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Technodyne goes bust

June9

Technodyne LLC., went bust on May 31st. I had been working for them from late November last year.

I had been working remotely from Fiji since January, and suddenly everyone was offline on the same day. At first I thought it was a US public holiday or company holiday, whatever, and just shrugged it off. I was working on my own time and had deadlines measured in weeks, so I wasn’t too concerned.

The next day however, our previous Development Lead popped up on the otherwise desolate internal company IM network. His first message was, have you heard the news? A sick feeling came to my stomach. I’m on a dead network, no one in office had replied to my emails, NY must be under alien attack.

With my experience in programming, when you encounter an anomaly (bug) you must assume you are the one in error, and not the underlying system. So the sick feeling really was, I have been cut off from the company communications network - my project has been terminated. But his exact words was “heard the news” which implied something broader. Yes it was, the news at large. Technodyne had been involved in a scandal which resulted in the death of the company.

Technodyne had seemed like a very stable company at first, but the inconsistency of payments for my projects and lack of feedback on project achievements was slowly eating away at my trust (as an employee) in the company. Never in a zillion years did I suspect the scandal it was involved in. Then again, I had been working remotely from half way around the world as most other contractors were doing.

As a place of work, I had been at the office for about 2 months and the other employees were probably the friendliest I’ve ever worked with. The sudden and unexpected close of the company has been quite upsetting to my plans. I can only imagine how bad it is for those full time employees employed on site, especially those on work visas. I just hope they are all doing well.