Boss Fires IT Guy, Makes Him Delete All The Files Despite Being Advised Not To, Realizes His Mistake Too Late
No one likes being replaced at their job, especially if your substitute is a cheaper software grad while you have spent years working hard and earning yourself a name. Well, this is what happened to one experienced programmer, Redditor Oldman712, whose job was “to design and write software prototypes for individual high-value customers.”
Then, one day management changed and he was told he was no longer needed and that he had two weeks to train a new guy. But there was one catch. “Having done this work for years, I’ve accumulated a disk farm of past projects, which can be very useful when a customer asks for something just like we did last year, but with a small change or two,” wrote the author. So he ended up having “$1000 of personal disk drives with old customer data on them,” which was really bugging the management.
Ordered to delete them all before leaving, Oldman712 tried his best to convince the manager that this was not exactly the smartest idea. But hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Scroll down through the whole story below, and be sure that malicious compliance was served and regrets were had. Big ones.
The experienced programmer has shared how he was replaced at his job by a cheaper new grad and the office drama that followed
Image credits: lilzidesigns (not the actual photo)
The new manager also ordered the author to delete his $1k worth of drives with all the company’s old customer data on them and didn’t take no for an answer
Image credits: oldman712
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Others shared their own similar experiences
I've found in my many years in IT that just because it's an IT based company that doesn't mean the management has the faintest clue how their own products and processes work. They're usually business grads who are taught that "a good manager can manage any company" and laugh off the suggestion that their ignorance is actually harmful. (spoiler: their ignorance is very harmful)
And this right here is why the company I work for is being run into the ground.
Load More Replies...If somebody is willing to get rid of you to save money one time, they are willing to get rid of you for another bad reason another time. Don't ever, ever go back to a place that you were forced to leave.
I went through a similar experience. The small company I was working for ran out of work, but the owner dragged his feet laying me off formally. So that's about 2 weeks with almost no income. Then he dragged his feet with the paperwork so that I could claim EI. Three weeks. Then of course it was about 6 weeks before I got EI payments, so that's nine weeks with no income. I found another job a couple months later with better pay, only to get a frantic phone call a few weeks in *demanding* that I come back at once to the previous company because they got some work. When I pointed out that I had found another job, he insisted that I *must* come in weekends and evenings to work for him. Um... nope.
If he really insists, quote him a rate like $1000/hour. Then you can tell how desperate he is.
Load More Replies...I retired after 20 years with the IT department in a publicly owned utility company. I was team lead for the ERP/Database group. I earned a decent 6-figure salary. My specialization was SAP/HANA and virtualization technology. The company spent my last year trying to recruit a replacement without success. Ultimately they had to hire me back as a consultant for another 2 years until they got somebody. They paid me 2-1/2 times my old salary, plus a fixed 40 hours per week, plus 100% remote work from home, while I was also collecting my retirement pension. No money for employee raises, but massive budget for professional services. The irony is that when the new CIO came on board five years earlier, the first thing he had everybody do was to write up a succession plan, which I did in great detail. Management never acted on my 6-page succession plan to benefit the company, so in the end I was the beneficiary of their oversight.
Knew of a similar situation years back. Not IT but in a parks department. A fellow had worked for years getting a new park set up and was promised the managers job once it happened. Higher ups hired their starchild instead and offered the old guy a job working in the damned basement of HQ. He decided to just quit and on his last day they made him clean out his office. Before computers so a few of his friends helped him pile all the maps, documents, records etc in a burn pile by the field office and burn it. They spent years playing catch up.
The incompetence in the company is staggering. To not have files and documentation of past projects is incomprehensible. In reality, new problems are often related to old problems. Older solutions, with modification, generally apply. And the fix is much faster. Newly graduated techs may not know anything about older coded functions...some might still be Fortran..., and kids, even smart ones, will be afraid to touch them and break them. Keep your older coders...they can be essential
People who manage IT teams or people should have some understanding of what things like "prototypes" and "coude source safes" and data archiving, and LDAP and VMware etc. etc. etc. actually are. And it's often a disaster to have a marketing person manage an IT group. They talk to each other but the words don't seem to mean the same things. Thay have a different mindset entirely. The smart ones know what they don't know and have interpreters. It's sweet to leave the power-mad types to stew in their own stupidity.
I went through this in a Government department that was basically a large collection of small specialised agencies. I joined a 3-man IT department in the mid 1990's in one of these agencies. The upper management had decided to meet the complaints of poor support by decentralising - so 17 small IT support groups, improved support but poor coordination. Works well for 2 years, then new management decides we can cut costs be decentralising. I went through 4 cycles of this. I.e. complete reorganisation every 2 to 3 years. Every time, the experienced hands would confront the bosses and say the same thing "Centralise the controls, decentralise the support". No one listened. It was always the same - everyone in one office, or everyone in small groups of 2 -4 people. The last time it happened the agency didn't even chuck out my old chair and desk - they just put them in storage and pulled them out a couple of years later.
This happens in all aspects of corporate culture. The old centralise if currently decentralised versus decentralise if currently centralised scam has worked for so many new managers with no real Imagination or worthwhile ideas of their own. E very time it is followed up with fat bonus cheques for the manager and wages freezes or layoffs for the worker. Those layoffs or high turnover because of frustration underpaid and stressed workforce just primes the cycle to begin again in futile attempts to fix what is now considered broken by the next generation of money hungry soul sapping so called talent.
Load More Replies...Business managers know s**t about content. Best to leave them alone to spin around and around on their little hamster wheels.
Best "cut your nose off to spite your face" story i've heard in a while.
they asked for it. When I was forced to leave my prev job I was the only one that has source code of some very important project. Company asked for a copy but forgot some project. I gave them exactly what they asked me. When I was gone they realized that something was missing but I was out at that point and of course I deleted everything since that code wasnt mine
And that is why some companies go out of business or are bought out!
When in the '70's Army if we had an overbearing Officer/NCO we'd do whatever they demanded EXACTLY without taking any shortcuts/initiative to better complete the task. When they'd get ticked off as it was taking too long we tell them we WERE doing everything they wanted.
The insanity of thinking that any programmer is as good as any other is actually a real problem for society. What would people think if someone decided to replace an experienced architect with someone straight out of college - with no mentoring or monitoring of that college grad by a more experienced architect? But they do that for software development jobs. Same for software quality assurance jobs where they think any joe schmoe is as good as any other in that role (yet hire college grads from other countries who don't know how to use a computer instead of hiring smart high school students from our own country - even though they don't actually value experience).
Uncle Bob points out that, with the programmer supply doubling every 5 years, that means half of all programmers have less than 5 years experience.
Load More Replies...What would it take for you to come back?? Reminds me of a old martial arts movie (Kid with the golden arm). One of the bosses tells the protagonist, that he should join them. He says on three conditions. 1. I must become the number 1 2. All the old members have to go, must be killed. 3. He mulls on it. One of the gang members tells him to go to hell. Protagonist leaps up with a flying kick and kills him....fight ensues. ☺
Because FLAs and TLAs are "fun" to management. Also, avionics, disc drive companies, military, medicine, etc thrive on them as short-hands. I have been in meeting where TLA/FLAs are half of the conversation. I am a contract engineer. It's pretty common for the same TLA to be used for different meanings in different fields. TLA: Three Letter Acronym FLA: Four Letter Acronym (ironically, FLA is a TLA...)
Load More Replies...I don't get this, they're protypes, so not running in a prod environment, essentially just mock ups no? Why 6 months later would a company want changes to them? 6 months evaluating look and feel seems excessive. Surely the prototypes either get signed off or not, if yes then it goes to the Devs, if not then nothing.
Far be it from me to ruin the schadenfreude of well-played "malicious compliance" against an evil corporation, but the unexpected behavior that the former employer couldn't grapple with was the the OP put copious amounts of work product on storage that he still (rightfully) laid claim to. The work product is theirs, so claiming it as his or destroying it is not a valid choice. The professional solution would be to transfer the data to storage they own. Insisting that they purchase that storage from him is not proper.
This seems kinda fake: just because: „I have 10 hard drives“ „worth more than 1000$“. Yea buddy...1 of my hard drives costs 500$ already🧐 So he only bought 500gb drives and/or meager quality for his important stuff?
Plus: they demanded he deleted all data. There was no mention of properly deleted and evidently and such. He could have gone home and recreated all data in a few minutes... Regarding how stupid the company behaved I am quite sure they wouldn’t realize no data can be deleted 100%. Which is why our company even has to hire a company to shred our old drives so the data is lost for real...which I think is a bit overkill, but still. When I was 14 I could already use un-delete programs, and if you didn’t touch the drive in between like 99% the data was intact... All smelling fishy to me 😜
Load More Replies...Ha! Company clearly was not providing the employee with the materials and access he needed, otherwise, you must see it's not reasonable for this employee to have gone so far as to buy them himself to accommodate business needs. The managers of that business didn't have the faintest idea what its needs were, the managers of that business screwed the business over. And you blame the employee. Mr hobbity must be in management. "How dare you let me ruin the company with my own stupidity and greed!"
Load More Replies...I've found in my many years in IT that just because it's an IT based company that doesn't mean the management has the faintest clue how their own products and processes work. They're usually business grads who are taught that "a good manager can manage any company" and laugh off the suggestion that their ignorance is actually harmful. (spoiler: their ignorance is very harmful)
And this right here is why the company I work for is being run into the ground.
Load More Replies...If somebody is willing to get rid of you to save money one time, they are willing to get rid of you for another bad reason another time. Don't ever, ever go back to a place that you were forced to leave.
I went through a similar experience. The small company I was working for ran out of work, but the owner dragged his feet laying me off formally. So that's about 2 weeks with almost no income. Then he dragged his feet with the paperwork so that I could claim EI. Three weeks. Then of course it was about 6 weeks before I got EI payments, so that's nine weeks with no income. I found another job a couple months later with better pay, only to get a frantic phone call a few weeks in *demanding* that I come back at once to the previous company because they got some work. When I pointed out that I had found another job, he insisted that I *must* come in weekends and evenings to work for him. Um... nope.
If he really insists, quote him a rate like $1000/hour. Then you can tell how desperate he is.
Load More Replies...I retired after 20 years with the IT department in a publicly owned utility company. I was team lead for the ERP/Database group. I earned a decent 6-figure salary. My specialization was SAP/HANA and virtualization technology. The company spent my last year trying to recruit a replacement without success. Ultimately they had to hire me back as a consultant for another 2 years until they got somebody. They paid me 2-1/2 times my old salary, plus a fixed 40 hours per week, plus 100% remote work from home, while I was also collecting my retirement pension. No money for employee raises, but massive budget for professional services. The irony is that when the new CIO came on board five years earlier, the first thing he had everybody do was to write up a succession plan, which I did in great detail. Management never acted on my 6-page succession plan to benefit the company, so in the end I was the beneficiary of their oversight.
Knew of a similar situation years back. Not IT but in a parks department. A fellow had worked for years getting a new park set up and was promised the managers job once it happened. Higher ups hired their starchild instead and offered the old guy a job working in the damned basement of HQ. He decided to just quit and on his last day they made him clean out his office. Before computers so a few of his friends helped him pile all the maps, documents, records etc in a burn pile by the field office and burn it. They spent years playing catch up.
The incompetence in the company is staggering. To not have files and documentation of past projects is incomprehensible. In reality, new problems are often related to old problems. Older solutions, with modification, generally apply. And the fix is much faster. Newly graduated techs may not know anything about older coded functions...some might still be Fortran..., and kids, even smart ones, will be afraid to touch them and break them. Keep your older coders...they can be essential
People who manage IT teams or people should have some understanding of what things like "prototypes" and "coude source safes" and data archiving, and LDAP and VMware etc. etc. etc. actually are. And it's often a disaster to have a marketing person manage an IT group. They talk to each other but the words don't seem to mean the same things. Thay have a different mindset entirely. The smart ones know what they don't know and have interpreters. It's sweet to leave the power-mad types to stew in their own stupidity.
I went through this in a Government department that was basically a large collection of small specialised agencies. I joined a 3-man IT department in the mid 1990's in one of these agencies. The upper management had decided to meet the complaints of poor support by decentralising - so 17 small IT support groups, improved support but poor coordination. Works well for 2 years, then new management decides we can cut costs be decentralising. I went through 4 cycles of this. I.e. complete reorganisation every 2 to 3 years. Every time, the experienced hands would confront the bosses and say the same thing "Centralise the controls, decentralise the support". No one listened. It was always the same - everyone in one office, or everyone in small groups of 2 -4 people. The last time it happened the agency didn't even chuck out my old chair and desk - they just put them in storage and pulled them out a couple of years later.
This happens in all aspects of corporate culture. The old centralise if currently decentralised versus decentralise if currently centralised scam has worked for so many new managers with no real Imagination or worthwhile ideas of their own. E very time it is followed up with fat bonus cheques for the manager and wages freezes or layoffs for the worker. Those layoffs or high turnover because of frustration underpaid and stressed workforce just primes the cycle to begin again in futile attempts to fix what is now considered broken by the next generation of money hungry soul sapping so called talent.
Load More Replies...Business managers know s**t about content. Best to leave them alone to spin around and around on their little hamster wheels.
Best "cut your nose off to spite your face" story i've heard in a while.
they asked for it. When I was forced to leave my prev job I was the only one that has source code of some very important project. Company asked for a copy but forgot some project. I gave them exactly what they asked me. When I was gone they realized that something was missing but I was out at that point and of course I deleted everything since that code wasnt mine
And that is why some companies go out of business or are bought out!
When in the '70's Army if we had an overbearing Officer/NCO we'd do whatever they demanded EXACTLY without taking any shortcuts/initiative to better complete the task. When they'd get ticked off as it was taking too long we tell them we WERE doing everything they wanted.
The insanity of thinking that any programmer is as good as any other is actually a real problem for society. What would people think if someone decided to replace an experienced architect with someone straight out of college - with no mentoring or monitoring of that college grad by a more experienced architect? But they do that for software development jobs. Same for software quality assurance jobs where they think any joe schmoe is as good as any other in that role (yet hire college grads from other countries who don't know how to use a computer instead of hiring smart high school students from our own country - even though they don't actually value experience).
Uncle Bob points out that, with the programmer supply doubling every 5 years, that means half of all programmers have less than 5 years experience.
Load More Replies...What would it take for you to come back?? Reminds me of a old martial arts movie (Kid with the golden arm). One of the bosses tells the protagonist, that he should join them. He says on three conditions. 1. I must become the number 1 2. All the old members have to go, must be killed. 3. He mulls on it. One of the gang members tells him to go to hell. Protagonist leaps up with a flying kick and kills him....fight ensues. ☺
Because FLAs and TLAs are "fun" to management. Also, avionics, disc drive companies, military, medicine, etc thrive on them as short-hands. I have been in meeting where TLA/FLAs are half of the conversation. I am a contract engineer. It's pretty common for the same TLA to be used for different meanings in different fields. TLA: Three Letter Acronym FLA: Four Letter Acronym (ironically, FLA is a TLA...)
Load More Replies...I don't get this, they're protypes, so not running in a prod environment, essentially just mock ups no? Why 6 months later would a company want changes to them? 6 months evaluating look and feel seems excessive. Surely the prototypes either get signed off or not, if yes then it goes to the Devs, if not then nothing.
Far be it from me to ruin the schadenfreude of well-played "malicious compliance" against an evil corporation, but the unexpected behavior that the former employer couldn't grapple with was the the OP put copious amounts of work product on storage that he still (rightfully) laid claim to. The work product is theirs, so claiming it as his or destroying it is not a valid choice. The professional solution would be to transfer the data to storage they own. Insisting that they purchase that storage from him is not proper.
This seems kinda fake: just because: „I have 10 hard drives“ „worth more than 1000$“. Yea buddy...1 of my hard drives costs 500$ already🧐 So he only bought 500gb drives and/or meager quality for his important stuff?
Plus: they demanded he deleted all data. There was no mention of properly deleted and evidently and such. He could have gone home and recreated all data in a few minutes... Regarding how stupid the company behaved I am quite sure they wouldn’t realize no data can be deleted 100%. Which is why our company even has to hire a company to shred our old drives so the data is lost for real...which I think is a bit overkill, but still. When I was 14 I could already use un-delete programs, and if you didn’t touch the drive in between like 99% the data was intact... All smelling fishy to me 😜
Load More Replies...Ha! Company clearly was not providing the employee with the materials and access he needed, otherwise, you must see it's not reasonable for this employee to have gone so far as to buy them himself to accommodate business needs. The managers of that business didn't have the faintest idea what its needs were, the managers of that business screwed the business over. And you blame the employee. Mr hobbity must be in management. "How dare you let me ruin the company with my own stupidity and greed!"
Load More Replies...
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