Top Ten Signs that the company you are working for is Going to Tank

Financial/Business Signs

• The policy used to be that if the first or the fifteenth of the month fell on a weekend or holiday, you'd get paid on the last day before. Now you get paid the first day afterwatds.
• On payday, all the employees race to hammer[1] the paychecks because you know that the last person's check will bounce.
• The President of the company is on first-name terms with the county sheriff who serves summonses.
• Ordinary expenses take forever to get paid.
• The CFO tries to raise money by factoring[2] accounts recievable.
• The CFO quits.
• The company arbitrarily doubles everybody's stock options.
• The activity your company is trying to make money on is illegal in most Western nations.
• Every step the company takes to try to retain employees results in more employees leaving.
• Turnover in the sales department is typically just long enough to learn the product and build up a list of clients.
• The compnay is way too small to have such a well-practiced procedure for handling exit interviews and final paperwork details.
• After you quit in disgust, you reconcile your checking account. It turns out that in addition to your final paycheck, the company paid you again with the next regular payroll.
• Management, in response to complaints from the law firms that occupy the same building as your software company, decides to institute a dress code for engineers and creative services.
• Management lays off Tech Support in anticipation that the upcoming release of Windows will eliminate tech support calls.

Engineering Signs

• All of the senior engineers quit within a few weeks of each other.
• Engineers fresh out of college are denigrated for having no experience in what the company is doing. Seasoned engineers with many years of experience are denigrated for having no experience in what the compnay is doing.
• Code is not documented because there's no time. "We'll clean it up later." Of course, it never gets cleaned up.
• The company hires engineers to build its new products, but refuses to provide the resources or management support they need. Instead, it buys other companies that have already developerd those sorts of products.
• The most common excuse for not establishing industry-standard software development practices or for not doing something about the panicked, haphazard way in which products are developed is that "we're a start-up company and you have to expect a certain amount of chaos."All the source code identifiers and documentation are written in a foreign language. Management won't spend the time and money it would take to translate it into English because it would "take too long."
• When the product finally ships its first version, the company sends the entire development team, their families, and their friends on a week-long paid holiday in Hawaii.

[1] hammer. v.t. To cash (a check) at the issuing bank. This technique avoids the possibility of having the check bounce.

[2] factor. v.t. To sell to a collection agency, typically accounts recievable at 80% of the cover price.