Working for friends can be a great opportunity, but unfortunately it often ends up going poorly because it is hard to draw a line between friend and employee.

What would you do if your friend hired you to work for them and then had to fire you soon after, and then it happened again.

That is what happened to the programmer in this story, so after the second time he took the website he made for the company and turned it into his own advertisement.

Check it out.

Tells me I have the position, Had everything in writing, Working for them for about a month in total, then says “Your position is no longer needed”

This all began a little under 6-9 months ago.

I was freelancing as a software dev for about 3-4 months.

My long time friend was starting to work for a company that basically provided knowledge on the best stocks/cryptocurrencies to trade.

They had an LLC, a license, a website, social media, and investors that were interested in the services.

That would be great.

I was told by my friend that he wanted me to be “Director of IT” basically heading up the entire I.T. side of the company.

I would code, evaluate others’ code, debug, do threat mitigation, everything.

I could even hire my own employees, that would work under me, and work on things I give them to do, things I had no time for, due to the vast amounts of coding I was going to undertake (Apparently).

I ask what my salary/pay I could expect would be.

They said, “You tell me what your hourly expectations would be, and I’ll talk with my boss, and see if we can agree on something”.

And so I waited.

Good idea, never work for free.

I waited until about 2-3 weeks later, not doing anything until I had something in writing.

(I’ve been messed with too many times before, and knew if I did any work without approval, they wouldn’t pay).

Eventually, they said, “Ok, so, we will pay you per project, based on the necessity/amount of time it takes to make even a mildly working application.”

I said “Ok, then, how much should I expect for [this]? (A project we were currently working on)”

And he said, “I can pay $200.”

And I agreed to it, cause the project was fairly simple, and wouldn’t take me long.

I finished the project, got paid, and then about 2 weeks later, I found out through a mutual friend, not even them, that they had left the company.

The friend told me, “They left cause there were too many complications with staff/blah blah blah”

Nothing involving me, I thought.

I find out a little later, that seeing as they left, they wouldn’t be able to pay me, as they already had a person (In a different country) that was coding for them.

I basically cut my losses with that, and continued being their friend.

Hopefully this will be a great opportunity.

A few months later, they call me and absolutely ecstatic, telling me “This is your big break” “You’ll be making exactly this much” “You’ll be the head of IT” “Your skills are extremely valuable to me.”

Which in hindsight, turned out to be utter lies.

I was getting texts from them, “Here’s what I need you to do today, tomorrow, etc” “Can you purchase the domain name, I’ll pay you back.”

(Which I trusted they would, cause they’ve been a good friend for 6+ years)

So, I purchased the domain, set it all up, made email accounts for each of the staff, etc.

After all this, he texts me, “Can you hop on discord for a quick sec” and so i do.

I get on a video call with them, and another manager.

They say basically “In all respect to you, and your skills as a professional programmer, we have found that your position is no longer needed” and I said “Ok” and that was that.

No “Sorry, I know your my friend, and we’ve known each other for 6+ years, but we just don’t have a need for you.”

It was more like “I need to put on my business suit, and say to my friend of many years that he has no place in our company.”

It was like a slap in the face.

That really was out of line for the friend.

After 6+ years of friendship, gaming together, laughing and chatting, they just basically didn’t advocate for ANYTHING they said in our first call.

So, here’s the petty revenge part.

After many weeks of fuming over being fired twice by my own friend, and realizing that you can’t really trust friends you haven’t spoken too in a while, I decided I would take drastic measures to let him know I mean business.

They already had a different site for all business needs, like clients, contact info, etc.

So I wasn’t really ruining the main site.

Basically it’s like this, their site was imawebsite.com and mine is imasite.com.

So, they were very similar, only one of the words was cut off.

I took off all the emails I had created, all data on the site itself, deleting everything I had made.

They really hadn’t used the site, except to log in and check it worked, so there wasn’t client data/emails sent/received etc.

That’s a great use for the site.

I turned their site into a portfolio of my services, basically stating that, “You want a site like this? Contact me and we will set up an appointment!”

And eventually, I’ll hopefully be setting up some marketing, or something, making sure my site comes first in search results.

All in all, don’t mess with someone who you didn’t reimburse for a site you had made, and then fire them cause “We’ve found we don’t need you.”

He put in the work already, no reason not to use it to market himself.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say.

Here’s a great idea.

This person says they aren’t really a friend.

Good advice.

No industry is immune to this.

He wasn’t much of a friend.

Keep friends and business separate.

And know when it’s time to say goodbye to both.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.