When a company you work for gets acquired, you have to expect that some things will change.

What would you do if the company adjusted the way your job works, which resulted in you being way overworked and underpaid?

That is what happened to the developer in this story, so he eventually stopped complaining and got a promotion.

Check it out.

“Just do your job and shut up!” Noooooo problem.

The software company I worked for got acquired.

Some people were let go, some were added, and some teams and functions were restructured.

Prior to acquisition, we had a “multiple hats” situation where you basically did whatever was in your capacity, teams played to each other’s strengths.

One person would generally take a client from the first demo right through the configuration, implementing, and training phases of the software.

Sounds like a great way to work.

Some of us had strengths in technical areas, others had a decade+ in the clients’ subject matter.

Clients would give us some feedback or wish lists.

We’d talk amongst the team about how the functionality could be added or changed, make a functional mock-up, and then bring that to the development team for polish and integration into the production code.

It worked wonderfully.

Like, 100% positive feedback and nothing broken when it went to production.

We had a good rapport with the Dev guys and some of us were able to write queries or code portions that would save them from having to ask a billion subject matter questions.

When we weren’t dedicated to a task, we’d handle support calls.

Clients would call up, receptionist learned who to pass things to based on clients and the nature of issues, and resolution was typically instantaneous unless the problem required research.

Clients loved that and had the understanding that if we couldn’t resolve their problem right away, it was because we needed to look into it.

After the acquisition, the parent company reorganized things into a much more rigid “you have one job” type of scenario.

The trouble was, with the people they let go, I was the singular remaining source of a lot of the capacities we provided.

It left me working with the Sales, Product Improvement/Concept, Product Evangelism, Implementation, Development, Data Conversion, and Support teams.

Initially, I didn’t mind.

Wasn’t any different than my previous role.

Things always start out nice, but they go downhill fast.

Things started nicely enough with the company CEO genuinely asking, “Would you mind helping X team with Y project?” and he’d pick up my travel bar tabs and toss me a day off here and there.

It was a fair exchange and he treated it as though I was doing him a favor.

But at some point all these other departments expected then demanded my time.

Instead of people asking when I could help them on a project, I would just find time blocks added to my schedule for various things.

A couple of times I was supposed to be chairing these meetings and having things prepared and no one even bothered to tell me.

Around this same time, I noticed a lot of recommendations I made when asked for input were being overturned by people in new roles who had no idea what they were talking about.

As in literally had no exposure to the subject matter and had never even seen the software, plus no programming/logic or database experience.

So, my input is demanded but also ignored.

And this was causing more demands on my time when things were broken or didn’t meet client expectation.

Plus, the new Dev team I was working with made every excuse not to act unless someone went and confirmed and fetched everything they needed.

There are only so many hours in the day.

The external demands on my time had increased and I had coincidentally hit a few walls with my actual job in that clients were unresponsive and couldn’t get me the data or access I needed to complete tasks.

But that didn’t stop my boss from demanding documentation and results and documentation about the results.

There was no such thing as “waiting”, it’s your duty to call and harass the powerless client until whatever third party involved enables whatever we need.

I was really unhappy in a job I had previously loved.

Every day was worse than the last.

And then I got my employee review.

It was top notch and yet I got the same “cost of living” raise as everyone else.

It particularly upset me that the Sales guys were getting commission on sales that I MADE and I was just shafted.

At the original company, effort above and beyond was WELL-rewarded.

I doubled my starting salary in a few years’ time for hard work.

Now, I was miserable, overdrawn, AND got nothing for it.

I was having daily arguments with my boss who was completely indifferent to all my commitments and refused to understand that I couldn’t compel third party companies to do my timely bidding to get client data or access.

Out of nowhere I get a call from the head of the Data Conversions department.

He says a few of his people have noticed some high-level solutions to Dev or data problems in the Teams chats “come out of some random guy from Implementations in no-time.”

Then he was talking to a preexisting client about converting a set of financial data from a legacy system I had converted some Building, Code, Fire, Planning, and Police data from and they asked if they could have me do it specifically because my conversion of their other data was “flawless.”

Also, I granted them some change requests on the way through to make their lives easier (simple changes to record type names for easier identification, clip leading spaces or extra zeroes so they could put reports in Excel…stuff like that).

That’s what happens when you do great work.

He said the client, “wouldn’t stop gushing” about me and he was floored to hear that I had done the whole thing myself where his team typically breaks the responsibilities between 5 or more people.

He offered me a position on the spot and I told him I was interested and I’d think about it.

He told me I could start doing some part time stuff with him a few hours a week if I wanted it that way.

Then he told me he “saw the situation I was dealing with” and said he’d “get the other departments off my plate.”

I liked him right away.

My current boss then interrupted our call seeing me talking to that guy on our in-house phone app and demanded to know what I was wasting my time on.

Then she proceeded to berate me about open orders and my lack of documentation about their lack of progress.

“You got time to chit chat with him but you can’t call a client.”

I tried to tell her for the millionth time about all the expectations from the other departments, the obligations they leave beyond their allotted timeframes, the inability I have to force other companies do things for us no matter how many times I tell the client.

She told me, “I’m done with your excuses. Just do your job and shut up.”

I called the Conversions head right back and asked how soon I could transfer to his Department full time.

That must have been a great feeling.

He said, “YESTERDAY, man, this is such good news! I was just talking to [Assistant Department Manager] and he got so excited when I said I think I got you part time! Take the rest of the day off, have a beer to celebrate, I’ll handle the transfer and we’ll see you in the morning.”

And that was that.

I did as my new boss commanded and had a beer to celebrate.

A wave of relief came over me after months of tension.

The following day I told the vampire departments and my previous boss in no uncertain terms that I was done helping them.

It went unacknowledged and they continued adding things to my calendar.

So I deleted them, did MY job, and shut up.

THINGS. GOT. UGLY.

I’m not super-talented or anything but I was literally the only person they had for a lot of things and things went to trash.

Most of it requires institutional knowledge I had spent years acquiring so they couldn’t even hire someone to do the things.

And rather than come ask me for help, people made demands and attacks!

And I got flat out belligerent about it.

They really don’t know that there was a problem?

In an email with the CEO cced, the Support manager asked why I “couldn’t be bothered” to help them anymore.

I said, “for the same reason you can’t ‘be bothered’ to clean the toilets or recable the building.

Not my job. [Previous Boss] told me to ‘just do my job and shut up.’ Take it up with her.”

The Sales/Evangelist guys tried to go over my head and asked my new boss if I could do some of their demos.

He said, “sure, if you come over here and do some of his conversions.”

Numbers tanked for the departments I was previously involved with.

Support in particular.

They went from a 2 hour avg resolution time to EIGHT DAYS.

Sales for my product line went down from 85% success to less than 25%(CEO reported that sales dropped over 60 percent from 85, don’t know the exact).

Dev and product went from 100% customer satisfaction to 60%.

Implementations has been completely unable to install certain components which led to at least one contract cancellation and demand for a refund.

And they will act surprised about the drop in numbers.

And in true storybook fashion, my previous boss’s boss, the one who gave me my previous employee review and who is a childhood friend of the CEO, told me privately that the CEO noticed, “all the departments I stopped working for suddenly saw their worst numbers in company history…weird.”

He also asked, “anything in particular that pushed the guy over the edge?”

Previous boss’s boss explained that I was upset about the review/raise having nothing to do with merit or effort, the demand from other departments, unrealistic and impossible expectations, and the idiotic requirement for documentation.

So, this year and going forward there are two criteria for yearly raises.

Individual output, and department output.

No raises for people with negative performance numbers.

Upon that announcement, some department heads up and quit and others changed positions internally.

At least his new department will appreciate this kind of work.

Meanwhile, I have written a few utilities for my team that have saved THOUSANDS of hours of manual work.

Our numbers are SOARING where they were previously up and down and my new boss is “driving the whole bus full of our smiling faces all the way to the bank.”

Finally, the company is realizing just how valuable this guy is.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think of this story.

This is a huge warning sign.

Companies love to get more work out of people without paying them.

Absolutely, always know your worth.

It is dangerous when one person is holding everything together.

Yup, the boss sounds like a great manager.

They only realized his value after it was to late.

Why is this such a common tale?

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.