Get Premium
Dark mode theme is available exclusively for premium users. Learn more about the benefits of subscribing.
No fees, cancel anytime.
Dark Mode 
No fees, cancel anytime 
then open in external browser
and click "Open in External Browser" 
28 Stories About Companies That Crashed Because The One Person Who Knew Stuff Just… Left
Interview With Expert
I think that the corporate world is a funny little universe within itself. With all the politics, the affairs, and promotion of a toxic environment, their world is probably closer to the apocalypse than our normal one. All jokes apart, such awful workplaces do a bad job with employee retention.
After all, nobody wants to work in a company that doesn’t even value their effort. Sadly, there are many such workplaces out there, and people called them out in this viral thread. The question was about valuable employees who left behind absolute chaos, and folks beautifully delivered!
More info: Reddit
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
Maybe not crash and burned, but there was a guy who was close personal friends with the CEO. He owned so much company stock, that if he sold his shares, it had to be cleared with board of directors and filed with the SEC (SEC Rule 144) as a registered secondary offering. Well, the company got bought out, which included trading his shares. If he sold, it would have been really bad for the stock prices. So they gave him whatever job he wanted, and he worked with me. He was unfireable.
After a few years, some hotshot young manager fired him. The reasons were long and stupid, but it boiled down to, "I don't like his attitude." Instead of saying, "HAH, you can't fire me!" He said, "okay," and filed a registration statement to sell his shares. I don't know how much he made, but it was more than $90 million. It was his right.
The board was forced to approve it, he paid taxes, and retired in his 40s. The company stock price fell about 15% that week. That manager was fired. Presumably out of a cannon.
RELATED:
#2
The guy who knew the clients. Had relationships with the clients. Who had the history of the clients & the company. They got rid of that guy and wadda know.... clients started bailing because they didn't like how they were being treated and the guy who could smooth ruffled feathers wasn't there.
#3
An absolute star in an engineering company who despite growing his side of the business, increasing efficiency, cutting costs and gaining additional relevant training and qualifications in his own time, hadn't had a meaningful pay rise in five years.
Gave notice after accepting a new position with a 60% pay increase and the company immediately countered with an 80% pay rise offer. That they knew his worth the entire time and refused to pay until they had to enraged him so much that they turned an amicable separation into a hostile one.
He came after their clients with a vengeance and while I think the company still exists it's a lot smaller than before.
As you go through the list, you might even find that some are quite familiar. It's a small world after all, and these things keep happening. To gain deeper insights into the issue, Bored Panda got in touch with HR specialist Nicola Dias. She openly spoke with us about how she has seen this play out right in front of her.
"The number of times that I have seen companies let go of good, resourceful employees is quite staggering. And the fact that there's nothing that I can do about it makes it sadder. They love to lean on that one person who knows how everything works… until they walk out the door. The truth is, a lot of organizations confuse ‘quietly holding everything together’ with ‘not doing anything special.’"
"These people don’t get raises, they get more work. They don’t get backup; rather, they become the backup. But when they leave, it’s not just a talent loss, it’s like ripping out the brainstem of a system. The company ends up paying the price they refused to pay in appreciation, retention bonuses, or even just respect," she added.
#4
Back in the 60s, my Dad drove a delivery route delivering eggs to restaurants and stores. One restaurant had a great cook. His cooking was widely known and the restaurant was always packed. He asked for a raise and was told that they couldn’t afford it. Another restaurant offered him a substantial raise and he accepted. He had a growing family and needed the money. His former employer lost a lot of business and eventually closed.
#5
So I was laid off a few months ago. I know everyone says the company will crash and burn without them, and while it is not crashing and burning, them laying me off is costing the company about 400,000 a month. About 6 months ago, the person in charge of logistics charges left the company, and then 2 weeks later, his boss left. I was fully trained to handle all of the logistics charges which involved SQL queries, working with other applications I will not name as it could out me, and cleaning all the data so it can be used to charge the vendors back the appropriate amount, and not a single other person was trained as it was implied i will be trained, and then train the rest of my team. Well I was laid off as "redundant" and only 1 member of my team was kept as she was the team member who has been there the longest. I am still in contact with her and she tells me all the time that there are company wide meetings about what I knew and how they can begin fixing the issue. While I feel bad for this person as she is catching a little bit of flak, I would never tell these people how it is done, and she has explicitly told me she doesn't want to know.
#6
I left my former employer as the foreman at a hardacape company to start my own outfit a year and a half ago.
The company is shutting down after this year.
It turns out people with 10+ years in the industry are basically non-existent. No one remembers to take care of their bodies. And when you offer s**t pay to start, you'll get s**t help. They simply could not replace me, and they couldn't afford my new self-imposed salary to get me back on board.
Part of me feels guilty to watch them struggle but man has my life improved since leaving.
The moral of the story is that if your company relies on a single person to operate, you're probably doing something wrong.
Sven Horlemann 1 week ago
Yep, OP is dead on with his conclusion. Couldn't agree more. And I am a manager myself 🙃.
Nicola also explained how some workplaces tend to punish employees for being too competent, by overloading them or undervaluing their contributions.
She further elaborated, "In some companies, competence is basically a punishment. You’re fast? Great, here are three more projects. You solve problems no one else can? Awesome, you’re now the unofficial fixer of everything broken, with zero authority and even less sleep. And the toxic cycle just never ends."
She claimed that these employees don’t get promoted; rather, they get depended on even more. Meanwhile, she added, a boss might say, ‘We can’t afford to lose her/him,’ while doing nothing to actually make them want to stay.
#7
I make a product that requires a high quality bottle and cap. During covid, supplies were getting scarce. I secured some bottles, albeit lesser quality. But caps were a nightmare. I called my way up the supply chain.
Ended up talking to the owner of the biggest manufacturer of the caps I need in America. Turns out.... they're completely shut down. There's 1 guy in Slovakia that can fix and service their machine. He can't travel because of covid.
I asked, with a mildly condescending tone, is there a manual? Or can you face time with this guy? Stonewalled. He's the only guy and we're waiting for him.
Luckily he didn't die and came to America to fix the machine 8 weeks later.
#8
Lol, it was my dad. He was the lead software engineer for the biggest client. The company he worked at built automation equipment, and they did work for a certain large glass manufacturer. They absolutely loved him.
Corporate removed the GM of his branch, and he got a bad feeling from the new guy. So he left and they lost that main customer within 6 months. The branch closed down less than a year after that.
Fuhleeheece 1 week ago
Why do the middle management guys seem like the worst losers in the whole company? Did they all get MBAs in Stupidity Studies?
#9
Not a crash and burn but almost a critical system failure.
New management came in and they were reviewing payments to outside labor and contracts and such. They found one such payment, annually paid to a fella out west. The payment was $20k a year.
They asked the wrong people and decided this was not necessary and cancelled the payments and retainer.
Apparently this guy was some expert code writer for a system long out of use, but very much in use by my company. Kind of like those memes you see in the IT world showing how all of this critical infrastructure relies on some small antiquated software no one knows about.
IT found out later, they were never asked or involved in the decision. They basically said without this dude we are f****d.
Management cut the check and he’s on retainer .
Nicole Weymann 1 week ago
Terrific money-for-work ratio for this guy, but a MAJOR fock up waiting to happen for the company. The incident should have been a wake up call, unless that guy's name is Duncan MacLeod
Our expert also stressed how this over-reliance on a single employee can actually be like a slow-burning nightmare for the person to handle. She chimed in that these folks are in a constant state of hyper-responsibility, even when they’re off the clock. Nicola believes that over time, it leads to anxiety, resentment, and full-on burnout.
"They start feeling like they can’t take time off, not because they don’t want to, but because the place might actually fall apart without them. Imagine being so indispensable that even your PTO feels like a liability. Eventually, the stress can push them to leave. And the worst part? Half the time, nobody even notices the toll it’s taking until it’s way too late," she noted.
#10
The person who knew the INDUSTRY left! The bozo board brought in 4 people in 3 years after he was gone to “take over” - all they did was trash the company, they didn’t know the market/customer base, competition, products, sales cycle - and on and on. Oh, so why did they let him go? To SAVE $$$! Brilliant!
#11
Had a guy at one job that landed us our largest client ever. Ford Motor Company. Ever heard of them? A $22 million dollar software contract.
They fired him immediately after the ink was dry on a trumped up b******t "not a team player" thing to s***w him out of their paying his percentage for the sale.
Company never found another big client after that, and 6 months later the layoffs started.
#12
I watched a company crash and burn as they protected one piece of s**t and fired every person who reported them. Even when everyone reported someone that was being abused by the a*****e (I was being abused), the company protected them.
Then 3 months later he was finally fired and the company stock took an 80% nosedive and has only recovered about 20% still.
But I'm at my new job crushing quota year after year so I look back and smile at that piece of s**t.
Wait, what was the question?
"I’ve seen employees beg to train others, flag the risk, even suggest building documentation. Only to get brushed off with a pat on the back and, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll get to that.’ Spoiler alert: they don't," Nicola sarcastically commented.
She believes that a lot of organizations have this dangerous optimism: ‘They’ve always handled it, so they’ll keep handling it.’ She narrated that when those employees finally leave, leadership suddenly scrambles as if it’s a surprise. "Meanwhile, that person had been waving a red flag for months. It’s not just unsupported, it’s ignored until it becomes a crisis," she added.
#13
My buddy used to work at a bar and did pretty much everything. Cook, DJ, and barback. Before he left he said they wont last a month without him. He was right. They s**t down about a month after he left.
#14
My partner is reluctantly that person. She likes where she works but they keep promoting people that can't handle the job. So whenever she leaves for a vacation she comes back to a s**t show. It's frustrating because she feels she can't take leave as she'll be facing a mess when she gets back. Meanwhile the place runs better when certain people are on leave themselves.
Not sure really what the skill is. She's hyper organised and observant. So she catches discrepancies and errors in things before they go to the next stage that other people miss. She's always very good at logistics, so she keeps things together and keeps the workplace moving.
These skills are great but she can't turn them off. So she comments on basically every single thing I do at home. We visited her family once and after a day of them all doing it I needed some time to myself.
That's ADHD for ya.
#15
The Coors company has long made ceramic lab filters. They custom made a large version of the mass produced lab filters and we had one at my company. We wanted another one so we placed an order. We were told that “X” retired and no one else could make them that large without cracking. X apparently could not impart whatever he did to others.
I have no idea if they gave up on making them as we switched to a different type after that. Maybe it was just a tall tale.
"Sometimes people do hold onto knowledge for job security, sure. But more often, it’s self-preservation. If documenting everything means doubling your workload and training someone who might leave in 6 months, a lot of folks just think, ‘Why bother?’ It’s not selfish, it’s a symptom. Of broken systems, of under-resourcing, and of being constantly in survival mode,” Nicola concluded.
Well, that definitely gave us all the tea that happens within such big organizations. It's no wonder some people are reluctant to share their knowledge with others. If the management is so toxic, you can't really expect much from the employees. Don't you agree? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
Also, feel free to share any similar experiences that you have come across. We always love to hear from you!
#16
There’s a notable difference in the quality of asphalt used in Oregon highways since my grandpa passed away.
He retired twice and stayed on as a consultant until the day he died. They called my grandma after he died and when she told them he had passed she said they seemed more broken up about it than she was after 40 years of marriage.
#17
Got rid of the CEO that actually took care of employees and grew the company exponentially. Explanation given was that they needed someone who could steward the company "at that level." Really, the major investor company wanted to have their own guy in there. They threw around a bunch of pie in the sky promises about an IPO which was never gonna happen.
The people they successively brought in slashed and burned everything that made the place great. Got so bad we were forbidden from sending company wide goodbye emails which were par the course in the past. They try to reverse course on some stuff to stem the tide but damage was done. Also all the changes in leadership meant the product strategy was nonexistent and something that was the new flagship one year was deprecated the next. They are still plugging along but a shell of what they onfe were. Many, many people who made the place great saw the writing on the wall and got out of dodge.
Michael Largey 1 week ago
If you broke the rule against sending company wide goodbye emails, what did they do? Fire you?
#18
My supervisor/head of department. I worked as a front-end dev in a very small and crappy marketing agency.
My supervisor was not only our sole back-end dev, but also the responsible for managing client lists, our monthly phone messages to clients, and the entire server that housed all files.
As soon as he left I was just going to work without anything to do, and soon after the agency fell through.
#19
We had an application that was very literally our bread and butter. It was the only application the entire company used to enter their data in, everything that made us money went through this application. We were a company of about 200 and two IT teammates controlled the application. Only ones with admin access, only ones with any knowledge of how the thing worked etc. We had been in the process of building a team to support it but we never got that far. Company got bought out. They decided to cut the fat and let go everyone on the IT team except me probably because I was the one making the least amount of money. I was more than happy to watch the s**t show. The company scrambled but honestly they were so big that our tiny company didn't mean anything to them so they just treated everyone like s**t and I left too.
K Barnes 6 days ago
I worked for a mechanical parts warehouse that needed to upgrade their software and went with a modified hotel system program. It was an unmitigated disaster. There were weeks where we could literally not do any business after it went live and months after than at only essential customer functionality at a huge loss. They lost at least tens of millions of dollars in order to save a few million on appropriate software. I could go ON and on about the many failed multi-million dollar projects this company bled while I was there, and yet they are a force in the industry today. To me it exemplifies utter failure in management with big companies.
#20
I had a systems administrator die from COVID and he took several important passwords to his grave. This caused a huge compliance issue as backups were no longer accessible, since he never wrote down the passwords.
setsuriseikou 1 week ago
Isn't there some tried and tested way of handling this kind of situations? I mean, people have been regrettably prone to dying since forever
#21
Not quite a crash and burn, yet was fun to watch. I worked in Department of A. The President of the place decoded to merge us with Department B. Our beloved boss was let go and the boss of B was not a good boss or even a good person. They took away our jobs and gave us new ones. The accounting in Department A was mostly done by one older woman who I shall call Jane. The powers at Department B could never make any sense of the accounting system. They hired about five consultants to "fix" the problem. Never once did they ask Jane about how she did her job. She could have explained it in less than a day. And she did not get paid anywhere near what the consultants charged. One of the consultants finally talked to her about her job. The whole mess was cleared up quickly. Lesson: Never under estimate an older worker who has had the same job for 40 years or more.
Sue 1 week ago
You have to understand that creating & maintaining a successful company is no longer the goal. It is to get in, get any money you can skim, & then file bankruptcy or sell it. But apparently it is heresy to try to regulate businesses. Several business owners have shown that EVERYONE can make more money by doing business legit but so many are just lazy.
#22
There was a dude. He'd been there 10 years when I got hired. I knew more about databases and they wanted to promote me into a lead role. I told them to promote him instead and I'd help with the DB side. They didn't he left. We were a creative space product that integrated with Photoshop. I don't know s**t about Photoshop. Company was bought, everyone was laid off except a skeleton crew to offshore all operations.
#23
When I worked at EF Hutton the CEO was pissed that the top broker made more money than he did and let everyone know it. The broker left. Then the company got in trouble for check kiting, which was a form of collecting interest on money that was supposed to be in non interest accruing demand deposit accounts. Ego over profits.
#24
...all the technical stuff, and worked a lot...
Aka me. I looked after all the payment machines, door timers, lighting, etc. They contracted the machines out to a company that worked Mon-Fri, 8am-5pm. Noone would look after the door timers, lighting, etc without upfront payment as they were known for not paying for several months. I was on call when there, and would help customers if they needed, no matter the hour, and did whatever was needed to keep the sites going. 6 months later, the company was in shambles, and later sold all their leases off to another company, and left the city.
#25
My former co-worker used to be a secretary at Lehman Brothers (yeah, that place). She had a high position at the company making 150k-250k a year in 2007. (Yup, she worked with someone very important.) Right before the company crashed, her boss asked her to shred some documents, and accidently noticed what those documents read (something like the company was going collapse soon and ordering all the higher ups to "cash out of their retirement funds ASAP" situation. She walked away with alot of money, and bought two houses during the great ressision, in cash, in NYC. She bought herself two homes; one-family home and a mutli-family home of 5-families (for rent).. She lives off the rents, she "retired at age 35" and sells vintage clothes as a side-hobby..
#26
I remember one specific case where I was fired illegally. Or better said, the company forged documents in my name stating I decided to quit, while I was on a vacation and learned about it during. Their reasoning was they weren't allowed to give fulltime contracts anymore by HQ (because a lot of fulltimers left shortly after getting a fulltime contract), and because I was on a two-week vacation. They weren't able to speak to me about it. So their smartest decision was to forge those documents in my name and make it so i'd quit.
Little did they realize (till it was already too late) I was one of the important employees in the store. Our store has two deposit-machines for plastic and beerbottles which had a lot of outages when customers threw in their bottles wrongly, which happens a lot because a lot of people have the mental capacity of a cashewnut. We used to handle those machines with a coworker and myself, till he got fired for being sick too much (at least thats what we got told). So I was the only one who knew how to hndle the machines, fix issues and seperate all bottles efficiently.
So during my vacation I got illegally fired by management. I got told by a coworker they realized messed up when I didn't showed up for work after my vacation anymore (because they fired me duhh) and they had no one to handle the deposit-machines.
For when someone asks: No I was not able to fight it in court because they sided with the company. Even though I had bulletproof evidence of never signing any documents, and being on vacation at time of "signing".
#27
A great manager. He knew how to lead people. Soft skills are so important.
Michael Largey 1 week ago (edited)
The picture reminds me that I've had two types of managers. Those that made me smile and those that made me laugh out loud.
#28
My sales manager left and all of a sudden long term customers started leaving in droves. Turns out the Sales manager was spending a ton of money taking them all out and disguising the costs as if he was riding with salesman and paying for meals and events.
#30
Way back during the late 2000's financial crisis, a manufacturing company I worked at suffered some layoffs (me included) but after only like 40 days they called me back up and said they had a new plan to get through. I went to this meeting and it was very obvious this was a half-baked idea that would turn into a cluster-F*** as soon as the regular work returned. This exact scenario played out and after they announced 7-day schedules as a last-pitch effort to not to drown, I reminded them this is exactly what I said would happen and then quit. I think the company did survive but a lot of managers got fired for fumbling it. It still felt good to be right after they ignored my reasoning in that meeting.
#31
My friend fixed LEDs for the patriots. Right after he left, Tom Brady left too.
What do you think ?
Apatheist Account2 1 week ago
I was made redundant once, then got a phone call a couple of weeks later as there was a problem with some software and I was the only one who knew how it worked. Charged them treble my previous rate for three days' work. Despite the 50 redundancies they made that day, including the MD, they were sold a few months later to a company that had been about a tenth of their size.
Apatheist Account2 1 week ago
I was made redundant once, then got a phone call a couple of weeks later as there was a problem with some software and I was the only one who knew how it worked. Charged them treble my previous rate for three days' work. Despite the 50 redundancies they made that day, including the MD, they were sold a few months later to a company that had been about a tenth of their size.
You May Like Worker Gets A Reprimand Instead Of Recognition, Decides To Stop Overworking, Watches Problems Grow Bosses Can’t Understand Why Sales Have Dropped, Workers Remind Them It’s Their Own Fault 35 People Share The Most Unhinged Things Their Colleagues Did At Work
Ilona Baliūnaitė
Mantas Kačerauskas
Gabija Saveiskyte
Related on Bored Panda
