Karen Ceo Fired Me For Taking Sick Leave.. Forgot I Own The Source Code!

I also called a couple of ex-colleagues who had already left the company and asked if they wanted to do some contract work, and they did. One of them laughed and said,

“So the dinosaur is starting his own herd.”

Something like that. While we coded in my living room turned office, the meltdown at my old job continued.

They tried to get a local dev agency to unlock the software. The agency looked at the compiled code, the license checks, and the contract and said,

“We’re not touching this. If we help you violate a license, we’re the ones getting sued next.”

Karen tried to get the HR lady to file a complaint against me with some government office, but the HR lady quietly refused. A little later, she asked me if I needed a part-time HR consultant for my new project.

Clients started leaving. Some went to other providers, and some called me again, this time more serious.

“Look,”

one of them said.

“We don’t care about your quarrels. We just need our trucks to move. If you can provide a working system, we will sign with you.”

And I repeated my line: I won’t poach, but if they choose to switch, I won’t say no. They decided to switch the moment they sent termination letters to my old company.

I knew there was no way back for them. Their entire value proposition was the software; without that, they were just a bunch of people in an office with nothing to sell.

The investors panicked. One evening, I got an email directly from one of them.

“OP, we would like to discuss a potential acquisition of your IP or a new licensing agreement. Can we meet?”

We actually met at a cafe. He looked tired and more polite than anyone from that company had been in a long time.

“We were not aware of the specific terms of your contract,”

he said.

“If we had known, we would not have allowed HR to send those letters.”

“I sent reminders,”

I said.

“Nobody listened.”

He nodded and asked,

“What would it take for you to reinstate the license?”

“Honestly, I don’t think reinstating the old license makes sense anymore,”

I said.

“I’m already working on a new platform. Some clients are switching. If I go back, I become your employee again and you have a director who thinks people my age should be in a museum.”

He winced.

“She will not be with us much longer,”

he said carefully.

I shrugged.

“Even so,”

I said.

“I think it’s better if we keep things clean. You had a license, you lost it by not honoring the contract and by firing me for being sick. So now you can build your own thing from scratch if you want. I’m not going to go after you as long as you don’t use my code.”

“So there’s no number we can offer you?”

he asked.

“There is,”

I said.

“But I don’t think you would like it. It would have to cover not just the code but the future earnings of my own business if I give it up. That’s not going to be cheap.”

He thought about it for a while and finally said,

“We don’t have that kind of money anymore.”

We shook hands. Meeting over.

A week later, word went around that Karen had been let go. The official announcement used some nonsense about different visions and pursuing other opportunities.

Unofficially, one of my ex-colleagues told me the board had basically thrown her under the bus.

“She blamed everything on you in the meeting,”

he said.

“But the investors asked a simple question: who decided to fire the person who wrote the system we depend on? And she didn’t have a good answer.”

“Did the founder say anything?”

I asked.

“He tried to defend you a bit,”

my colleague said.

“But they were also angry at him for not telling them how important you were. Anyway, she is gone. She left the office like someone stole her heels.”

I thought I would feel more triumphant, but mostly I just felt done. The real revenge was not her losing her job.

It was the simple fact that she had tried to erase me and discovered that the so-called old dinosaur was the one holding up the building. The company tried to limp along for a while.

They hired some freelancers to build the basic system. It sort of worked, but it was slow and buggy, and by then most of the good clients had moved on.

A couple went to competitors; a couple came to me. And at some point, the company shut their doors for good.

My little company grew. We rented a small office and I hired two of my favorite exes full-time.

We kept it simple: no fancy titles, no loud heels on tile floors. I wrote a sick leave policy that basically said,

“If you’re sick, stay home. We will figure it out.”

In the end, the software that defined their business walked out the door with the so-called old dinosaur. And when they tried to pretend that it didn’t matter, reality hit them harder than any revenge I could have ever planned.

Their company went dark; mine turned on the lights. This story took place in Azerbaijan.

Some of the comments here were slightly confused by a few things. Well, what can I say? This country is screwed up. I have no words.

After the license died, they tried to limp along on spreadsheets and a half-baked temporary system a cheap agency cobbled together. Dispatches went back to WhatsApp and phone calls.

Mistakes multiplied. Trucks got stuck at customs because forms were wrong or late.

Two of the biggest clients triggered penalty clauses in their contracts after missed SLAs and quietly moved all business elsewhere. Within a couple months, cash flow also dried up fast.

Investors refused to pour in more money just to patch a leaking ship, especially once they realized how much it would cost to rebuild a real platform from scratch. Their reputation in the market tanked.

They finally tried one last round of layoffs and salary delays to buy time, which only pushed the remaining good staff to quit. Finally, they filed for bankruptcy.

By then, most of their former clients were already using either my system or a competitor’s. The next one is a story from r/maliciouscompliance which is titled “You’ve been randomly selected.”

This happened about three years ago while going through an airport in the USA. I walked through the metal detector, something must have beeped, and they needed to pat me down.

After a thorough pat down, I put my shoes on and started to walk over to grab my bag. A TSA agent stops me.

“You’ve been randomly selected. Please step into the body scanner,”

the agent said.

I was polite but said that he really didn’t want to get into the body scanner and asked if there was another way. The agent said that I could get a pat down.

“Well, I just got a pat down,”

I said.

So they angrily told me to pick an option. I took two steps backwards to the woman who had patted me down 30 seconds ago and spread them again.

While she was patting me down, I asked her if she found anything new. She stared daggers at me but then let me go.

The next one is of course also from r/maliciouscompliance and it is titled “Account closing fee? Okay, then leave my account open forever.”

A long time ago, I worked at a company that gave me a retirement account through Fidelity. I eventually changed jobs to a different company that provided a retirement account through another provider.

So I call up Fidelity to roll my old account funds into my new one. Fidelity can do that for me, but there’s a $50 account closing fee.

Why do they have an account closing fee? Well, because forget me, that’s why.

I tried to be clever.

“Leave one dollar in the account,”

I said.

But they require a $50 minimum in case you want to close at a later date. So cue my malicious compliance.

“Okay, roll over all my funds except for 50 dollars. Keep the account open. Send me quarterly updates on my 50 bucks. Invest it. Make it grow,”

I told them.

So I now have a tradition: once a year, I call Fidelity to transfer over all but 50 dollars of my account balance. Usually, it’s just a check for a few dollars.

By this point, I’ve cost them way more than 50 dollars of service, postage, and checks they mailed to me. But I still have a few decades to retirement.