I put some more thought into this whole 'compromising' my values. Several years before this business I was in another one with a partner whom I thought was my friend. As time passed he started to get really weird, spending money on personal stuff and talking to customers in bizarre ways, promising stuff that was not a good idea.
Eventually I spoke to the 'investor' about my concerns and the short story is that this 'friend' convinced him that I was the one who was stressed out and I needed to be put in my place - so they put me on PROBATION in my own company!
A month later I stood up for what I believed to be the right thing, and they fired me. I won't even go into details about the long, convoluted and blathering 20 page document he tried to get me to sign before they would give me a 'severance package. I still have it and it's amazing to read. I had to go to the labor board to get my vacation pay and other stuff and he tried to tell them I was 'insubordinate' so they were justified in firing me.
The guy at the labor board listened to my side and told me after talking to him that he had no doubt there was a loose screw there and forced them to pay me without that stupid 'agreement' being signed.
I tried to find a lawyer who would help me prove they were wrong and nobody would take the case because there wasn't any clear evidence that he had done anything wrong. Even though I had seen the American Express bills with $10,000 per month of expenses on them - him taking his family on trips. Even though his wife was on our salary as an 'office manager' for $30k per year but never came to the office. Our staff didn't have desks, they had folding tables. One of our programmers was a woman who was also athletic and he would say to me 'doesn't S have great legs'.
The last lawyer I talked to was a kind gentleman who said "Let it go, it was a learning experience and you know that it was all your creation. Go do it AGAIN and learn from this".
This wasn't the first time I stood up for 'the right thing' but it was the most severe response I'd ever gotten. My Wife was pregnant at the time (this was 17 years ago) and I went from a comfortable income with a lot of stress to no income and the humiliation of being fired.
It took me about 6 months to pick myself up again - on my own - but I did have a few friends around who I could talk to about how I felt and it helped. I ended up at a 100 person technology company where I couldn't use him as a reference and they (rightly so) said they couldn't hire me until they talked to him because it was hard to believe MY story. They did and it was abundantly clear to them that I was telling the truth, that he was nuts.
after only being there a few weeks I was called into the presidents office. Of course I'm terrified, thinking that somehow the past had gotten to me again. Instead, they are telling me that they looked at my resume and saw that I had 'some' background in VAX/VMS systems engineering. See, I had wanted to do more work in computer graphics, and I got a book on programming in what was then Microsoft Windows 3.1 and absorbed it, tried some programming and got a job for several months so I could learn it. I hyped it up in my resume so I could get THIS job doing what I thought would be fun. I played down the VAX/VMS part of my history but the reality was that there was pretty much nobody who was better than me.
I don't say that lightly, I could 'see' things that other people couldn't when working on these problems.
So, what they wanted of me was to tell them more about my background so I did. I told them how I had written a system to emulate another computer operating systems on VAX's and how some of our clients for this system were people like Chase Manhattan Bank.
So, they showed me a project that they had paid a consultant to write that was 'almost done' but he was leaving the area to go to Silicon Valley and could I look at it and estimate how long it would take for me to finish it.
I did, and in the process I realized he had faked the majority of it. Think of it this way: It was supposed to 'look like' a Windows program but on an old style DOS / Ascii text display. Instead of building a library to create menus or screens, he wrote a program to display each screen individually, and if a 'menu' needed to be displayed he just copied the program and made the changes to draw he screen with the menu displayed.
In other words he had maybe 20 copies of the same program with slight changes to display the screens differently. What had happened was that when you need to change the behavior of one of the screens, you have to change all 20 copies to mimic the same changes. To hide his bad design he would make sure that when they did demos, only HE would run the demo.
Well, I spent all night agonizing over this discovery. I was afraid of what would happen if I told them that this was all fake, that it needed a rewrite to be done correctly. I had already been through a lot just to get this job and I didn't want to be looked on as 'negative'.
But I told them. They asked a lot of 'right' questions and I showed them examples to support my belief. I proposed a better way and a timeline I was sure I could make.
In the end it was a success and over the next few years the tech support people said of all the products they had, mine was the one that they did the least support on. I ended up becoming friends with the President who was a good and decent man and could never understand why I was so hard on myself.
Once he asked me why I didn't start another company and I told him I just wanted to work in a cubicle in the back and be obscure. I didn't want to be the center of everything.
Eventually he sold the company and it was he who encouraged me to strike out on my own because - as he put it - you were never meant to be 'obscure'.
When I went through the sale / loss of my last company and lost my integrity I know that I FELT like I had to suck it up when history seemed to be repeating itself because I was afraid to 'leave' or to stand up for my values. I'm sure there is a connection between both bad events. It was the good event in between them that I've lost touch with.
I'm internalizing more of this. I can see that it's been about fear - fear of authority, fear of failure. Fear of standing up for what I believe in - no matter what the consequence.
