Software giant fires last developer capable of servicing $25M contract in short-sighted cost-cutting measure, he successfully negotiates $1M/yr consulting fees:'Never fire the last legacy knowledge guy...'
It's been increasingly common for companies, driven by the pursuit of continuous exponential profit, to cut costs in areas that seem expensive on paper but are really essential to basic operations that would be far more expensive were they to go sideways. Spurned on by the promise of larger bonuses, executives and their fellow bean counters will cut and cut until they finally make one incision near-comical disaster.
Of course, although it seems that this behavior has been prevalent in recent memory, as in this story that this worker shared from earlier days of their career…
This employee worked in the contracts department of a major software company, which they refer to as "MidSoft Inc." Continual foolish decisions that thought of nothing but the bottom line and cost-cutting measures, driven by the ravenous interests of private equity investors, reduced the company's senior development team from 12 to one soldier, "Sam." While the ledger might have looked better for a time, the immeasurable loss of institutional knowledge and literal lifetimes of experience would go unaccounted for.
That was until Sam was also sent packing right before the company acquired a major new contract. However, when they started looking around, wondering who was able to handle the integration necessary for the deal, soon the realization dawned that Sam had been the last remaining developer with the necessary expertise for this particular and essential task. What unfolded was quite predictable: they needed Sam back, and Sam was going to make them pay… Teaching them a lesson in hubris—in the most corporate sense.
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Image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Image is for illustration only and subjects are models.
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