New CFO fires head IT guy and replaces him with incompetent nephew, company's system malfunctions sooner thereafter: 'Pam was gone within a month'

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Dec 18, 2025 2:00 PM EST

This new CFO's "groundbreaking" vision for the company seemed to involve hiring more friends and family than actually instituting real change.

Some folks are so ill-equipped at holding positions of influence that you should be able to identify them from a mile away. Unfortunately, the head honchos at this company instilled far too much trust in the new CFO, which only backfired for many of the current and soon-to-be former employees there despite the years of loyalty they gave to the business.

This story was shared by the now former IT manager, who once led a department that was considered to be a well-oiled machine by everyone at the company. Well, everyone, that is, with the exception of the new boss. She shrunk this manager's budget until he could basically do nothing with it. On top of that, practically everyone within his department was included in a round of layoffs. Before he knew it, that well-oiled machine dwindled into a department of one.

At this point, the IT manager knew that his time left at the company was like a ticking clock. When the CFO, Pam, hired her nephew to work below the author, he knew exactly what was coming. He immediately understood that the core idea behind this power move was to have the author train the nephew in all thing IT until he was comfortable enough to replace the author. The problem was that this nephew knew next to nothing…

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  • Once again, it just goes to show that not only was Pam fully in over her head when it came to the friend and family she hired at the company, which included three of her bridesmaids, but it also demonstrates the complete lack of foresight from the people who felt she was the right candidate to lead the company through a difficult financial time. Now, she's running the company into the ground with one incompetent employee after another at the helm of each department.

  • "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
    via red23011
  • 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
    via red23011
  • have to pay for licensing to keep our firewall updated, it's working just fine now. I went from having an annual budget to a "wish list" which she would deny everything I asked for.
    via red23011
  • 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 red23011
  • 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
    via red23011
  • 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 that she fired. I knew I was on borrowed time.
    via red23011
  • 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
    via red23011
  • 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 him in since my boss was lying and was told "this is not about him this is about you" (remember kids, HR
    via red23011
  • is there to protect the business, not do what is right or legal in some cases). Needless to say I knew my days were numbered.
    via red23011
  • 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
    via red23011
  • 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.
    via red23011
  • So I knew what had to be done. The inventory, billing and shipping and receiving were all run by scripts that I created on the server. They were all run using the domain admin account.
    via red23011
  • An adult man walks out of an office building with a cardboard box of his personal items.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • 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
    via red23011
  • 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 the admin password and
    via red23011
  • deleting his local account the second he is no longer "consulting" with us to him. I showed him a few things (but nothing in regards to what really made the company run) that day. There wasn't enough time in a year to bring this kid up to speed on how to run that place due to his complete ignorance of IT.
    via red23011
  • 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
    via red23011
  • 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
    via red23011
  • and if she wanted my services I was going to charge her $200 per hour with a 250 hour minimum. At that point she told me that she was going to call the police and have me arrested for what I did if I didn't come in and fix everything.
    via red23011
  • 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,
    via red23011
  • please call the police and let me know what they said". She started cursing at me and hung up the phone.
    via red23011
  • 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 de d in the water for
    via red23011
  • 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 red23011
  • 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 red23011

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Tags

replacement CFO fired layoffs petty revenge IT guy Horrible Bosses nepo baby toxic-work-environment
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