be his boss and got out of writing code and into hiding in management. I recall a few times when Dip joked of how James' code had a code comment just for the starting of an array in some old dabbling that Dip had to unearth and deal with. I have a hunch that James wasn't much of a developer. James told me that his father was an alcoholic and I suspect the son took after the dad too. James would crawl in late a lot. When Mike Rivers was James' superior before Bill Wied and when he would visit from Atlanta there was often a happy hour after work in coordination and another coworker I had would joke of James being "sick" the day after these. There was a time when he and I and two others all had a training together and he showed up late for the training. I twice watched Bill Wied stand really close to Bridget Richards and ask her if she needed more time off when he learned of an issue with her as if he was really concerned about her. Bridget would smile at him with a shit-eating grin as if thinking "What is this bullshit?" and I suspect Bill's wife would have thought that too had she been a fly on the wall. Early on at my time at Paymetric, Asif Ramji reversed a previous policy of allowing employees to work from home on Fridays. Also there would be no flexibility as to when you had to be at work. Everyone had to be there until five, so no getting in early to cut out early to beat traffic home. Of course this angered a lot of the staff. James pulled all of us into his office, a few at a time, and then told us the news. After everyone was on board, James and Michael told David Streeter last and David Streeter threw a little fit in the middle of the office and was threatening to quit over having to be at work until five. Apparently he and his wife had some small dogs together, Schnauzers I think, and the new timetable wouldn't jive with some logistics challenges to do with the dogs. In short, David was too spoiled to be at work until five. I watched James suggest aloud in the middle of the office that perhaps he and Mike Rivers would just hide from Asif the fact that they would let employees leave before five. (I wonder what Lauren Allen and Rie Irish in the Atlanta office would have thought if they knew everyone in the Austin office didn't have to stay to five when the Atlanta office did.) Often when something went wrong middle management would introduce a new layer of micromanagement to give reassurances up because what else could they do as middle managers? Partway into my time at Paymetric the company started doing exhaustive code reviews because of this with a tool (SmartBear Collaborator) that could not aggregate commits and, as I like to check in early and often, this was ultimately the death sentence for me. It was the same story for me at @hand one job prior. I should have taken the "make one big commit" thing more seriously in retrospective, but I would also point out that almost everyone in the office would pick and choose what they took seriously. Michael asked everyone under his command to read the "Who moved my cheese?" book as an exercise and Dip just refused to do so and he got away with it. Posters were hung in the Austin office advertising our nine core values and when Asif, the CEO, visited from Atlanta, on a few occasions, he would preach to us about them while everyone (well, at least Dip) rolled their eyes. (I guess he didn't literally roll his eyes. He'd stand there looking grumpy, disgusted. You know what I mean, right?) They were all too vague to be actionable. Another example of cherry-picking what to care about would have been that business about not keeping the Austin employees in the office until five o'clock. At Paymetric I seemed to be the budgetary replacement for an Atlanta-based contractor with the idea being that it was best to have all of the developers in Austin. However, I'm not sure the Austin office was too in love with my addition to the team. I showed up wanting to work hard and that was quickly shot down and then I began to just coast. Two years later when management tried to shake me out of my slumber to get me to actually work hard again I didn't have the mindset for it and a voice inside was telling me that I could probably just get away with coasting yet as I had coasted for so long. Then things ended. It is tough that David could get away with leaving before five and that Dip could get away with not reading "Who moved my cheese?" but that I couldn't get away with checking in early and often but then I am also a tough person. I cannot say that I'll move on, but I will grow from this. The famous Nietzsche quote applies here. You know when Jeff Burkett was cut from Paymetric he told me that he was given three months severance in exchange for signing a piece of paper in which he would not badmouth the company on social media. In my case however, I don't think Bill, James, and Michael wanted Parisse Spelios in charge of human resources to even know about the decision making happing at least two states away (if you drive from Atlanta to Austin through Tennessee and Arkansas) and they just told me that I could stay until the end of the year while I looked for something else. It would to all appear as if I just quit. How convenient! I left work early that Friday, rattled, and then returned on Monday and resigned outright. I had a new job in less than a month. (I have some game.) Anyhow, the secrets were not contained in my case like they were with Jeff. Here they are for all to see! I may have more embarrassing stories under my own belt than anyone else I know, but if you stack a few others atop one another they can stand just as tall as me in that regard. Michael once suggested that he heard that the reason Jessica Wine's father Larry Wine was pushed out as CEO was because he was embezzling.