On this day, I sent this email to Burt and Beatrice
If UA wasn't offline, you might have had a chance to see the change in my signature. The words "Zero" in the company line have been replaced with a hyphen, and the tagline is "will code for money" now.
The history of Zero is finished, they blew it. They didn't even file for bankruptcy, the bank is simply taking over and shutting down the operations, trying to pull out as much money by selling hardware as they can*. The value of the company, however, was in software, which is still not worth much without the people who can finish it. The Hossy Thin Client was deployed as v1.0, with still a few features missing, and has run for only 4-5 weeks. The Hossy Special Projects stuff, namely the things I was doing in VFP, are left in the middle of nowhere - after the initial demo release (which worked great but lacked a lot of features) we are caught with the next release half done. I may have done more, but somehow the whole august was in some after-the-battle mood, and nobody was really doing much. I managed to do a couple of big things (like finishing the document viewer, and re-doing the big import procedure), but they're all left unfinished..
We didn't get any severance package, weren't even paid for the last month. The managers tried negotiating with the bank and the investors to the last moment, and even the day before the last there was some hope, or that's how they presented it to us. The thing had some value while we were around - and that's what they were trying to sell (to the bank and the investors, or as a story to us), but eventually failed in the last round of negotiations, when supposedly everyone who had to write a check was consulting their lawyers first.
The history, in brief, may be reduced to this:
They had a clumsy unfinished product, written in vpm by a bunch of self-taught programmers; a couple of them knew more and were supposedly good, but the code was really spaghettied. The product covered a niche where there was no competition, and no matter how badly written, it served the customers (about dozen of teaching hospitals). Then there was the incentive to do this right and go for the rest of the market. The owner, at the time, consulted Grant, and Grant allegedly pushed for VB/ASP/SQL, even demonstrating that VFP would be slower (!). The old product was nearly abandoned and all the forces invested into creating a thin-client VB COM driven thing. I was brought initially to teach the kids how to do big stuff in VFP, but by the time I came there was a certain VB/SQL guru (Frank) who pushed for something he called "a highly denormalized database, with intelligent keys and COM objects which will marshall everything". I was assigned to the maintenance of the old product, and this guy told my team "do it quick'n'dirty, I know you don't like it, but we have dozens of outstanding issues with this, and we got to push this enrollment season through". The old team had eight customers at the time (fall 99), and we had two programmers, three report writers, and one manager/document digger/customer relations guy. By the end of the season, we were down to the two programmers and one report writer, and had to deal with a bunch of unsolved issues in the rest of the product, aside from the application season.
For the next season (fall 2000) I was completely alone. They started bringing in the guys from my company back home, but didn't actually assign them to help me; they rather worked on additions. By that time, the "highly denormalized" stuff, aka "The Borg Engine" was being abandoned. The Yugo team [later USquad] started coming regularly - there was an average of 2-3 people here at any time, they shifted monthly, were paid cash, an appartment was leased, and it was in my neighborhood so I drove them to work most of the time. By the break of the millenium, their boss (i.e. my junior partner in Avai, the Brlja you asked about) decided to split with Avai and take the other two programmers, leaving Avai with just one guy. He sort of expected me to take my share out of the company as well and to hand it to him, but when I asked him about "what happens with my share" he said "are you kidding me or what", and avoided the answer. Then I split with him and stayed with Avai - I'm teaching the two new kids there some tricks, entirely by email.
In Zero, the project was due to launch on april 1st, which didn't happen. Instead, 20% of the people were fired at the time. The version of the project for Vermont Dominion University was the thing being abandoned (look at www.Zero.com, look for the Summit project, and you'll see that the webpage on VDU it links to is removed), mostly, IMO, because of endless requests of IU for changes, and IU's general inability to get their data straight. Meanwhile, several other customers abandoned the old product, and only three were left. In july, the product finally launched for the most important customer, but then someone at VDU (a certain J.S., can't remember the name) threatened to file a lawsuit demanding 2 million of damages for project unfinished, time wasted etc etc. The threat was ridiculous, but it scared the investors, and the salary started getting late - once the last investor wasn't available to write a check because he was on the beach, and such. Another third of the personel was laid off in july. Whole august was spent in attempts to sneak away from this lawsuit, by cleansing the property and passing it to a new company, but it all failed two days ago.
So this is it, end of chapter two. I'm looking for a job, if you know something drop me a line.
And this came from Dženk:
I'll start asking around re job for you right away. My advice is to go through Employment Agencies (Head Hunters). I can send you web sites of Employment Agencies here. If you don't want to go through Employment Agencies, send me your resume and a general cover letter. It would do good to make your status in the US known. If you got paperwork, you can work in Canada on the basis of Free Trade Agreement (check with Canadian embassy). If you don't have the papers and you want to come to Canada, best that you file for immigration right away. maybe a job can be found on black [i.e. off the books] but I wouldn't recommend that because the cash is far smaller, and you risk deportation. Call me, and let's find something.
Same morning I applied for "Job 4802 on DICE" (undeliverable), "Job MW081702 on DICE"
While I am a VFP guru, I haven't really touched Delphi since '95 and my Pascal may be a bit rusty. Still, it's just one OOP programming tool vs another, and it's something I could re-learn.
I am not an American citizen; but I am in the States, with a valid H-1B visa. My sponsor, however, is going out of business, which makes me available. There is some paperwork involved, but that doesn't cause any delay - I may actually start within weeks." - the spiel didn't work, though)
Janna sent an email to everyone from Zero about health insurance - which wasn't paid for august:
Trigon is allowing each of us to pay our own premium for august. If you are interested in doing this, you need to have a check to Lisa at her office no later than tuesday morning.
I did visit this Lisa in her little office somewhere not exactly downtown, about the cost of Lena's checkup, x-ray and transportation, which we incurred for her slip in the bathroom while we were in VB. Trigon would pay exactly zero, because we weren't covered, period. Now throwing that money in retroactively wouldn't help any, because she made it known that since it wasn't paid for last week of july either, we were off the schedule or something. The "allowing each of us to pay" bit was a nice, heartfelt touch.
Nina has cut her hair real short, looking almost like a boy. Really cute. Now looks like Arpi did at some point. Said she was quite noticed in school, collected a bunch of very surprised and bewildered facial expressions, and one guy from somewhere around Taiwan (doesn't know exactly where) peeked at her from all sides and eventually confessed he never saw anything like it.
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* some guys, e.g. Ford's sons, got PCs at 100$ each... when I came, it was too late. Could have taken the chair, though.