Jack-Of-All Trades Automates Reports, Then Erases His Work When He Gets Fired, But Then The Executive Team Wants Him To Salvage It

Ashley Ashbee

5 days ago

Pexels/Reddit

When a company only sees costs and doesn’t see the value of those costs, the risks of cost-cutting go way up.

Read on to see why this worker wasn’t at fault for the self-destructive actions of the executives.

Delete everything you have ever built for us!

As a longtime nightshift worker, who often hanged out with the local IT folks, and demonstrated Tier 1 support skills (looking up error messages) and even Tier2 (willingness and ability to learn and improve) I was “promoted” to an honorary tech support role.

It was a win-win (win-lose?) scenario for the guys as they could chill at home while on call, in the meantime I resolved low level on-site issues and had something interesting (or at least different) to do in addition to my boring desk jockey job.

His next adventure ran less smoothly.

A few companies later, I had to manually create a lot of reports, work with a lot of data. I’m as lazy as it comes. If I have to do the same task twice I’m going to spend an unreasonable time (trying) to automate it.

The result of my laziness was a PowerBI dashboard hosted on SharePoint. Behind the scenes and the shiny charts there was a giant pain, as I had to solve issues with the tools I had access to.

It had a lot of moving parts, but I tried to keep it as organized as possible.

I had the code on GitHub in a private repository and written documentation for everything, all the other best practices. I always checked the final result for quality assurance before releasing it for use.

So, in addition to my standard role (which I performed “above expectations” according to my annual reviews) I was the local BI developer/data analyst/ad-hoc tech support. At every salary increase cycle I always had to ask for a salary at the top of the range of the role which I had on paper, citing the above reasons.

Which made what follows especially insulting.

The company always fought tooth and nail and it was always a painful and a bit humiliating experience. (Un)Fortunately after a few years they’ve decided that “Now that you’ve built these solutions, we don’t need you anymore, we only need to hire someone to maintain it. You are fired.”

According to my contract this would mean I’m still employed for another 60 days. I made sure to double-check everything, rewrite some of the documentation to be more clear, refactor the code, especially my early kludgy solutions, made backups on my team’s OneDrive, fixed as many issues I could, etc.

In short, I tried to make sure that everything goes smoothly when my replacement takes over. By the time my notice period was up they still couldn’t find anyone as they’ve been advertising a wonderful “3 in 1” package. Yep, my successor was supposed to do everything I was doing…

My last day was at the end of the month and I pushed out one more update under the watchful eye of my supervisor. As soon as they saw that everything has updated security came in and my boss said to delete everything from GitHub as it’s an external site and a security risk.

It looks like he could help!

I tried to explain that it’s tied to my corporate email and it would be best to keep it alive and transfer ownership to my successor, they wouldn’t budge and told me to delete it. Okay then, let’s nuke it from orbit.

I told them that there’s a local copy (duh) on my work laptop and also on OneDrive (not in my private folder) they said IT will take care of it. Apparently that meant a deep cleanse of my laptop without retaining any of the data (while the “she’s on maternity leave” woman’s laptop was still in locker after 4 years…), so the only remaining copy was in my former team’s shared OneDrive folder.

A month passed and my former boss called me asking for help. They still haven’t found a replacement unsurprisingly. Not wanting to burn any bridges and because I’m a exploitable idiot I told them sure, I’ll help, toss in a steak dinner voucher for two at a local mid-range restaurant and I’ll help.

They were dragging their feet, despite the fact that my ask was significantly lower in value than what the contractor rate would’ve been and I knew they could expense it anyway.

He had tried to save them from themselves, but alas…

After a day or two they gave in, I hopped on my bike, signed an NDA, got a laptop and asked a team member to add me to the Teams channel so I can start working (long live python -m pip install -r requirements.txt, or so I’ve thought).

As I started to poke around on OneDrive I couldn’t find my backup folder. After a while went to ask my former boss where did they move it, as I can’t find it anywhere.

“Oh, we deleted them, didn’t seem important. Were only a couple of files though, I’m sure you can easily do it again.”

Those “few files” where the result of hundreds of hours of experimentation, trying to figure out how the various systems work together and without documentation there was literally zero chance of recreating it in a short amount of time.

“Can’t you just restore from that online hub thing?” – Not really, as you specifically asked me to delete it despite my protests…

This is the most satisfying part. Oh well!

I left without getting my steak dinner. A few days later they’ve called me again asking me how much would it cost make a brand new dashboard. Apparently some corporate bigwigs overseas were using it for their C-level nonsense PowerPoint meetings (remember, it included global data) and were pretty ticked that the fancy charts are gone.

I may or may not have found a relatively recent local version of the git repo on my Raspberry, which I may or may not have used to do some of the number crunching as my old corporate laptop could barely handle anything (yep a RPi4 8GB outperformed it).

I ay or may not have forgotten to mention this obvious security breach and billed out my hours as I’ve been creating everything from scratch.

Here is what folks are talking about.

At least! The cheapest employers and clients are always the worst.