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Boss not co-worker. There's about 50 but this one ranks top. At my previous job leadership and managers had annual reviews, self reviews about a month before the annual review and unofficial reviews about midway between annual reviews. A lot happens in a year so it's good to keep on top of long term items.A little background. One of the newer managers was incompetent. Unable to make decisions and constantly asking for help. Not for help in her role but help with the things that resulted in her promotion. She was also a bit of a backstabber and buddy buddy with the boss which is how she was promoted even higher up in a very short period of time. We got along ok, were even slightly more than general co-workers at various points but we didn't really like each other a whole lot. I could also never see her as a supervisor since she just didn't get it.The underhanded situation. At my mid-yr review boss and I talked about the issues other mgr and I had. I was told that everything was going really well with my work and that other mgr was working on her things that kept getting in the way of a pleasant work environment, that “I was obviously more mature”. I took detailed notes of our conversation. Boss saw me doing it, small room, 1 shared desk. No way to not be aware.Come and go a few months, it's annual review time. I go into my review expecting it to go well. I'd spoken with boss regularly about the situation and my performance of her expectations. Boss rated me really low and unsatisfactory in almost every single thing. Stated that I was the sole instigator in all the challenges, wasn't doing my job, etc… In all that time, all those conversations and pointed questions NOT ONE SINGLE TIME was anything negative ever said. This is the only time I'd ever had something like that occur. It's also the only time I ever challenged a review. I may not have always agreed fully with other reviews but the points being made were so minor and though I didn't agree I could easily fix. This time, nope, wasn't going to sign it. So, I took my copy. I ripped it apart line by line and called our hotline that's set up specifically for crap like this. I gave permission to the hotline to contact boss's boss and went back with my notations, quoted conversations and corrections. Boss and I sit down to go over my comments and I am told that another person wrote my review. BS, boss was trying to pass the buck. Boss accepted my counterargument, had a conversation with their boss and the following year my review was glowingly bland. I don't appreciate that either, I'd rather have honest conversations and things to work on but I was glad that the same shtuff wasn't pulled again.

Documenting the terms of an agreement.I had a client who had a fourth-grade education, was dyslexic long before such conditions were recognized, but had a superb memory, a winning personality, and the sharpest business mind I ever met. He had built an empire of small businesses related to the auto trade. He was huge, tough, and the personification of a “good” man. I was the first lawyer to survive more than a few months, possibly because I recognized his reading issue and without saying, made a point of keeping communications oral and explaining documents to him rather than expecting him to read them. I admired and respected him, loved his wife, and with several children myself, empathized with the problems of raising their tribe. He reminded me of my own father.The above being a disclosure of bias, one of my early tasks for him was creating documentation of what he owned. I found out about a used car parts business when he was served for a lawsuit based on a pre-acquisition event . Of course, my first thought was to review the acquisition documents to see if the claim had been disclosed, whether there was a hold-back or some such, and generally how such potential claims were addressed. Now I was a litigator, not a business attorney, but had seconded a few small acquisitions before I started my own practice, so I felt sure there would be something in the documents of acquisition on this. I went by his office, explained what I was looking for and why, and asked that he find the acquisition documentation and send it to me. If the documents were bulky, I suggested he send them to us by courier and we would have copies made by our trusted service and the originals returned, also by courier.The next day, I received an envelope containing a single sheet of paper, hand written and obviously torn from a spiral notebook, saying that my client was buying ownership of X company from seller for a sum certain, receipt of which was acknowledged. Thinking it was just some sort of basic agreement to agree, although troubled by that “receipt” language, I called and explained I needed all the documents as drafted by the attorneys or accountants involved. My client assured me that was it. Signed by both people, and money changed hands. Deal done.Of course we got it all fixed, but that was the least documentation I ever saw. Both people were honorable, but neither recognized the need for anything more than what I had been given.On another occasion when I was asked to find out why a jointly owned small manufacturing company was losing so much money, I went out to the location and asked to see the records. I was given a cardboard box full of notes on such paper as cigarette packaging. There were tire marks on some of the papers, because, I was told, the box had been dropped while being sent to the office for me to review, and a delivery truck had run over them. But I was assured that they had been able to retrieve “most of that”. The thing was, it was probably true.There are other examples, but you get the drift. In each case these were owned by smart people good at their primary jobs, but just limited in their experience of paperwork.

Q: What is it like to write for Packt?A: I would never want to write another book for Packt Publishing.I was contacted by Packt Publishing to co-write an introductory course on C++. My two co-authors were both experienced C++ developers, and both had worked with Packt before. I wrote a technical book for O’Reilly, but had no previous encounters with Packt.We had three or four weeks to produce an outline of the course together. Unfortunately one whole week passed before we were given any guidance what Packt wanted to see. We were also asked to produce marketing blurbs for the course, which I found strange. Wasn’t marketing Packt’s job?So the three of us had so far put in three weeks work, with no compensation and no contract. That was a little scary. When I got my contract, I noticed that it had many terms that held authors accountable for meeting a strict time schedule, but nothing that held Packt accountable for anything. I asked the co-authors how their previous experience with Packt had gone. Both reported that the editing stage, after the basic content was written, had been haphazard, rushed, and unpleasant, but they were ready to go on this new project.Packt wanted us to produce a new chapter every two weeks. This schedule seemed unachievable to me, and Packt eventually agreed to three weeks per chapter. This is still a very aggressive schedule.We produced our first chapters and handed them in on time. This is when the trouble began. We began work on our next chapters, expecting Packt to get edits back to us timely. Remember the contract didn’t hold them to any kind of timliness. Another three weeks passed, as we worked on our second chapters. The edits came back about the time we were supposed to submit the second chapters. It was at this time that we began to learn about the highly structured format Packt wanted the writing to be in. We’d been given a few brief cuts of other books, but they were in different formats. Packt also asked us to create overhead slides for the chapters, which was a new requirement not in the contract. We had to extensively rework both chapters to meet their vague guidelines. Then they said never mind about the overheads.The edit of my first chapter severely damaged the document. Someone had manually changed all curly double quote marks to straight quotes. In the process, they had also doubled some of the straight quote marks in code examples, which all had to be re-written and tested to see they compiled. The numbering of numbered lists was damaged, and had to be manually fixed. In short, there was a lot of rework just to undo the damage done by the editing process, plus all the changes they’d requested.The edit to my third chapter was four weeks late, arriving after I was working on the fourth chapter. These edits were a bit less onerous because we had learned what Packt expected, but there were still literally thousands of changes in a 40 page chapter. I got a lot faster at fixing up broken paragraph numbering.Our contracts specified we were to receive half our advance on royalties (a paltry $500 or so) when the chapters were “accepted”. A month after we had submitted our last chapters, no advance had arrived. We were also still waiting for edits of our last chapters. Meanwhile, our editor set a publication date that was only 3 weeks off. Given that none of us had seen all the first edits on their chapters, and none of us had seen anyone else’s work, that schedule seemed to be, not just unrealistic, but disconnected from reality.At this point, the authors rebelled, and would not submit any more work until the advance had been paid. I think we sat on our hands for about two weeks, while Packt promised to pay us in four weeks, then three, then payment arrived in our accounts.Once all the work is submitted, and corrections from preliminary edits have been turned around, there is a copy-editing phase, where our chapters are marked for conformance to the Chicago Manual of Style…sort of. This process took weeks, while the publishing deadline loomed, and the result was awful. Different people had edited different chapters, and made inconsistent changes.As I write this, I am still waiting for guidance from Packt on the copy-edit changes. But Packt has sent us a PDF of the whole book (with only half of the copy-edit changes in it, that we are supposed to sign off on, to see that we didn’t forget to cover something, thinking another author was going to do it.Technical authors never make enough money from writing to compensate them for the time spent. I knew that going in, but I didn't know how much unnecessary rework would be required fixing the unforced errors, the fumbling and bumbling of my publisher. This is what I will tell anyone who asks me about my experience writing for Packt.[edit] Well I have thankfully got this unpleasant experience in the rear-view mirror of time. All of my chapters went through six (count ’em six) rounds of extensive and mutually contradictory review. There were also I think three reviews of the galleys. All three of the authors threatened to chuck the whole project at one point or another. The quality of the final product was uneven, and definitely not something I am proud to have my name associated with.It’s been over six months since we completed the last edit and I have received $0 in royalties. I rather imagine I am going to have to fly to London and storm the Packt office wearing a suicide vest in order to see another dollar from this effort. I’m not sure what I’d do if there was less than half a planet between them and me.If you’re an author, heed my cautionary tale and don’t work with Packt Publishing. If you are a reader, consider the low quality of Packt output in this case and don’t buy books from Packt. You will be glad you steered clear.