Thanks then no thanks, no place for me at RAC/Crowd Interactive

Let me introduce myself, I'm a previous developer and system administrator for Rich Apps Consulting (now known as Crowd Interactive). I'd worked there for over a year and a half. I first started working with Crowd Interactive around April 2008, and served this company as a developer, system administrator, and consultant. I remember one of my first tasks was the set up of an IP-based PBX as a "trial." I used Asterisk and then FreeSWITCH. This system served the company as a way to communicate with their employees and customers and was originally used as a PBX and later served as a conference platform as well. I scored many points and recognition at the company when I made this, no one else did it before, they tried to but with no success, I was the one that made it happen.

After that I have helped to raise their infrastructure and some of their employees and even my boss itself started to realize how hard I worked and they started to call me names such as "The Man" etc. I have worked on small to large projects such as setting up virtualization software like Xen, IP based PBX such as FreeSWITCH, clusters such as MySQL Cluster and heartbeat, load balancers, Apache, etc. I have spent countless and sleepless nights and many hours raising their infrastructure from the beginning, like no one ever did in the company, I have worked hard for over a year non stop, if I had to finish something I made it on that day, I felt very proud of all the work I have made and accomplished at that company, but I also feel sad becuase of how things turned out to be in the end, read on to know.

Some of the things I really enjoyed by working at this company was the fact that it was a global company, I really enjoyed to work with people from United States, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, etc. I have enjoyed working with people from Asia, they were very nice to me. I also had a team mate, Son Nguyen, who was a Senior Admin also.

After the company grew and all the infrastructure was in place, Adil Wali, my boss started to hire more people and the company had about 500 employees and a few customers, most of those employees were from Asia doing outsourcing work. Then after that the company started to destabilize and they had to layoff all those people from Asia, Pakistan, India, etc.

Ok, so after the big layoff, the company went from 500 to 50 employees, or even less... those 450 layoffed people were from Pakistan, India, Asia, etc, working from offices situated in Pakistan, India, etc. I was one of the people that "survived" that tragedy, so I was still one of these people that remained at the company, for one part I was very proud of myself because I did know that they would not get rid of me because of all the hard work I made for the company, but in the other hand I was a bit sad to watch all these people get layoffed.

Soon after that the company started to move from United States to Colima, Mexico. where they would "consolidate" all of their employees, at that time, Adil Wali, my boss have started to ask people to move over there, I remember he asked Tony Busch first, our Vice President of Operations at that time. He refused to go there so he quit. At that time there were some people working on internet still, I was some of them.

That happened in January of this year, and at that time I took some vacations and went to Brazil, I was working with my laptop from the hotel when I talked with my boss, Adil Wali, and he asked me to go to Colima, Mexico, he said that if I didn't I could still work online, but that my job wouldn't be so secure anymore, he gave me 24 hours to decide. I decided that I wanted a raise for all the hard work I've made, I was getting only $1000 USD per month, and I asked $2000-3000 to go to Mexico, he said that he woudln't be able to give me that raise because of the economy crisis, he offered only $300 more to me and I thought it was a joke, it was really disrespecful and I thought to myself "What? After all the hard work I made, he offers me only $300 more as a raise and he asks me to go to Mexico". I felt very disappointed, I expected at least $1000 more.

Then after that I continued to work from home as always, I also got another job as part-time at a better company called Teliax Inc, which is a well-known company that offers VoIP and telecommunication services. I made a calling card application written in Ruby and FreeSWITCH for this company, I have also installed 4 FreeSWITCH servers with load balancing capabilities, everything in three weeks.

I still continued to work at RAC, at this time it was Crowd Interactive already, at this time I was fixing bugs and dealing with day-to-day tasks from employees and customers. I've noticed that in the last 6 months the demand have lowered a lot more, the demand was very little compared to before and Adil Wali, my boss, have hired on-site sysadmins, and they were working on interviews to employees and collecting information about the future of the company. At that time I felt that the company lacked vision and direction, I was getting very little requests from people inside the company and my co-worker felt the same.

Just after that, the new sysadmin, Carlos Rocha, started to work on a document that would contain all the usernames and passwords from servers, etc. My boss, Adil Wali, have also asked me to teach everything I made and knew to him, including the FreeSWITCH server, etc. Then I have asked to have access to that document that Carlos was working on and I was denied, I felt something very bad was happening, then after that my boss have asked me to teach FreeSWITCH to the new sysadmin and I teach him.

At this time I already knew that my boss, Adil Wali, wanted to replace me, sine they moved to Mexico, working online has always felt like being a second-class citizen, and after raising all their infrastructure and helping all their employees and teaching them everything I knew, of course that my ex boss felt that they wouldn't need me anymore.

Ok, so the next day I woke up I went to check my work email and guess what? I could not access it. I have got the message "This account has been disabled". So they decided to disable my account with no previous notice. I have tried to ask my boss what the hell was happening and he didn't answered, not a single word or explanation. I was feeling really angry and disappointed about it. I tried to look at the servers and all the servers had the password changed. I could not access anything, I was completely out of the company without any explanation or anticipation of what was happening.

I have to say this is the biggest disappointment to date from RAC/CI since the time Adil Wali told me I was going to get a raise for all my hard work at his company and it never actually happened... sigh.