funnystories

I have been in both sides of the equation.

As an employee, it happened three times.

1. I got fired when the product got acqui-hired. I didn't have a significant exit or anything like that. He explained to me that they could only keep the most senior guys and I was ok with that. Was during college. Learned a lot during the time. (My friend was like 10 years older than me)

2. I joined a "dev collective shop" basically we were something about 10 devs and designers that would run gigs and make mvps for startups and share the profits. We had a leader (close friend of mine), very idealistic and charismatic. After a while we noticed that there were some transparency issues about money and how the projects were picked. It was very stressfull, I ended up breaking relationship with my friend. Shortly after everyone got pissed with him, he got me and some others jobs at his brother's company (a big industry) as a form of compensation. His brother was way crazier than him.

3. I worked for a friend of mine that has a small telecom company. Worked for some months, then went to a better paying job because I needed the money at the time. After that I did many consulting gigs to him and we are very close to this day (remotely, but we always talk)

As an employer, many times, but two in special:

1. I hired a close friend of mine as the tech lead. I was the CTO of a startup and it came to a point that I couldn't handle both the business side and the technical (code) side, just architecture and infrastructure. He had a very senior position at a really big payment gateway. He joined us and really gave his best to the success of the company. When we exited, we gave him lots of options so he could exit well with us.

2. At the same company, we hired a friend of mine (not very close, someone I met in college) to be a regular dev. He was a very smart guy, you know, that use his own distro and coded his own crypto wallet and the such. The thing is that he was never pushing code. Later we found out that he was doing other 3 jobs at the same time. The CEO and everyone complained a lot with me. When we were almost firing him, we noticed by his surname and after some social media searches, that his father was one of our major clients (like 30% of our revenue). So we kept him and turned him into a tech evangelist kind of guy (he ran a technical twitter for the company). Surprisingly, it yielded a lot of new clients and helped a lot with recruitment.

My takeout is that the relationship should be equivalent. You should not be "helping him" or "understanding a difficult phase" and he should not be "helping you grow" or something like that. You both are professionals that by chance are friends. No more, no less. And that your work ethic should always be high, but with friends, double or triple that.

Also, I never seen a couple that worked together and maintained a healthy relationship at the same time. It can happen, but I've never seen it.

all the stories are real. i just try to really anonymize them.

For several years, I worked at a fairly large company as the CTO. All C-level executives (and some managers) had G-suite accounts, and all executive meetings or calls were to be on the shared calendar, allowing anyone to enter any call without prior request. Of course, as in all companies, people would leave the company (by personal choice or the company's decision) and new people would join. Often, people would forget and add random things to the calendar (like picking up a son from school, dentist appointments, etc.).

Our CFO left our company to work at a large investment fund. As usual, I would have removed her from our Gsuite, but the C-levels wanted to keep the email so we could still access her contacts and "impersonate" her in ongoing deals. She created a new password, sent it to us, and stopped using the account.

However, two years passed and some calendar events started to appear. They were from an unknown user but with the old CFO's email, involving random professional meetings with random people. We called her, and she said that she didn't have the account credentials or even the cellphone she previously used.

So we did what most companies do: We ignored it.

Fast forward a few months, our head of marketing was at a startup event with investors when a guy he didn't know introduced himself. He was from another company in the same market as ours and was concerned that he had started negotiating to buy an IP from us but we stopped responding. We had never sold any IP, so my coworker asked with whom he had been talking. Of course, it was with the impersonator. When we checked the email, there weren’t any recent emails sent or received. Weird.

A few days later, we called him to the office, offered him some coffee, and he showed us the conversation. It contained a lot of internal details, a full 9-page PDF with specifications and valuation, pricing, and payment details, with the payment destination being our company's account!

It didn't make any sense. It wasn’t just an error. It wasn’t just a scam. Why would the person direct the money to us?

We tried to investigate, but with many things on our plate, the mystery was again sidelined.

A few weeks later, we had a large sales event inland. By local legislation, all events of a certain size must have a paramedic present. We hired a recent college graduate for this role. She reported some sexual harassment from the construction workers we had hired to build the stage and event structure. As we were investigating this and talking with the authorities, we noticed some calendar events between the medic and the impersonator. Our CEO joined one of these meetings, with me beside him at his desk. Neither party turned on their camera. The impersonator's voice, calm and professional, stated that since our CEO had joined the meeting, he could leave the rest to him and then exited the meeting. We talked to the medic; the impersonator had offered her the equivalent of 20k dollars to not make any public claims about the harassment. We had never discussed any of this during our board meetings.

We started to panic. What else could the impersonator have done? How long had he been posing as us?

We contacted a security company to investigate. They deployed four agents who began to analyze data, track everyone, call people for interrogation, and so on.

In a couple of days, they identified a 23-year-old guy from accounting as the impersonator. We called him into a meeting with all directors. He was visibly nervous but explained his story. A few months before joining the company, he had bought a used cellphone online, on an eBay-like website. This cellphone had belonged to the former CFO, who hadn't wiped it before selling. He began reading the saved emails and documents and got excited about the company's strategy, then applied and got the job. He even shared this story with his recruiter (as in "look at God's will"), but nobody reported it to us, as it seemed irrelevant.

So, he occasionally received emails and acted on them, with the best intentions. He actually had the authority to send and receive money, since he worked in the accounting department. He said that initially, he would ask for advice on what to do, but never received any good suggestions, so he stopped asking. From the first CFO to him, we had two other CFOs. Apparently, during this time, we also had a shadow one. He solved many issues, from workers asking for money to renegotiating payment deadlines. He was actually very good at it.

He showed us all the emails and deals he made, and everything was, in fact, recorded in our system, with invoices sent and everything.

The directors debated whether what he had done was good, bad, illegal, and whether he should receive a reward

, etc.

We voted and then promoted him to a position akin to vice-CFO and gave him a substantial bonus, considering all the legal expenses he saved us.

I left the company a few months after that, but I heard he went on to work at a 'cool' startup, I think Notion or Spotify, something like that.

He was a very intelligent and humble guy, and we met him just because of a series of coincidences with a calendar app.

another story that i just remembered:

I met a guy, at the time the boyfriend of a friend of mine. We hanged out a few times, mostly in his place. He lived in a giant house with a big garden around it. His family was italian and most of them lived in italy. He didn't work or anything and lived a very lavish lifestyle, going to fancy restaurants and driving sport cars. His older sister (she was like 30 something) came to Brazil for some vacations and was always trying to find a guy in parties or bars or any social situation, in an almost embarrassing way. Not a guy for a 1 night stand but for a serious relationship. She met a guy in a bar and started dating him. She started to pay him meals, go on trips with him etc that was responsible for draining all her money in about 2 months. He even sold her an apartment (he told her that it was an incredible investment opportunity). The guy disappeared with the money shortly after (around 100k dollars). There was a little bit of drama but soon after she went back to italy.

Two stories:

1. Once I was working at a mobile app shop. We basically had 3 or 4 models of apps and would customize for clients: a clickable map with information for convention center, a menu for restaurants, a service ordering template for hotels and so on. It was the beginning of the tinder fever in Brazil and me and my coworkers were all single male college students. We wanted to hack tinder to maximize matches. In a few hours we were able to "sniff" the requests, understand the payloads and make a rough api in a python script. We noticed that the swipe limit was only on the client. So we basically swiped right all the girls in our city and selected the ones that didn't interested us. We were having burgers when we noticed that the automatic approach isn't always the preferred one: There were acquaintances there that we matched but never had the intention to, which led to many apologies or at least embarrassment. One of the boys actually got very "successful" with this method (sexually) and even started a shade business selling guaranteed matches to lonely guys. He marketed on facebook with very depressing slogans "you are always being rejected? People avoid you? Send me a message" and people actually paid him blindly hundreds of reais before receiving any concrete product or result. Loneliness is indeed a kind of hunger.

2. I have a friend that is a phd in biology (neurobiology and cognitive diseases) and started to make videos on tiktok etc during the pandemic to explain diseases, infection rates etc. She started to get more and more audience, for 3 reasons (we could identify by the comment section): the scientific content, the "lifestyle" content (how to clean your hands, how to use a mask properly etc) in which she added some fashion and organization opinions, and obviously the pervert ones (she is actually very beautiful, is always with makeup on videos etc). Then she started to make lives to answer questions of the chat. Then these lives became routine. Then the lives became more lifestyle-based with her going to the mall or getting her hair done. In a few months she already had some followers that would pay her monthly to just talk to her. Nowadays she is making 6 figures of dollar basically by talking with followers all day, without nudity or anything like that. She continues to do her research but the grants and publishing became irrelevant financially to her. She seems very happy, but concerned when this "season" is going to end. Loneliness is indeed a kind of farm.

the method I used (I barely remember the details) is similar to this one https://scholar.archive.org/work/idi3kpcrlbfpvkxfxxf5tqr3om

thank you for the suggestion, but it was just an undergraduate paper written in ~2014. I don't see any relevance in publishing it now.

when i was on college, i wrote a simple system to make corrections on text based on some heuristics for a class.

then, the teacher of the class suggested me to write a paper describing the system for a local conference during the summer, with some results etc

I wrote it with his support but it got rejected right away because of poor grammar or something similar. the conference was in Brazil, but required the papers to be in English. I was just a student and thought that indeed my english was pretty bad. the teacher said to me to at least send an email to the reviewers to get some feedback, maybe resubmit with the corrections.

i asked specifically which paragraphs were confusing. they sent me some snippets of phrases that were obviously wrong. yes, they were the "before" examples of "before/after" my system applied the corrections. I tried to explain that the grammar should be wrong, but the just replied with "please fix your english mistakes and resubmit".

i tried 2 or 3 more times but just gave up.