'You specifically asked me to delete it despite my protests': Company stranded after firing reluctant developer and telling them to delete everything they made

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    Hand - H For - 0434 "Delete everything you have ever built for us!" www
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    Font - Posted by u/herites Delete everything you have ever built for us! Long I'm not in tech support, in fact my none of my job descriptions ever included anything remotely resembling tech support. Yet, life finds a way... As a longtime nightshift worker, who often hanged out with the local IT folks, and demonstrated Tier1 support skills (looking up error messages) and even Tier2 (willingness and ability to learn and improve) I was "promoted" to an honorary tech support role. It was a win- win
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    Font - The following story is not related to any of the above. Plugging VGA cables into desk stations to fix "broken computers" is not a story, it's business as usual. A few companies later, when the buzzwords "business intelligence", "data analysis", "data driven decisions", etc. started to pop up on the corporate bullshit bingo I was already involved in these things at my current workplace. As usual, my job description had nothing to do with it, but I had to manually create a lot of reports, w
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    Font - The result of my laziness was a PowerBI dashboard hosted on SharePoint. Behind the scenes and the shiny charts there was a giant clusterf, as I had to solve issues with the tools I had access to. Python calling SAP GUI scripts to run custom queries, then reading and transforming the data from the resulting exported Excel files just to spit it out again as a new and improved (tm) spreadsheet, PowerShell to manage SharePoint then some AutoHotkey and PowerAutomate to maximize the chaos.
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    Font - It had a lot of moving parts, tried to do way too much (but had CLASSES!!!). It was also a horrible mess, but I tried to keep it as organized as possible. Code on GitHub in a private repo, regular and conventional commits, issue tracking, (well?) written documentation for everything, all the other best practices. My team's standard reporting tasks, which were taking usually an entire week at the end of each month condensed down to a few hours, which in theory could've been less if I had t
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    Font - So, in addition to my standard role (which I performed "above expectations" according to my annual reviews) I was the local BI developer/data analyst/ad-hoc tech support. At every salary increase cycle I always had to ask for a salary at the top of the range of the role which I had on paper, citing the above reasons. The company always fought tooth and nail and it was always a painful and a bit humiliating experience. (Un)Fortunately after a few years they've decided that "Now that you've
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    Font - My last day was at the end of the month and I pushed out one more update under the watchful eye of my supervisor. As soon as they saw that everything has updated security came in and my boss said to delete everything from GitHub as it's an external site and a security risk. I tried to explain that it's tied to my corporate email and it would be best to keep it alive and transfer ownership to my successor, they wouldn't budge and told me to delete it. Okay then, let's nuke it from orbit. T
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    Font - A month passed and my former boss called me asking for help. They still haven't found a replacement unsurprisingly. Not wanting to burn any bridges and because I'm a exploitable idiot I told them sure, I'll help, toss in a steak dinner voucher for two at a local mid-range restaurant and I'll help. They were dragging their feet, despite the fact that my ask was significantly lower in value than what the contractor rate would've been and I knew they could expense it anyway. After a day or t
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    Font - As I started to poke around on OneDrive I couldn't find my backup folder. After a while went to ask my former boss where did they move it, as I can't find it anywhere. "Oh, we deleted them, didn't seem important. Were only a couple of files though, I'm sure you can easily do it again". Those "few files" where the result of hundreds of hours of experimentation, trying to figure out how the various systems work together, just the pandas part was a couple hundred lines of unfig data, and wit
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    Font - "Can't you just restore from that online hub thing?" - Not really, as you specifically asked me to delete it despite my protests... I left without getting my steak dinner. A few days later they've called me again asking me how much would it cost make a brand new dashboard. Apparently some corporate bigwigs overseas were using it for their C-level bullshit PowerPoint meetings (remember, it included global data) and were pretty pissed that the fancy charts are gone.
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    Font - I may or may not have found a relatively recent local version of the git repo on my raspberry, which I may or may not have used to do some of the number crunching as my old shitty corporate laptop could barely handle anything (yep a RPi4 8GB outperformed it). May or may not have forgotten to mention this obvious security breach and billed out my hours as I've been creating everything from scratch. TLDR: "You are no longer needed" makes shiny charts go away, which could've been fixed with
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    Font - Tophertanium When you see the writing on the walls, make contingency plans, and can stick it to the corporation, it's great. When you luck into their incompetence and then can milk them with consulting fees, it's beautiful. I shouldn't feel this happy at work and yet here I am. Congrats on the amazing work! And the self learning! 1.2k [deleted] I really wanted to updoot you, but it's at 404 104 Share 45 Share Tophertanium Give it a minute. Then you can upvote. Thank you! Share
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    Font - skelleton_exo 1 A little after I left my old company, they called me and need some information that I did not remember. I searched on my machines at home, and found that I still had my old company laptop backups on my old unused windows home server (I was remote so all my work was on my laptop and the company was to cheap to pay for backups.). Anyway I found documentation on what they were looking for and sent it out. A few weeks later I received a cease and desist order for storing the c
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    Font - They were willing to pay everything I asked immediately if I agreed to answer questions for one more year. The alternative was that they would drag the law suit out, so I agreed. A month or so after they called and this happened: Old boss: Remember how you set up the wireless controller and firewall customer x? me: yes Old boss: Give me the password! me: I don't remember, buts in the keepass from my old files. Old boss: Oh we deleted your laptop when your replacement started. Please check
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    Font - They had an issue with an application I wrote for one of our customers. I was the only one who really worked on it. And the other guy who worked with the same application framework, has also left the company a good while ago. They never saw the need of actually training anybody on it despite still "supporting" it. Anyway when I called him back this happened: Me: so what are you going to pay me for doing that. Old boss: Oh remember we have an agreement that you still help out. Me. That was
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    Font - Seicair You billed out a few hundred hours? I hope at a minimum of $50/hr 3X your previous hourly as consulting rate. Edit because I have no idea what number to put. 255 Share
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    Font - herites OP It's recent enough that I'm keeping lips tight on the exact amount of work required, it was obviously fluffed up (quite) a bit, but it was still a lot of work as I didn't have any of the code from the last 60 days of my employment and there was a lot of work done during that time. At some level it was even a bit of fun testing whether I can do better this time. I also have a new adventure bike coming next January/February (hopefully), brand new Alpinestars gear for my wife and
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    Font - Weak_Jeweler3077 Text heavy, but know this, fellow Redditor, I. Read. Every. Word. Simply due to the enjoyment you managed to convey in every paragraph. Have a victory sip, and enjoy the many hours of work you're going to have to put in (writing up your billables) 763 Share Giklab Too Experienced to Reboot At first, only the first paragraph and the line after it loaded for me, which made this comment extremely funny. 75 Share
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    Font - Decision-Dismal I read every comment here and I just can't wrap my head around why they (management) would either fire you and/or treat you like that. What is wrong with them?!?! 137 herites OP Share Apparently a high performing employee who's always pushing for the maximum realistic paygrade makes manglement look bad or something along those lines. Paying a lot more to a contractor to unfuck things, even if the contractor is the same guy they've gotten rid of is okay. 202 Share
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    Font - kagato87 Careful: I'm as lazy as it comes, if I have to do the same task twice I'm going to spend an unreasonable time (trying) to automate it. This is one of the greatest marks of sysadmin/engi potential. You might end up doing stuff like this again. ;) Also, well done. I hope you billed them at a contract rate, not your old hourly. 78 Share herites OP I billed them between "fy you" and "I still want to work in this industry, possibly even for this company later". As I used to responsibl
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    Font - TheFiredrake42. Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy people trying to find easier ways to do things. 53 Share Drim498 I plugged the wireless USB adapter into the etherne... Supposedly Bill Gates once said that if he had a hard job that needed done, he always gave it to the lazy person, because they'll find the easiest way to do it. 16 Share
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    Font - o StevenXSG Next time have your own git repo and don't tell them about it (keeping their version tied to the corporate one). Mostly for your own future reference and not for tydying up when the boss doesn't know what they are on about hopefully. 116 Share herites OP I do have my own github for private projects but I also always have one tied to my corporate email (legal CYA). The code is usually so specialized anyway that there's no point in forking it. At the core, it's just data cleansi
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    Font - CzLittle I'm as lazy as it comes, if I have to do the same task twice I'm going to spend an unreasonable time (trying) to automate it. If you like playing video games, you should look into Factorio, you might enjoy it. 25 Share ... herites OP I have over thousand hours in it. The factory must grow! 36 If you like Factorio, check out Dyson sphere program, modding scene is non-existent compared to Factorio but the gameplay is quite good, I really enjoyed the vertical possibilities (multi le

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