I'm very familiar with #8. I worked for a company that was being super picky with its term sheets when looking for investment, but then suddenly the credit crunch happened and all our term sheets were withdrawn. Problem was, we were spending as if we'd already had an extra $15m in the bank, so we had to start cutting back.
I'd had a habit of coming in around 10 AM and staying most of the day and part of the late afternoon/evening; typical startup kind of 'go get lunch then come back and crank out some code' behaviour, while most of the rest of the dev team came in between 11 and 1. This includes one of our best developers, who, without downtime, ported an entire product from PHP to Rails on his own time over the weekend because the code was unmanageable and he wanted to be able to iterate faster.
Suddenly, after most of the most senior (and most expensive) people have left, the CEO decides that everyone needs to be in the office at 9 AM, you know, so we can communicate. Sure, okay. So people start coming in at 9 AM. They're tired, they haven't had breakfast, they only got 5 hours of sleep, but boss wants people filling seats so we fill them. I start getting phone calls at 9:03 if my bus is running late, because my buffer time was usually taken up by being in such a rush that I forgot my wallet.
So every day, everyone's tired, everyone's frustrated, and everyone's leaving after they've put their 8 hours in. My start date, when my options were priced, was the highest price the shares had ever traded at. But I was still one of the most well-paid engineers so I stayed until I got 'downsized' and took a month off.
Last I heard, the CEO was getting sued by the board for treating that company as a source of resources for his other company (like flights back to his other company's office, or my tech support to get his people up and running).
I'd had a habit of coming in around 10 AM and staying most of the day and part of the late afternoon/evening; typical startup kind of 'go get lunch then come back and crank out some code' behaviour, while most of the rest of the dev team came in between 11 and 1. This includes one of our best developers, who, without downtime, ported an entire product from PHP to Rails on his own time over the weekend because the code was unmanageable and he wanted to be able to iterate faster.
Suddenly, after most of the most senior (and most expensive) people have left, the CEO decides that everyone needs to be in the office at 9 AM, you know, so we can communicate. Sure, okay. So people start coming in at 9 AM. They're tired, they haven't had breakfast, they only got 5 hours of sleep, but boss wants people filling seats so we fill them. I start getting phone calls at 9:03 if my bus is running late, because my buffer time was usually taken up by being in such a rush that I forgot my wallet.
So every day, everyone's tired, everyone's frustrated, and everyone's leaving after they've put their 8 hours in. My start date, when my options were priced, was the highest price the shares had ever traded at. But I was still one of the most well-paid engineers so I stayed until I got 'downsized' and took a month off.
Last I heard, the CEO was getting sued by the board for treating that company as a source of resources for his other company (like flights back to his other company's office, or my tech support to get his people up and running).