Cheap Company Sends New Employee to Replace Software Department, Gets Schooled on the Difficulty of Their Jobs

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  • 01
    Rectangle - r/MaliciousCompliance u/Edymnion 15h M ● "Teach him how to do your job", Okay Boss!
    via Edymnion
  • 02
    Font - So this happened a good 15 years ago, and another story just reminded me of it. As always I am a native English speaker sitting at a keyboard, so any typos are my own damned fault. To keep it short, 15 years ago and some change I worked for a local computer programming company that made automation software. Our company got bought out by a bigger national company, and after the dust settled corporate decided they were going to send "a liaison" down to our local office. To "learn how you do
    via Edymnion
  • 03
    Font - Aka, "Hey new hires, teach our guy how to do your job so we can let 3/4's of you go before next quarter." None of us were happy about that, but our new corporate overlords had spoken. A month or so later, here's our "liaison" fellow all ready to go. "So, show me the interface!" he said.
    via Edymnion
  • 04
    Font - Oh thats when we all stopped, looked at each other, and grinned. For you see, the reason it took us so long to bring new people up to speed is that we didn't "configure" new projects. "Configure" in this corporate speak meant "Go check off the boxes in an interface until it does what you want." Noooo my good friends, we coded everything by hand. Our main program accepted straight up VB files. Not even scripts, full on files, and our new friend here was NOT a programmer. At all. The guy di
    via Edymnion
  • 05
    Font - "Didn't you guys say you had some default policies you worked from?" "Oh yeah, but they end up being more trouble trying to customize than it is to just write the entire thing from scratch. So up here is where we're declaring our global variables..." To our friend's credit, he tried. Oh he tried for DAYS. And every time we thought he was about to figure something out, we intentionally switched him up to and even worse one.
    via Edymnion
  • 06
    Font - We hired requiring a computer science degree, 6 months of on site gearing up, and another 6 months of shadowing before we would let ANYONE handle a project on their own. This poor guy got the full year's worth of training in a week. To his credit, on his last day he flat out told us he was sent down to learn how to replace us, but that he was going to tell them that we were doing a great job and if anything our timeframes were surprisingly short given what we were doing. We ran that depar
    via Edyminion
  • 07
    Smile - People are STILL kvetching about "Man I miss X, it could have done this in half the time..." and instead of a 5 man team upkeeping everything we have multiple departments that still can't manage to fix a broken image link in the new stuff 10 years later.
    via Edymnion
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    Font - lockinber 14h Brilliant it just shows the management doesn't understand what was going on. : Reply ↑ Vote ↓ Fredredphooey 12h Even down to the seemingly most basic things! I was a PowerPoint jockey at a big 5 consulting firm and our manager had never used PowerPoint as far as I could tell. At one point, they were looking into buying or building some fancy templates and we were given a list of features to prioritize and she was surprised by our answers because we didn't choose anything tha
    via lockinber
  • 09
    Rectangle - purpleoctopustrolley The is what happens when managers have no idea of how the day-to-day works. All these "seems like a good idea" ideas that actually make the job harder. 14h •
    via purpleoctopustrolley
  • 10
    Font - Tikki_Taavi 13h That makes me think, The old masters teach you everything You know, Not everything THEY know. lol : Reply Vote O Edymnion OP +4 13h Side note, same job, our VP at the smaller company single handedly wrote the main program. He was also very much of the "I'd rather fix it myself than spend a week teaching someone how to do something that should never actually come up" kind of guy. When we were bought, he had back surgery already scheduled. Long story short, he was highest sa
    via Tikki_Taavi
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    Font - StormBeyond Time +2 13h I'll give liaison guy lots of points for doing his best in so many ways while he was there and telling you the truth. And for the latter part, the new upper management didn't sandbox or test the software before pushing it, did they?
    via StormBeyondTime
  • 12
    Font - paralyse78 +2 12h In my former brief life of IT I saw something a little similar happen. At one point while in my junior year of college I was working on a contract with a smaller scale manufacturer of implantable medical devices (think pacemakers, etc) that was being bought out by a much larger manufacturer, I'll call them company X, who manufactured a lot of other things, not just IMD's. The order management and customer database software in use on the sales side of the business for ord
    via paralyse78
  • 13
    Font - The software in use was supposedly difficult to learn, but once learned, it was apparently much faster than any of the point-and-click Windows-based apps that served the same purposes. It was also highly customized for the specific field of implantable medical devices. In early 1999 the new owners brought in an outside IT consulting firm who conducted onsite review of the hardware and software in use to see if a better (read: cheaper) solution was available. The consultant spent a couple
    via paralyse78
  • 14
    Font - It was suggested that rather than spending all of this time and money on the custom software already in use, that an "off-the-shelf" product would be much cheaper, more reliable, easier to learn, etc. and they could just customize it and make it work for the IMD sales and manufacturing business. Company X apparently totally bought into this load of crap from the consultant. My contract ended in Dec of 1999 so I don't know what happened after that but from what I heard they ended up losing
    via paralyse78

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