Title: I had a bad freelance experience at a startup where we agreed on fulltime work &amp; hourly rate. I worked normally, some days working late on features into the evening, some days wrapping up early. After a month I invoiced for ~38 hours per week &amp; the founder who was also my manager literally threw a tantrum saying that my invoice was &quot;immoral&quot; and that I &quot;should only bill for productive hours.&quot; I don&#x27;t know what he means by that, as I was working full time, sometimes with him side-by-side or clearly committing code at 8pm, 9pm etc. I left that role because of the founder&#x27;s lack of professionalism.<p>My next experience with a Berlin startup we agreed to a full time role. I got great feedback from them for 6 months, they said the app looks good &amp; is fast, we didn&#x27;t go live but they showed investors in meetings and we were in good shape. They said things were great and they were happy with my first hire to the dev team. Then just before my 6 month probation as &quot;Director of Engineering&quot; was up, they abruptly hired a CTO above me, kept me for an additional week of onboarding the new CTO while dodging my questions of &quot;how does the new team hierarchy work?&quot;, and then fired me. All without ever giving me anything but glowing feedback (this is the short story, leaving out a few promises made by them and not lived up to). It felt like I was being used as a 6 month freelancer.<p>Before I moved to Berlin I heard that there&#x27;s better work life balance here, more vacation, etc. Though lower pay. In my experience the people I&#x27;ve worked for have seen their employees as disposable. Or had a general lower level of respect for dev contributions to the team and less professionalism than I experienced in NYC.<p>In NYC I got accustomed to a culture where if a company has a developer that is productive and professional that person is a valuable asset to keep around.<p>Is that not true in Berlin? Is the culture different? Or have I had a couple weird bad luck experiences?
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