Thirty years of development taught me a lot about software but it also wised me up to deception, resentment, sabotage.

I've conducted 200, perhaps 300 job interviews since 1994.  But this character, the Sultan, was the first to specifically request a woman hire.  I asked why and he shrugged.   The Sultan was new to software and startups so I explained that reduces our candidates by 85%, and almost guarantees we won't hire the best candidate.  

But he insisted so we hired a 22-year-old woman with 3 years of  experience.

We had no female candidates for our second hire.

The Sultan fast-tracked "Web Boy" for our third hire.   I knew something was up when we shook hands because he flinched and his face was guilty.  Later a lightbulb went off.  Ah, yes, he's my replacement.  

Then the Sultan switched tactics, giving me only a short list of "top candidates" for our fourth hire; one strong woman and three weak men. So we hired another young woman "by consensus".   I later received a followup call from a much more qualified candidate and realized the Sultan gamed our hiring process to bag his next chick.

He switched tactics again with a beautiful blonde candidate as an intern.  By now, 7 of our 12 staff were young, attractive women.  Our business proposal was rejected by fifty venture capital firms, Web Boy was undermining me,  I'm doing diversity hire cleanup and now I get an intern with zero experience.  I quit the next day, telling the owner I didn't sign up to manage a harem.

Later that year, the Sultan and/or Web Boy broke into my Gmail account several times.  You know IP addresses are recorded by Google, right, boys?  They probably restored a backup I'd left and until today, only we three knew.

Luckily (or perhaps shrewdly), I moved all my important info out of Gmail in 2014, I use it only for job interviews and cam girls now so at least they got some hot porn.

I signed up to write software.  What's amazing about the past thirty years is how often I'm dealing with NONSENSE like this instead of software.