Corporate doesn’t always understand the nitty gritty of day to day work.

That’s why upper management can sometimes make really bad decisions.

In today’s story, corporate decides to send a guy to a computer programming company they recently acquired.

The employees know this means they want him to teach this guy to do their jobs so they can fire all of them.

That’s not about to happen!

Let’s see what they do to keep their jobs.

“Teach him how to do your job”, Okay Boss!

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.”

This was bad news.

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.

It wasn’t going to be easy for the new guy.

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 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.

They showed him the code anyway.

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?”

“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…”

There was no way he was going to catch on quickly.

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.

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.

The guy was honest with them.

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.

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.

Well, it sounds like their fate was inevitable, but at least they were able to delay it for 5 years.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person makes a good point.

The liaison guy seemed like a good guy.

This person comments on the codebase.

Perhaps this is what the liaison guy told corporate.

Here’s a funny way of explaining how corporate thinks.

They knew what they were doing!

They always do.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.