Bitcoin Forum

I lost a job with Nefario a few weeks ago without knowing it. Today, he informed me the reasons why I lost my job.

I did the work and meet the deadline as far as I know. However, he said that I was unenthusiastic, slow with my work, poor communicator and was not very autonomous and that I was only in it for the money. He did not informed me weeks ago as to why he have an issue with my work and hence discontinuation of no more jobs. of work.

So, I do not have opportunities to fix my mistakes and I have the impression that I have an amicable relationship with my employer. That was not the case!

Consider the implication that my reputation will be damaged if Nefario told others how bad my work was and I did not know of his opinion. I cannot fix it until after the fact!

The pay was very good for what I can get in the job market and he promised me work and work for months. It would be better if I had known it way back then that he did not like my work and will not continue to employ me.

Unemployment due to perceived or real bad performance is bad, but false hope of employment is the worst thing.

Others who worked with Nefario may have good experience with him, but not me.

Truth-telling and accepting truth and doing it in a timely manner is a very important quality in an entrepreneur or a boss. Tell me what I don't want to hear, now! I want to know he fires me, now! Not several weeks later.

That is the extent of my complaint on Nefario.

P.S.

This is not an April Fool joke.

May I suggest a contract? Even if you don't trust state enforcement of them, it's still a solid agreement between both of you which you can objectively evaluate when the time comes. At least it would give you more things to complain about when things go wrong. Also 'how well party X upholds contracts' is a good reputation builder.

It's a communication issue, above all else. I cannot fix a problem if I don't know there's a problem with my work!

That was fatal to my ability to be employed. Imagine a customer saying he likes my work even though my work are horrible.

I am a fan of contracts per job. Longterm contracts are always doomed to fail at a predictable percentage rate. I.E. Home Mortgage is based on your employment but they assume that you will remain employed at the same rate or greater salary for 30 years. That is ridiculous.

Either get a contracted employment or you are working on a "as is" basis and should be expected to be let go for any reason.

You are lucky that he gave you a reason, most employers don't for fear of reprisals (legal or otherwise).

If what he says is correct, it is a bad model.

Most freelancers work by contract. Pay me this, for this, in this amount of time. etc...

Happens all the time, the key is if the customer buys your work.

Just like an interview, they like you but don't hire you.

Anyway, I decided for all future employment, I will make people sign a contract, with GPG and all that jazz.

I don't know how to write a good contract, but it's better to know that you're fired now rather than knowing that you got fired 4 weeks later.

A good contract is a clear contract. It's not too difficult.

Everybody knows what's a good contract is. I just think it's easier said than done.

Has he paid you anything for the work you submitted/time invested?

Strictly from what I've read in this thread, if you were in Canada you already have a valid legally binding contract. Also, contract or not you still may be legally entitled to a fair percentage of funds promised to you regardless of whether Nefario was happy with your work or motivation.

Also, I didn't realized this was an unacceptable attribute of an employee. It will be interesting to hear Nefario's side.

I don't think he needs to voice his side. However, letting someone think they are still employed is a little dubious. I am guessing the paychecks were on a monthly basis. Otherwise, who continues to work without getting paid. Oh... Californians... they take those IOU's.

I might be able to have a good start-up out there, just pay with IOU's.

No, he did not gave me any work for a month. So he doesn't owe me anything.

Here is the message Nefario PMed me:


The only issue I have is that it took Nefario so long to tell me this or that he didn't like the work I do and neglect to tell me this. (as far as I know, I completed the work according to the assignment and deadline I was given)

I'm working for nefario too (on the same project, I might add,) and he/she (It says female on the profile) hasn't contacted me, or responded to me for weeks. Did he say anything about me? Do you think I lost my job too? I was actually really excited for this.

I don't know anything about you. I did not know much about the other employees and we didn't communicate even once.

Sorry about that part by the way, that was mostly my fault. I've worked with git before, but for some reason, I couldn't get it to work this time on my piece of crap computer. I was on IRC with him, and told him I was having a little trouble, and he told me to try fossil before continuing with getting git to work. Fossil was up and running in minutes, so he decided to stay with it. Did he tell you that was because of me? If you told me you had a problem with it, I would have tried harder to get git working.

Fool. I PM'ed you to ask if you want to help out. You replied then did nothing.

Your loss.

Don't know about Kiba but I suspect the same.

Are you both 12? I guess you're only good for making crappy forum posts attacking people rather than taking the initiative to write useful code. Not here to be your parent. In the future if you want to work on the net, you have to be pro-active and self-directed.

Irony? For someone calling others out for making crappy forum posts attacking people, this one sure was filled with vitriol.

Chill genjix.

Well, this is not the most pleasant thing to wake up to. I would think that this sort of thing should be dealt with in private(not airing your dirty laundry in public sort of thing), but since it's been brought out into the open then I guess we'll have to deal with it that way.

Firstly a little background, this is all to do with a bitcoin company that has started, we are building a stock market that deals in bitcoin. I'm the CEO/president/organiser or whatever you would like to call it.

We have a number of investors as well as investing 1/2 of my bitcoin wealth myself. I had invited kiba to join in too, but he prefered not to risk his capital, which is understandable. However at the time, me and kiba were working together on the bitcoin weekly, and I wanted to involve him in the project somehow. So I asked him to do some development.

Kiba was not the only one, there was also Ryland Tylor Almanza who did some work for the project.

This was my first experience hiring anyone, it was also my first experience working with others in a development project.

Not long after starting the project changed, what was planned to be a client written in Ruby changed to be written in Python.

I wrote to kiba.

I don't have a record for Ryland, however I paid both kiba and ryland for the work they had done, and told them that there was nothing happening for them at the moment.

After that well to be honest things moved on in the project(as well as my non-bitcoin workload increasing) and I didn't inform them, mainly because I had forgotten. It wasn't until a few weeks later when kiba pm'd me asking when was I going to have more work for them.

Well, with Ryland I had asked genjix to get onto him, that he seemed bright and enthusiastic but nothing came of that(genjix said why). With kiba that was awkward and, hoping that he would get the idea didn't reply. But kiba kept pm'ing me and so I sent him a reply, the one he quoted above.

So it was a mixture of a few different things, my own lack of experience in working with, and overseeing others, my own time constraints which meant I wouldn't be able to oversee someone that needs a lot of direction. And my own dislike for bearing bad news.

These are all my own problems, I admit that, I even said so much in both messages I sent to kiba.

Ryland, I have no problems with you, as I said I think you're bright and enthusiastic, we'll it's just the project has moved on and because of my own limitations I can't handle you, and you never replied to genjix so I assumed you were not interested in continuing.

Kiba, Chill, what I pm'd you was meant as advice, something you could use to reflect on, and use to make some self improvements. I hadn't complained to anyone about you. Do you think I'm like some fat executive hanging out in a boardroom with others, smoking cigars while we laugh and crack jokes about our underlings at their expense?

I'm just some person on a crappy, tiny, laptop in China who teaches English for a living. Trying my best to get something done. If I wanted to badmouth you I would have written a public post on the forum to air those things I sent you in the pm.

I lost a job without knowing.

I apologize for my complusion to air this thing in public. I guess this job left me a bad taste in my mouth.


You need to COMMUNICATE with me if there's an issue with my work.

You can't say "Oh, yeah...that's guy not autonomous, unenthusiastic about work, only care about the money and not the job" in your advice.

I only worked for one week and did the job correctly and accordingly to deadline. I got paid for it and there was no complaint. That is what I know.

You thought my dislike for fossil as "lack of enthusiasm". However, you forget that it was textual information. You don't know what I think. That's bad.

I seem to not be in contact with genjix or with any other employees. That's also a big problem right here.


You're my boss, not a Chinese guy who teach English. You're responsible for making things run on time and making sure everyone is on the same page.

Similarly, I am not "kiba", but your employee. I can't help you if you don't communicate.  If my clients or employer said I did bad work, my reputation is the one that's getting chopped. You got an ISSUE with me, you let me know ASAP.

I don't even know that genjix was someone I was supposed to report to.

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You keep changing your post, so I'm quoting you and signing my post.

Allow me to COMMUNICATE this: your role/position/job disappeared when the project changed. .I have no use for a relatively inexperienced Ruby developer that doesn't understand Public Key cryptography in a Python project that uses it heavily. Ryland is in the same boat to a certain extent (although he understands public key cryptography, and had the chance to work with genjix).

It's unfortunate but that happens.

I had just hired you, it's not like we have been working together for years and suddenly you changed, if I don't like the way you do things(no response for days, trying to get me to promise that you would have a job longer than what I had said, telling me how I should spend my companies money etc.) then it's up to me whether to continue working with you or not.

I didn't like your attitude, and spending a few days working with you was more than enough for me to conclude that our business relationship had come to an end. I'm not your personal coach, and have tried to be as non-confrontational about it as possible, I gave you feedback so you could use it, not post it all over the forum, continuing to beat a dead horse.

What do you want? what are you trying to achieve?
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First of all, I'm not trying to attack anyone. I was just confused, and when Kiba brought this up, I thought I might as well tell him my experience and ask if he knew anything about it. Also, I replied to your message and wasn't aware I got a reply back. I just went through my messages and found it. I'm not sure how I managed to miss it, but I guess that is kind of my loss. I should have been more thorough when I checked my messages. :( Anyway, thanks for hiring me in the first place, and for paying me for what I did do. Again, I'm not mad at anyone. And if theres no room in the project for me anymore, that's fine. I was just curious as to what was happening, and upon more thorough examination, I realize it's my fault anyway. However, if you do find more room in the project, let me know. Ruby may not be my thing, but I'm great with python. It's the main language I use to program.

Edit: By the way, are you male or female? I know your profile says female, but I haven't seen anyone refer to you as a she.

It doesn't matter whether or not you had just hired me. It is very clear that there was a communication failure. That was the root cause of the whole issue here. If you had done that from the very beginning after week one on the project, than I wouldn't have wasted time contacting you for work.

The advice you gave me was a bunch of hogwash. It was an issue with me not understanding cryptography and that I was inexperienced. This is an acceptable explanation.

In the future, I suggest coming up with better way to communicate to your employees.

Was this for the job posting that paid 120 BTC per week?

Yes, I believe it was, unless there was another one with the same pay.

Did you have PM popup on? If you had that option on, it would be very hard to miss. I enabled that so I wouldn't miss any important message.

In fact, it was one of my big frustration. I gotten really pissed off that a developer didn't respond to my PM about a particular bitcoin extension bounty that I asked him to deliver.

It seems that I got burned from my not making my expectation clear repeatedly. But it also seems that I have issues when people are not communicating.

I even had this whole thread detailing my frustration with PM system: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2274.0

I guess this whole thread was caused by my irrational anger in response to lack of communication.

Called it here, http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3845.msg60112#msg60112 haha

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You mean this advice?

Hogwash? That's good advice for anyone, that's exactly what I'm doing now. It's the best advice to follow if you lack experience, you don't have to work for anyone to get experience you just have to create, and you can do that yourself.

I've already said the primary reason is that the project changed and your skill-set didn't match.

When I was back in Ireland, I spent a lot of time job hunting, doing interview after interview. Almost without exception if they didn't want to hire me I never heard back from them. Sometime I could guess the reason but most of the time I just didn't know. It meant I never really knew what I was doing wrong, and probably repeated the same mistakes. It made it really difficult for me to improve.

I gave you feedback so you can take something from this, something positive, but you've taken it as a personal insult. Take what I've said as something to improve on. I like you, you're very active on the forums and I think this 3rd attempt at the bitcoin weekly will succeed. Chill
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I realize this was directed towards kiba, but, again, I'd like to point out that I'm great with python. Is there some other requirement that I don't meet?

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Well we thought you were not interested, I asked genjix to contact you to bring you in on the client development side of things and then really didn't hear much back from you. genjix didn't tell me anything so I assumed that you were either not up for it or genjix didn't much want to deal with you.

We've moved on quite a bit with the client now, and it's already been opensourced.
https://gitorious.org/black-market/black-market-client

The next step is making sure it easily installs and runs on various planforms and then the gui.

How's your gui development skills? AFAIK it would be done with QT
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It seems that I had missed this crucial information, somehow.


You did not like how I approach the project, in a textual context. You didn't like me "telling you what to do with your company's money". You thought I had a bad attitude.

I simply believe that this was a communication issue.


What was wrong with me is that I lacked public cryptography knowledge. That is why I lost the job. Your advice had nothing to do as to why I lost my job.

I am done with this issue.

Simply put, my "communication" issue is understood. I understood the reason why I got fired.

I am not exactly on good term with Nefario and his corporation, but there is no business issues to resolve anyway. It was simply a personal complaint about how Nefario handle communications.

Though now, I even perceive an opportunity for a company in his market to take his business. It won't be me though.