The surreal experience of my first developer job
This reminds me of an early job I had. Except my boss was closer to retirement age and had basically earned a great deal of money as an industrial sales rep. His whole business was basically providing sales staff for big industrial manufacturers.<p>I actually went in to pitch him to become an investor in my small startup that was in the education sector. He was immediately interested but wanted me to also help him with several projects he was working on. He needed &quot;a tech guy&quot;. He was the first wealthy business guy (but not the last) to tell me he was going to make me rich.<p>We pretty immediately started meeting with other people, he had me hiring a few employees, buying computers, having custom office furniture commissioned and checking out office space.<p>It was a whirlwind of different, seemingly unrelated ventures. There was my business, which I was trying to get off the ground, though after a few months, still hadn&#x27;t received any investment. But I was bootstrapping it with money that I was earning working for this guy. Then there was some energy drink MLM that I think one of his rich friend&#x27;s wife had signed him up for and he was buying cases and cases of it to meet quotas with plans to sell it. We had also hired a friend of mine as a sales person for some sort of mineral that I think is used in cattle feed and there were several other things going on.<p>We were flying around in his private plane, all over the state and region meeting with people. We would start around 5am and might fly to one part of the state, then by lunch, be one state over, then back to a local business by dinner and many times finishing up by around 9pm or even later sometimes. Lucky for me, I was just acting as a &quot;consultant&quot; since I was supposed to be trying to build my business. So I was just sending invoices to his secretary for my time. But I had almost no time for my own business. Though I was too busy living in this strange daze of so many projects and ideas being bounced around all fueled with seemingly unlimited money and a private jet zipping us around on a whim.<p>I realized things were probably coming to a head when he asked one day how &quot;we&quot; were doing with my education startup and if there was any free cash flow yet that we could start using for some of these other ventures (this was probably 3 months after I had pitched it to him). Of course, he had not actually given me any money for my business. But I think he sort of thought the consulting money he was paying me and his presence was just naturally building equity for him in my business.<p>I just told him no, we don&#x27;t have any free cash flow yet and he jumped on to the next topic. His adult son, who by then was running the family business started showing up more and it seemed he was trying to rein in his father&#x27;s spending. Apparently, he had spent down most of his retirement savings in those few months and he had attracted quite the cadre of grifters and hangers on (the room full of energy drinks was now starting to spill over into the vacant office next door). Perhaps to some outsiders, I seemed like one of those hangers on, but I was just a college student on summer break, excited about the constant action and interest that a prominent, wealthy businessman had in me and my business.<p>I would only catch bits and pieces of conversations here and there but I pieced together that the muscle relaxers that he had recently been prescribed for his back pain seemed to trigger a sort of manic state that was fueling all this craziness. We had to start laying people off and cutting any ongoing expenses and since university was starting back up, I sort of saw myself to the door and started responding to text messages and emails a little slower and slower and excusing myself from his business outings more and more frequently until he eventually moved on to fresher faces.<p>Definitely a weird but fun college summer break.