'Don't fire me so you can hire your nephew': IT guy forced to train unqualified nepo baby to replace him, nephew tanks the company, boss gets fired

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Dec 8, 2023 2:00 PM EST

If you feel taken for granted more than anyone else you know, you're probably the parent of a teenager or you work in IT. Even worse, you might be both. Now, I have never worked at a company big enough to have an official IT person, but I know how grateful my coworkers and I would be if we did. One has to wonder where this lack of proper gratitude comes from considering how lost we would be without the technologically competent folks in our lives and especially in our workplace environments. 

Not only should this story serve as a reminder to thank the IT guy if you have one, but let this story also serve as a glaring reminder that there are some positions that nepo babies should never be considered for in the workplace. Nepo babies, as we know all too well at this point, are a rare species that exist in our universe whether we like it or not. What employers have to consider is where to place them (if they have to place them somewhere) so that the potential damage to the company and its employees is minimal. 

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  • 01
    "Just so we're clear, you fired me..."
    via Onur Binay

  • This thread was posted to Reddit's r/ProRevenge subreddit by u/red23011, who was the only person in the IT department after massive layoffs. Of course, the dire economic situation that the company found itself in did not stop OP's boss from trying to hire her completely unqualified nephew to eventually replace OP despite zero IT experience. Keep scrolling below to see how OP got some professional IT-powered payback. For more stories like this, here is one about a manager who gave their highest-performing employee a difficult time. 

  • 02
    Don't fire me so you can hire your nephew This happened several years ago. I was working for a small medical supply company as the IT manager. Business was bad and eventually the IT department had to downsize to just me. During this time they brought in a new CFO that I had to report directly to. Let's call her Pam. Pam had zero knowledge of IT and how things worked. Her motto was if it ain't broke don't fix it. PC/server lifecycles didn't exist. We don't have to pay for licensing to keep our fi
    via u/red23011
  • 03
    The couple that owned the company were real pieces of too. One time we had a quarterly meeting and people were asking about how secure their jobs were.
    via u/red23011
  • 04
    The owners said that nobody was off and that our jobs were all secure. This was at 5:00 pm on a Wednesday. The very next morning at 9:00 they laid off 6 people. At noon one of the owners showed up to show off the Escalade that he had just purchased that morning. During the first six months that Pam was there she started firing everyone that worked for the old CFO and replaced them with her friends and family. Three of her bridesmaids from her wedding a few years prior got hired to replace those
    via u/red23011
  • 05
    After she had been there for 9 months I was the only one left out of what was about a dozen people that worked for the old CFO. I knew my time was running out. I had been looking for work but the 2009 crash just happened and the job market in my area went south quickly. Sure enough she called me into HR and blindsided me with an entirely trumped up charge that she claimed happened the day before. I was working with the VP of sales on a project that entire day so I had a witness. I asked to bring
    via u/red23011
  • 06
    The next morning I get introduced to an IT expert who just happens to be Pam's 21 year-old nephew. He was to shadow me and evaluate everything that I did to see if we could streamline any processes. In other words, they wanted me to train him to do my job. I quickly learned that this kid had absolutely no knowledge of IT. He's the kid people think is an IT expert because he can hook up a play station to a TV. He didn't even know how to join a PC to a domain. So I knew what had to be done. The in
    via u/red23011
  • 07
    I raised quite a fuss about giving him the domain admin account in front of Pam and him. I then loudly proclaimed that I was going to change the password to it since you can't have people who don't work for the company to have admin access to our network. I was overruled and was told to give it to him. I complied but I also showed him multiple times how to change passwords on the domain. I even had him write it down to make sure that he could do it. I really stressed the importance of changing t
    via u/red23011
  • 08
    I come into work the next day and sure enough I was let go because her nephew had found "my skills lacking in many areas". I collect my last paycheck and head home. The next morning I get a call from the CFO and owners. Apparently her nephew wasn't quite up to speed on everything we did there and she was graciously offering to pay me my regular salary to come in as a consultant and get her nephew up to speed on the IT infrastructure. I told her that I was now an independent contractor and if she
    via u/red23011
  • 09
    My response was "Just so we're clear, you fired me, replaced me with a completely unqualified idiot and now you're threatening to call the cops on me if I don't come in and fix what he did? I'll hold, please call the police and let me know what they said". She started cursing at me and hung up the phone.
    via u/red23011
  • 10
    Turns out her nephew did actually learn something from me, he changed the admin password after I had left. The one that ran all the scripts for inventory, billing, shipping and ordering. According to some of my coworkers, the place was dead in the water for several days until they could get a real consultant in to go through the documentation that I had created and fix the issue. The nephew was immediately fired and Pam was gone within a month.
    via u/red23011
  • 11
    TLDR: Don't try to replace me with your idiot nephew that isn't smart enough to not bring your entire business to a screeching halt.
    via u/red23011
  • 12
    [deleted] Hmm, $200/hr that is fairly common... 250 min. hours... Ah, I like it! $50k min. sounds awesome. 4.1k Reply Share
    via u/red23011
  • 13
    EchoGecko795. You gave the nephew enough rope to hang himself but not you to. Good job. 2.9k Reply Share
    via u/red23011
  • 14
    TechnoTadhg ULPT: When creating scripts for a business, make sure you're a vital part of them working. This makes you a whole lot more expensive to replace 1.1k ↓ Reply Share
    via u/red23011
  • 15
    red23011 OP. To be fair, everything documented. was She was in a big rush to push me out the door and her nephew was just too stupid to know how to locate the scripts, let alone edit them. It would have taken me a couple of minutes to edit the scripts and get everything running again. I imagine that the consultant that they brought in to unfuck the situation figured out what happened pretty quickly if they were only partly competent. 940 Reply Share
    via u/red23011
  • 16
    patico_cr Overstimating yourself can lead to disastrous problems. My family owns a small company started by ma late father 27 years ago. When the company started, everything was done by hand: invoices, credit control, salaries, etc...
    via u/red23011
  • 17
    Since I was the technological son, I started pushing towards some kind of automation using a programmable calculator to ease and speed up some tedious process. It came down from 3 hours per page, to perhaps 30 minutes.
    via u/red23011
  • 18
    After 5 or so years, I pushed again to buy a software to keep control of credit sales. Not sure how you call that in English, but it's when you sell today and collect payment in a month, for example. Well, the software was bougth and installed. Quite a buggy stuff, but functional at the core. However, once I tried to fix something and ended up erasing all the data. It was backed up in some floppy discs that decided to die on me that day.
    via u/red23011
  • 19
    Since no one on my family knew jack of computers, I went unscarred and convinced them that is was a software error. It had failed several times before and the seller had to visit us many times. I was not questioned at all.
    via u/red23011
  • 20
    Even the software developer accepted the fault and told us the backup routine inside the program was faulty. It was a DOS program so the backup routine consisted on copying everything in a sub directory, then run the BACKUP command on that subdirectory and finally erase the subdirectory contents. Weird as He assumed he had not created that subdirectory during installatiom and the program glitched and erased the main directory. That, or he tried to save my skin putting the blame on him.
    via u/red23011
  • 21
    TL;DR. I up big time thinking I knew was I was doing. 736 Reply Share
    via u/red23011
  • 22
    penkster. This was brilliantly executed. You stayed in control, saw all the warning signs, covered your tracks (WHAT? you wrote DOCUMENTATION? That you could show a REAL consultant? that's crazy talk!) - and in the end, got PAM fired. Hot IT's new patron saint. 540 man, you are Reply Share
    via u/red23011
  • 23
    AR F-The-NWO Man My love for you IT guys just grows as I read this sub, and If I ever start an company with an IT department, you guys will have all my respect and ears, great story bro <3 169 Reply Share
    via u/red23011

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pro revenge karens workplace-stories work stories toxic-workplace revenge work Horrible Bosses reddit thread Reddit company karen nepo baby toxic-work-environment
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