I arrived at work one day to find someone sitting in my chair. It turns out, that person was my replacement. In fact, my entire team was being replaced. An engineer, hired just two days earlier, had been promoted to CTO, and his first official action was to call us, one by one, into a conference room and terminate us immediately—while his friends, the replacement crew, sat at our desks.

The next day, a friend who hadn’t been fired told me the CEO was claiming we had all quit.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Programmers are pawns in a corporate game where others hold all the cards. Freelancing or starting our own companies seems to be the only viable way out of this madness.