Arman Atienza - PHP Programmer

The Beginning - April
First Wasted Month - May
Second Wasted Month - June
Third Month Of Nothing - July

Arman Atienza
A programmer NOT to be trusted

Why does this web site exist?
Indeed, why have I just spent two days of my valuable time creating it? Why am I spending $10 per year on a domain name? Why am I contacting other web site owners about a certain man?

The reason is that stories such as mine need to see the light of day; people like Armando Salandanan Atienza should not be in business. And if they choose to stay in business, prospective employers need to know exactly what they are getting into.

Mine is an "outsourced programmer from hell" story involving this 35-year-old Filipino "programmer" living in Manila. Living in the Philippines myself, I have met him and experienced his level of "service" first hand.

Armando Atienza was given every opportunity to perform. Arman was forgiven, twice, for grievous lies that cost me months of delay and many thousands of dollars in lost revenues. Arman was warned that this site would be going up, knowing full well my expertise at getting my message to the top of search engine results. I suggested that, if Arman could not show me any work, he should return 90% of the one month advance payment since he produced less than 10% of a month (2 days') work. Again Arman refused, and you are reading the result here.

Despite his written threats to, amongst other things, "blow up" my house and harm my children, this site will stand as a warning to others.

Arman Atienza (7/19/2009 12:00:40 AM): all your properties there will blew up

Text message from cellphone # 0908 181 5397 @ 5:34pm 22-Jul-09:

Yo Stefan dude,stop threatening my friend.If u are going to destroy his future then U shuld Take really GOOD CARE of your SAFETY in Palawan especially your KIDS

Prospective acquaintances of Mr. Atienza might wish to be aware of his true nature, and the company he keeps.

Below is a summary of my experience with Armando - essentially 12 weeks of empty promises, outrageous lies and not a single functioning web page at the end of it. Click the links to read more detail, including evidential correspondence:

Early red flag: Prior to being interviewed, Armando asked for a $100 advance payment to cover a $3 bus fare.
Lies right from the start: Prior to being interviewed, and prior to receiving a down-payment, Armando stated that he had only minor "site maintenance" commitments.
- After one month of doing nothing but lying, Armando admits that he had one big project to finish.
- After two months of doing nothing but lying, Armando admits he actually had FOUR big projects to finish.
Generosity vs. Greed: Armando was offered (1) excellent salary until the project was completed and (2) a 50-50 partnership once the new site was operational.
- At the conclusion of the interview, Armando was paid one month in advance - and at twice the monthly rate that he asked for.
- After two months of lying and doing nothing, one of his excuses was that I didn't pay him enough.
  Here he claims he worked too much already ("80 hours at $30/hour") -- 4X the rate he requested (and 6X average Filipino programmer salary!)
  ... and here he admits after 2 months to having done "very little work so far".
- After doing no work for the first month and lying to me the entire time, he had the nerve to ask for $50,000 to buy a house!
- After 5 weeks, during which he did approximately 3-6 hours of work, he also had the nerve to ask for his salary!
False impression: From Day One he gave the impression that he was hard at work. See also his many empty assurances below.
Unresponsiveness: After the first week of "working", Armando became generally unresponsive for days at a time, even when he could be seen logged into Yahoo Instant Messenger. Emails were ignored, as were Yahoo Messenger contacts (both live and offline), as were cell phone text messages. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for examples. It reached the point where only mention of putting up this page would elicit any response.
Compulsive lying: Armando repeatedly admitted lying and promised to stop lying here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Armando lies -- again and again -- even about not lying any more!
Empty assurances: In order to keep me quiet, Armando made repeated false promises to work and send updates. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
"My ass is so hot!": Armando repeatedly assured me that he was extremely motivated and 100% committed to working with me on this project. More lies here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
First month wasted: As can be seen through the links above, Arman spent the entire first month pretending to work for me. At the end, realizing that he had to start producing something, he whipped up some hasty JPEG-format (!) site design and attempted to pass this off as one month's work. Caught in a lie, he admitted what he had done and promised to start anew.
Second month wasted: Within days of promising to start anew and never lie again, Armando's computer was infected with a virus, which corrupted my development site (not that there was anything much to corrupt.) As it turns out, Armando managed to remove the virus from his computer within two hours but spent the NEXT 21 DAYS (3 weeks!) pretending that his machine was still infected by this "nightmare" (his word, here, here and here) virus, asking for my advice about what to try, and even going so far as to manually and repeatedly re-corrupt my development site with infected versions of the files to give the impression that his computer was still infected. Armando's behavior goes far beyond unethical and verges on being pathological / criminal.
Third month - game over: Unbelievably, Armando thought he could get away with an entire second month of lying. And I let him believe that while I hired another programmer. I "forgave" Arman a second time and asked him to come up with a final set of site graphics. Within a few days he produced a slightly edited version of the JPEG (!) graphics that he produced at the end of May to cover for his first month of inactivity. After more failed promises and more... nothing... I told him on July 14th that he had until the 17th to show me what he had done during the first 3 weeks of this third month; Armando agreed. On the 17th, we had our final showdown where he refused to send anything and asked me to wait until the 19th.

You are reading the result of 83 days of the most unbelievable experience I have ever had with someone calling themselves a "programmer". That's 83 days of delay on a new project, 83 days of lost revenue, 83 days of utter frustration. 83 days of lie upon lie upon lie.

I contacted the Australia, U.S. and U.K.-based owners of some of the web sites in Armando Atienza's portfolio and it became clear that this is how he operates with everyone: Win a contract by any means necessary, work extremely slowly, make excuses, ask for payment above the agreed price, fail to deliver.

Feel free to contact him here armanatienza@gmail.com or here arman_atienza@yahoo.com for his side of the story. Or text him at 0920 438 6766.

Timeline

First month of nothing - May >>

Apr 24, 2009	Initial contact made via oDesk.com, an outsourcing site. Here I ask on Yahoo Instant Messenger about his present workload: Stefan (4/24/2009 10:11:35 PM): What are your present commitments? I think this would probably be a full-time venture... Arman Atienza (4/24/2009 10:12:44 PM): right now i dont have major projects, some are for site maintenance and some script editing
Apr 25, 2009	In our second Yahoo Messenger conversation, Arman writes: Arman Atienza (4/25/2009 4:29:06 PM): great, im so much interested and can't wait to start working on it Stefan (4/25/2009 4:29:38 PM): But, it won't happen unless one or two people are willing to commit their lives to it. It is hard to find serious, hard-working people these days. Arman Atienza (4/25/2009 4:31:01 PM): Right now my family is just renting a house here in Cainta Rizal, and one of my goal is to get my own house that's why im so motivated working with projects like this one We agree to meet some 60 miles outside of Manila. Armando is willing to come, but wants me to send money for him to come (a $3 bus fare!) and won't trust me to give him the money upon his arrival. I understand that there is an issue of trust here, and he may be thinking, "What if Stefan isn't really there when I show up?" He asked for PHP1,500 or 2,000 ($30 or $40), which was already excessive considering the cost of Philippines transport. Then, in the middle of discussing how to send the money to him, he writes: Arman Atienza (4/25/2009 5:14:34 PM): i suggest you better make it $100 then will account the remaining to the project Wow, $100 for a $3 bus fare. Perhaps I should have flagged him as a scammer at this point already? I point out to Armando that we have not even agreed to start working together, and he reduces his requirement to $50, which I send him via PayPal as a sign of good faith.
Apr 26, 2009	Arman came by bus and trike to my house, as planned. We spent several hours at a computer viewing different systems and program code, as well as discussing the new project. Based upon the good examples of his work that he was showing me, I decided to hire him. I offered him the following arrangement: A monthly salary until the system was complete, and then a 50-50 split of the revenues after this amount exceeded his monthly salary. In other words, a 50-50 partnership with vast rewards, not just a simple programming job. More than fair by any measure, especially considering that this new venture was already 60% programmed and expected to earn well in excess of the $400,000+ annually that my other business did. After receiving his assurance, again, that he was free of other commitments, I offered him one months' salary in advance since we did not have a contract and I wished to show my good faith. I asked him how much he wanted per month and after long calculation/consideration he requested PHP50,000 ($1,000). I paid him P100,000 in cash before he left, as a sign of good faith. Arman returned to Manila and all was well. Or so I thought.
Apr 27, 2009	We chatted on Yahoo briefly, arranging to meet the next day in Manila for dinner since I was picking up a friend at the airport. He wanted me to see his office and meet his family. I was impressed by the fact that he had already changed his Yahoo online message to read, "[The name of the new site] development in progress!" Little did I know, that was simply his way of pretending to me for the next month that he was working! I received an email from Arman stating: My initial task on our pipeline for now is that I will be running and reading each php script to know how it goes and also to review all your validations and how your existing scripts handle all the error messages. Since as you said the database is already normalized i will use it and i will let you know if i have some suggestions and questions. Thanks again. Sounds like he's hard at work already, right? Reading my code and trying to understand how my error handling function works. See our long conversation on June 2nd (5 weeks after he 'started'), in which he admits that he never did go through my system but that he is "on the verge" of doing so. This is the first of literally dozens of broken promises: Armando Atienza lies like a broken record.
Apr 28, 2009	I saw that Arman was online at 1:47 AM, so left him a message. He responded 6 hours later, while I was asleep: Arman Atienza (4/27/2009 12:25:29 PM): LOL, yes burning the midnight oil, i was working on my other PC didnt catch your message instantly. As an aside, you will read, during June (when he claims to be infected by a virus that took him weeks to get rid of) that he claims to have only one old laptop. That evening, Arman, his wife Girlie (a College Professor of computing), myself, my friend and my driver had a pleasant meal together at a restaurant in Manila. My friend and I were very impressed by Armand and Girlie; the thought that Armando might be a lying scumbag never even crossed our minds at the time.

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First month of nothing - May >>