Tech Bro Denied Dev’s Hard Earned Bonus For Bug That Overcharged A Little Oldlady

Who, Me? Welcome to the opening day of another working week, an occasion The Register always celebrates with a new installment of Who, Me? It’s the Monday column that revisits readers’ worst moments at work, and celebrates your ability to rebound and reinvent in their wake.

This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as “IVR Ivan” because his story harks back to his time as one of three employees at a startup in the then-nascent interactive voice response (IVR) industry.

Ivan was the only programmer at the startup, which created a service that billed people by-the-minute for telephone-based chats with professionals such as doctors, lawyers, or accountants.

The startup decided to make calls to its services free, rather than use billed numbers that had a reputation for overcharging and/or mostly being used by services that specialized in discussion of – ahem! – intimate personal services.

That decision saw Ivan build a system that timed calls and then charged customers’ credit cards. After as much testing as was possible at a three-person startup, the team felt it worked well and put it into production.

But when the very first live customer called in, their call didn’t terminate properly.

“The call-duration-timer kept running… for hours,” Ivan told Who, Me? That meant Ivan’s billing code didn’t kick in, leaving the startup’s founder furious that the company couldn’t register its first revenue.

Ivan eventually found a way to terminate the call so the billing process could commence.

A few days later, two people appeared at the startup’s office and demanded to know why it had just charged their aged mother $1,000 for a phone call.

“All I could hear after that was a long stream of humble apologies from my boss, and a promise to reverse the charges as long as the family agreed not to sue us,” Ivan recalled. “Much to our surprise, the kids agreed,” so he scuttled off to arrange repayment.

Once that job was out of the way, the startup’s founder and the other employee delivered what Ivan recalls as “a very blunt and foul-mouthed assessment” of the very nasty things that would happen to him, the company, and its backers if this error ever happened again and regulators got wind of it.

Both wanted to fire Ivan on the spot, but the startup could not function without a developer. Ivan stayed on despite this encounter, and as the office atmosphere warmed assumed he’d been forgiven.

Several months later, the company scored a big deal. As an early hire, Ivan was eligible for a substantial bonus.

“The founder, perhaps recalling the earlier incident, refused my payout,” Ivan told Who, Me? “He said, ‘You almost sunk us, so, sue me,'” and then explained that his lawyers were so slick they’d kept the tax office at bay and Ivan therefore had zero chance of recouping his bonus.

Ivan immediately resigned.

“That IVR business is still going today, with that same ‘genius’ at the helm, presumably supported by his lawyers,” Ivan lamented.

Have you ever been punished for a mistake? Did you think it fair? Do the right thing by clicking here to send an email to Who, Me? We’d love to share the error of your ways on a future Monday. ®

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