A Cautionary Tale from A WordPress Business Owner – WP Tavern

After being within the WordPress world for 15 years, I’ve made some unbelievable friendships and I’ve heard some loopy tales with reference to their WordPress enterprise. Not too long ago a type of buddies reached out to share his newest expertise, and I’m right here to say it is among the crazier ones. For privateness causes, I’ve modified the names of each events in addition to the title of the company.

Introduction:

As everyone knows, beginning a enterprise shouldn’t be for the faint of coronary heart. The statistics will be miserable as 20% of companies fail inside the first 2 years. Beating these stats and rising has change into much more uncommon. After 10 years of being in enterprise,discovering and retaining expert staff and builders has been the bane of Mike’s enterprise progress, which is an important side of success for any company. Mike because the lead developer and proprietor of WebEase, a US-based WordPress service company, has lately had a lesson for others navigating the hiring panorama.

Background:

WebEase at present has a regular slate of full-time staff in numerous roles together with, gross sales, advertising and marketing, buyer help, operations, and design. What’s lacking is one other developer, as Mike is each proprietor and lead developer, constructing the enterprise from the bottom up. With the present scenario as it’s, Mike has struggled to maintain up with including wanted options to the service, in addition to buyer requests, main him to discover the choice of hiring a senior developer to ease the workload.

The LinkedIn Connection:

Enter Dave, a senior developer Mike found via LinkedIn who was “open to work”. After a couple of LinkedIn messages, emails, and at last an official interview through Zoom, Mike supplied Dave the job. The onboarding course of went easily, and Dave seemed to be an ideal match for the crew, losing no time in getting the required software program stack arrange and put in per Mike’s directions. Nevertheless, inside simply two weeks, pink flags started to floor, with communication turning into a major situation. Dave remained unresponsive on all channels, inflicting concern from Mike. 

The Surprising Revelation:

The scenario took a dramatic flip when a 3rd get together from Ukraine contacted Mike through the web site’s Contact Us kind. They had been claiming that they’d not obtained fee for work carried out for WebEase. At this level, Mike was a bit confused. Who had been these individuals within the Ukraine? They did reference Dave within the contact kind, however Mike was actually baffled at that second. To Mike’s shock, it was revealed that Dave had subcontracted the work to an abroad firm with out informing anybody at WebEase.

Digging Deeper:

To know the extent of the scenario, Mike logged into the corporate’s GitHub repo with VS Code and utilized the Git Blame instrument. This revealed the true scope of the scenario, leaving Mike not solely involved about missed deadlines but in addition alarmed by the unknown builders who had gained entry to WebEase’s codebase. Had they added code that might go away his prospects uncovered in any capability? Realizing the severity of the scenario, Mike took swift motion, halting the excellent funds to Dave(Mike pays his contracts utilizing a bank card), informing Dave of what he had discovered, and emphasizing the potential irreparable harm to the sale of his firm, which is at present in negotiations with a valuation beginning at 6 million USD. In response, Dave denied any wrongdoing however confronted with plain proof, threatened authorized motion towards WebEase. Mike stood his floor, asserting that Dave’s actions constituted fraud and posed a major menace to the integrity of WebEase’s supply code.

The Aftermath:

After documenting all the scenario with quite a few screenshots of the emails between them, Mike’s bank card firm sided with him, halting all funds to Dave in addition to performing a chargeback for a couple of fees that had already been processed. Regardless of Dave’s preliminary defiance, he finally went silent as soon as once more, not solely leaving Mike to mirror on the pink flags he had missed through the hiring course of but in addition having to schedule time to overview any code that was touched by Dave and the subcontracted builders. 

Conclusion:

So, the place is Mike now? He’s nonetheless looking for that trustworthy senior developer although sadly, he has fallen additional behind on including options that will profit his prospects as code overview takes time.  

Moreover, it seems that Mike shouldn’t be alone with this expertise as there are simply too many dangerous actors on the market attempting to make a fast buck and reap the benefits of over labored enterprise homeowners. 

My hope is that different enterprise homeowners/WordPress businesses can be taught from Mike’s story, emphasizing the significance of due diligence, efficient communication, and a vigilant method to safeguarding the integrity of their codebase and enterprise operations.