Wednesday, November 21, 2012

One More Thing I'm Thankful For

Being a Subject Matter Expert as well as a customer of the No-Name Software Company, I was included in a Customer Briefing about questionable accounting and business practices by former management prior to the current companies acquisition.


Let me try to clear that up, when I first worked for the No-Name Software Company, it was called something. Through a merger/takeover, another company bought it and changed its name. I still get recruiters calling me to see if I'm interested in taking a contract job out-of-state for a position I have no qualifications for whatsoever. A simply reading of my resume and cursory understanding of the position you're trying to fill should make that self evident but alas, recruiters are mostly bottom feeders who couldn't make it into Human Resources.


Anyway, a few years after I left No-Name, another company acquired it. This is the company that allegedly implemented said questionable accounting and business practices and is now under investigation by the SEC and UK's Serious Fraud Office for civil and criminal investigation.

I have no way of knowing if the way they cooked the books is illegal, legal or just screwy.  It's probably one of those risk versus reward factoring chances of being caught scenarios.  What I can speak to is the culture that existed when I was there.  Everyone from the Top down had a culture of only sharing as much information as necessary and only when it absolutely needed to be released.  Development would release software with known issues and not share them with Consulting Services who would discover them at advanced installs and not share with Technical Support, who would discover work arounds and not propogate those back to anyone.

My point is that I probably left in the nick of time, though I had no idea at the time. Even though things were rough at the Low-Rent Consulting Company (C2), I did learn a lot of my current skillset and much more than I would if I had remained at No-Name.

I left C2 to go to a Big Bucks Law Firm. I was there for almost 3 years before running, not walking away. While I wasn't the first rat to scurry off the sinking ship, I once again got out in the nick of time. Everyone was geting the hell out of Dodge including the CIO.  A few months ago, the FBI charged the replacement CIO with fraud. I was not involved with any of that.  However, it's just never a good thing to be in the vicinity of such impropriety if you can avoid it.

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