Kind relevant.
Just finished a summer internship working with wordpress and looked for work. Found what seemed like an ok job on craigslist, applied and a lady called back and hired me, all within 24hrs, with 20/hr payrate. I was pretty enthused since it's my first paid gig....... but:
What I didn't know was the company was a single lady coordinating everything. She was pretty convincing too, setting up my e-mail account, dropbox, and skype accounts. I thought I would be working with at least one other developer from the job description, but oh well.
We worked remotely. She wanted to skype...... at 6:00 in the morning. Oh well she said it was just one day. (I guess it's worth noting we're in the same timezone, so she's just an obscenely morning person).
After explaining the small list of things to do, she told me she expected everything done in 3 hours. Alarms should've been going off at this point, but I figured she probably knew what she was doing.
Start working roughly at 7:00am. Task took longer than I anticipated because whoever made the website needed a WYSIWYG editor to make the site. The plugin never does what you want and the preview mode on it was broken, so I had to do a combination of using the plugin, some CSS hacks to modify the elements produced by the plugin, and loading the page for every change I made.
Finished a good bit of the work 3 hours in. E-mailed her with my progress..... To which she sent me another list of tasks to accomplish on the same site. In retrospect I should've said something about the fact that it was three hours, but I figured the fact that I responded three hours exactly with my progress might clue her in to this fact.
One of the tasks was to figure out why a video gallery wasn't showing any of the videos. Either her or the person before didn't think that using a combination of custom themes and visual editors might conflict with this kind of functionality. Took a lot of time to debug.
While figuring this out, she was asking me to look at another website. This website was a resume for an associate of hers. Some Big Whig executive. Either way she was asking me to add sections, shift elements around, change colors, yada yada...... Again another fucking custom theme with the same shitty, broken visual editor. Turns out she wanted me to do this pro bono (I know I'm not a smart man, but it was my first gig).
Either way finally figured out what was going on with the video gallery and fixed it and made changes for her friend. I'm at 9 hours at this point. I e-mailed her with everything I finished, at which point she wondered how long I worked for the day.
At this point my heart sank. She really didn't comprehend through constant e-mail contact (to which we replied to each other within the minute) that I was working my ass off this entire time. I figured I maybe wasn't efficient as I could've been, so I told her I worked 7 hours for the day.
She freaked out via e-mail: "I'm not paying you to learn on the job!" "We're subscribed to <tutorialssitehere.com> for you to learn on your own time" "I'll compensate you for one extra hour, but this is highly unprofessional and I expect more from you next time!"
I was tired (only slept 5 hours), stressed, and depressed. Did I really fuck up that badly after trying as hard as I did? I never worked as hard on this as anything in my life and I couldn't do it. After deliberating for about an hour, I called her.
Holy shit what a 180 in personality. All of a sudden telling me don't worry about it, it's only my first day and I'll get better yada yada. I explained to her that I had to learn on the job because of the fucking visual editor on every website. "That's surprising, I thought everybody know how to use that tool". No you bitch, your visual editor plugin is trash and was the reason your websites fucked up as much as it does.
She then explained to me her business model. It was to sell little "tickets" that would credit towards an hour of work, which she sold for $10-15/hour, don't remember exact amount. She needed to talk to the website owner about buying another credit pack. This is the worst fucking business model I've ever heard of.
After getting off the phone, I talk with my dad and he's laughing through this story and told me this isn't worth my time. I agreed.
That night I sent an e-mail, politely explaining that I unexpectedly had to enroll in another course for the semester (which was true) and that I wouldn't have time to work. She called the next morning, but I missed it because I slept in till noon. Haven't heard from her since.
Either way, if anyone applies to this guy, expect a similar experience to what I went through.