Employee asked by new owners to teach their replacement how to do their impossible job: 'This guy got [a] full year's worth of training in a week'

Advertisement
  • 01
    "Teach him how to do your job."
  • 02
    Posted by u/Edymnion "Teach him how to do your job", Okay Boss! 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.
  • 03
    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 things to be a better bridge between offices". 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."
  • 04
    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. 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
  • 05
    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 didn't know a for loop from a bubble sort. So, as we were instructed, we started walking him through our code. "Here's our X policy, its the most common one we use and is about 1,500 lines of code in it's base form..." "Didn't you guys say you had some default policies you worked from?"
  • 06
    "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.
  • 07
    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.
  • 08
    We ran that department for a good 5 years before the inevitable revolving door of upper management decided to bring in a new "easier to use" suite. 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.
  • 09
    lockinber Brilliant it just shows the management doesn't understand what was going on. 2.6k Reply Share ●●● Fredredphooey 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
  • 10
    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 that was already built into the program. She was all "but I thought you would want X and Y." Lady, we already have them. You can't spec out new software for us if you don't know what we have. Ridiculous 580 Reply Share
  • 11
    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. 660 Reply Share 165 ●●● zerj Oddly seems like Management handled the original situation somewhat perfectly, and in this one instance the cynicism was perhaps misplaced. Reply Share
  • 12
    StormBeyond Time 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? 392 Reply Share
  • 13
    Tikki_Taavi That makes me think, The old masters teach you everything You know, Not everything THEY know. lol Reply Share 180 Edymnion OP 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.
  • 14
    When we were bought, he had back surgery already scheduled. Long story short, he was highest salary and his job was "retired" while he was out. So he didn't get fired while on protected medical leave, his job just didn't exist anymore. Wasn't long before "Who knows how to fix this?" was followed by " <name here>." We were on a client facing call when that came up again and our higher up said out loud, with the client on the line, "I really wish we hadn't fired that guy..." Reply Share 237 ●●●

Tags

Scroll Down For The Next Article