[meric]

I know it doesn't feel like it, but wins all around. You had little experience and you got a job and experience. Your ex-boss needed to take advantage of someone at $12 an hour. Your new company needed someone experienced. You needed more pay and respect.

A more principled person might not have hired you at all and instead looked to hire someone with good experience at good rates, because they "want to do the right thing" and then you might not have gotten the experience you needed.

And good work getting out of there. I think in secret your ex-boss respects you for doing it. You say he says good things in front of people and bad things behind them, and at the end he said bad things in front of you, perhaps now behind your back he tells your ex-coworkers good things. :-)

[mattbgates]

Ha. Part of what you say is true... he helped me to be a better programmer. I would just jump right into and start coding. Now I actually write all the logic and functions out before starting which saves me so much time.

His greatest lesson to me: You can't really code for the customer if you don't understand what your program is supposed to do for the customer.

Though we did part ways and he did say some words to me that I was not fond of. That was just the type of person he was. I actually parted ways with him more nicely writing an email thanking him for giving me exposure to the programming world once again. He was mad about it, but hey, I was being courteous and trying my best not to burn bridges.

To let you know the type of person he is/was: I received a nice paycheck from the IRS a few years later out of no where from his business. He must've been audited.

But he did take a chance on me and I am grateful for that. It pushed me back into the world of programming and development. Without this job, I wouldn't have gotten the experience for the companies that came afterwards to take me seriously as a professional coder/programmer/developer.

And Visual Basic 6.0 was quite outdated... he was probably the last company to even still be using it. Had I stayed, I was working on a web version of the program. But choosing another job, going forward, moving on... I actually got hired and moved across the country by another company.