I've never encountered so many false promises and lies in my entire life. - Web Developer The Vanbex Group Employee Review

I'm going to start by saying that by writing this review of my employment, the CEO will likely want to harm my reputation. He will take direct offence to this and insist that everything is a lie. They will likely convince each other that I am in the wrong for writing this based on the way they treated myself and others during my time with them. The CEO and the founder, were dating at the time of my employment. They might still be, I have no idea. This was never disclosed, in fact it was denied, to myself and the rest of the team at the time. This may not seem like it would be an issue to some, but with the type of 'us vs them' politics that were being played by the upper management against the employees, it came off as a way for them to try to keep the upper hand, as if they even needed to. Everyone knew anyways, it's incredibly obvious. That being said, the push and pull influence they had on each other, and their personal opinions of members of the team, seemed to change regularly based on their moods. Overall, the Founder appeared to be much more calm. When hired, they would have me sign an indefinite term contract of employment. The contract stated that I was to work a minimum amount of hours a week which they would immediately deny and say it was actually a maximum. The contract said I was a contractor, they said I would be a full-time employee withing a month. They had no experience in web development except for setting up WordPress sites. They would deny that certain projects should take as long as they should because, "I just don't think it takes that long". They would contact me on weekends with an urgent need to finish a project while creating a new deadline for that Monday. On Monday, they would reveal that the deadline was unnecessary. I would always bring up how I was an actual employee, and not a contractor, even though they wanted to say I was. To this they would respond that everyone is a contractor, including themselves, or the CEO would tell me that he could just outsource my job. The latter came after a change to my salary which was to be temporary as now our full time employment was going to be the following month. They underpaid everyone and consistently broke their promises. The CRA has now ruled that I was, in fact, an employee during my entire time with the Vanbex Group. My role was in a constant flux. I was always given incredibly vague amounts of information for each project, which I would always try to get clarified, and then ridiculed when it wasn't exactly what they had in mind. I was told that they never had to give lots of details when they outsourced their projects, apparently. I was incredibly willing to put in the time and extra work, while being underpaid, to help their company grow. For much, if not all, of my employment, I worked much longer hours than my coworkers. I can remember one night when I was staying late at our shared space office and I was excitedly learning a new programming language by completing an employment test that they had for the blockchain engineers. I can specifically remember being the only one there, multiple hours after everyone left, and being told by the CEO, "Shouldn't you be working on something else?" This test that I was doing was for the programming language Solidity. The test was designed by a 16 year old who I was later told was the lead developer for a project I was assigned. Honestly, I could keep going on and on for like 5 more paragraphs, easy. In the end I was terminated in lieu of notice. They gave me a bunch of different reasons, which I easily proved wrong by simply repeating what they said. Finally said it was that they were looking for a python developer and that is why they were ending my employment. All of this took place during the termination meeting. Overall, it was an awful waste of my time. They refused to let me try new technologies, so it wasn't even worth the experience.