'Ruin a department I helped create? Fine': New manager fires workers so she can hire her friends

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Jan 28, 2024 11:00 AM EST

It couldn't be clearer that this manager had zero idea what she was doing. At least that's what her employee, u/DangerPaladin55, explains in their story about the department they ran a few decades ago. 

Workplaces are ever-changing. At corporations with hundreds of employees, workers are hired and fired each day. Turnover is much more noticeable at small companies, though. Hiring the right person can make a huge difference. Having someone who gets along well with everyone can change the workplace. Adding a boss who really listens to their employees and empowers them can also be a total game-changer. The power of people who really care about their work is a force to be reckoned with.

But, as you probably know if you've ever worked in an office, change isn't always positive in nature. Some people come along and bring drama to the workplace (lunch thieves, we're talking about you!). Other times, it's a personality clash that takes a few months to overcome. 

This consulting company was left in ruins after hiring a few bad managers in a row. The OP writes that their director chose to hire a friend who was "horrifically underqualified," with a fake resume. Oh, and not to mention that this woman knew quite literally nothing about her field. It was a disaster in the making, and you can read all about it below. After that, this student was asked to turn on their camera on a Zoom call at an inopportune time, so they maliciously complied with their school's wishes. 

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  • 01
    Cheezburger Image 9871600640
    via Andrew Neel on Unsplash
  • 02
    Ruin a department I helped create? Fine. Whatever. XL This goes back decades. I'm almost over it. (not really) I joined a company that was set up as a consultancy to a large corporation to repair their relationship amongst the local community that they were part of. I was in the IT division - I was part of a team of five people who installed computers in local businesses and it ran a billing package for these businesses. We trained their staff and supported everything. This was all done as a low
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 03
    This went fine for about eight years until the top guy in the company left to join the corporation and a new guy took his place as director. The new guy, who wasn't really a problem, was more of a paper manager. A genius at it really - but he left all personnel issues to the department managers. However, he didn't along with the IT manager and she finally resigned after months of tense standoffs over various policy issues.
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 04
    Now, I was the most experienced staffer and I might've had a chance to get her job, but the office grapevine said the director had already secretly selected someone himself. This was surprising as we'd merged with the large corporation and all hiring was required to go through human resources. But he wanted to be able to replace our manager instantly so he'd been grooming the replacement so the moment she resigned (in a fit of anger during a meeting) he had her replaced right away.
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 05
    Remember how I said the director wasn't good at personnel? He wasn't good at hiring and interviewing either. The new IT manager was horrifically unqualified. Her resume was invented from top to bottom. She had no management experience and as we discovered - she knew nothing about IT.
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 06
    How much nothing? She didn't understand the difference between Macs and PCs. She made a major purchase of new office software for the entire office. Mac office software. We ran MS-DOS on PCs at the time. Although Windows 95 had come out a few years earlier - we were locked into IBM PCs w/DOS based applications on a contract with IBM. Her resume boasted a deep programming background, but she didn't know what a subroutine was. It simply got worse and worse.
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 07
    Over the next few years, she deliberately drove out all experienced staff. She would require highly granular timekeeping for all of IT, tracking who called in for support, when we spent support at a business or the corporation, even though there was ZERO use for this as there wasn't even internal tracking for who used what. When we complied, including tracking the time to track the time, and her increasingly complex needs for details started to take up to an hour each day - the director ended it
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 08
    She also routinely took personal credit for projects done by her department with no acknowledgment of the actual individual who performed the work. One by one my coworkers left to other jobs - and in one case she framed one guy for a failure she caused and got permission to fire him. She replaced everyone with people she had known at previous jobs - regardless of their backgrounds and job skills. A Cobol programmer replaced one of our training and support people. He was a great guy and miserable
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 09
    training manuals. Our training materials were all provided under our contract. I never figured out what she did aside from acting occasionally as a personal secretary. Which made no sense since we had a secretarial pool. And she got paid three times what they got paid. As for me - my wife and I had had our first child around this time and I simply didn't care about issues of pride anymore. I was careful to CYA myself because all I wanted to do was bring home a paycheck for my family. The IT mana
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 10
    Anyone who has done customer/computer support knows that you will get customers you just cannot make happy. Usually just a personality conflict. In the past, we simply traded the call off to another member of IT staff and that would often do the trick. My manager tried to inflate all of these to fireable offenses. To my face, she would promise to have my back (as the original IT manager always did - she LOVED her staff and would take a bullet for us). Behind the scenes, she tried to build a case
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 11
    The first time I realized this was a meeting between the director, one of our business consultants, my manager and myself. I'd been given a heads up by the business consultant and when I walked into the meeting I had all my notes on my supposed failures. She made her pitch to the director, but the business consultant and I destroyed her and demonstrated to the director she was inventing things. She was humiliated and I remained unscathed. The second time, an assistant manager at one of the busin
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 12
    to set up a system at home to call into his office to get onto the network. Which, back then, was a bigger deal than it is today. However, I'd actually done this for another business - but not this one. He'd made some random guesses as to what he needed and wasted $5000 (because it was all IBM hardware/software). He blamed me. Again, the IT manager told me she'd reviewed my notes and knew I was blameless. I wasn't stupid enough to believe her again. I got the business consultant to go to the hea
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 13
    the entire staff there supported my version of events. Of course, my manager once again had tried to escalate this to a major failure. Remember those detailed notes/timekeeping she had wanted? Well, even though the ridiculous depth of them was gone, I still kept them. She called another meeting, this time inviting senior management from the corporation as well. It was another embarrassing moment for her. I refuted all the claims made by her and the assistant manager of the business and with docu
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 14
    to apologize for his assistant manager and to praise my work. My manager looked like the idiot she was. All because I continued to comply with the task/timekeeping she originally instituted to drive the old staff out. Now - she kept her job (mainly because our director would have to explain why he hired someone so clearly unqualified and he couldn't because he violated HR policy to do so). But I know you readers out there want to hear some juicy revenge as well. That weekend following that meeti
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 15
    replacement and a restore from a tape backup. I came in Monday. Before I could leave to fix the client she called me into her office. She offered me a three-month severance package. Full pay, benefits, etc. They only offered these to management types normally. She hated me and wanted me gone. I told her I would GLADLY accept it - but didn't she want this client fixed? It was kind of a big deal. She said NO. While I signed the legal paperwork she rambled idiotically about my job performance, etc,
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 16
    I packed up my office, said goodbye to my friends (many of whom were shocked and crying over this - and I can't deny I was a little wet around the eyes too). I told them it wasn't a problem. And you know what? It wasn't a problem. I'd been building my own software company on the nights and weekends for years (with full permission of my original manager). I walked out of there was three months of free salary into my own company which was now paying me more than my old salary now that I could go f
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 17
    As for my manager? They took over TWO MONTHS to figure out how to replace and restore that hard drive to the business that had the lightning strike. I wasn't kidding about her hiring the wrong people for our jobs. That business likely bad mouthed them because they barely retained 25-30% of the businesses as they lost them one by one over the next few years. (my friends kept me up- to-date until, they too, left)
    via u/DangerPaladin55
  • 18
    TL;DR - new manager doesn't know IT, runs out existing staff to hire friends who aren't qualified, finally it's down to me and I comply and comply as it ruins the department under her. I walk w/a nice severance package into my own company.
    via u/DangerPaladin55

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