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When a company you work for gets bought out, you have to expect that some things will change, and it isn’t always for the better.
What would you do if your new supervisor at the company had specific ways of doing things that were inefficient and wrong according to industry standards, but he demanded that you follow them anyway?
That is what happened to the developer in this story, so he asked to be moved to another team, and he was able to watch that supervisor fall behind and fail to meet every deadline along the way. Now, he thinks management is going to ask him to step in to help fix the problem.
While what he did definitely seems risky, it looks like it is going to work out in the end. Read through all the details below and see if you handled it properly.
My new supervisor yelled at me in front of everyone in a meeting, took me off a task that I was the only expert on, and now people are getting fired, the business is demanding immediate results, and none of it affects me
The company I worked for 6 years got bought last year by a massive company. Our division merged with another.
It is scary when your company gets bought out.
They’re absorbing all our data. I developed a large chunk of the platform and was the sole maintainer, still am the sole maintainer, since 2019.
In January we started merging the data. I was gung-ho. Happy to be on a new team with what seemed like friendly people. I came from a team that worked famously well together.
It is not surprising that the new company wants to do things a certain way.
I was only on the merge for a few weeks. I started writing code. The most senior developer on the new team told me that I was doing it wrong and how he preferred I do it.
I don’t want to sound mean, but this entire team is full of programmers who invented their own solutions to everything and never took the time to learn the proper ways.
This would be a very difficult situation.
They constantly ignore common programming practices and scholarly resources in favour of doing their own invented, fragile solutions. So they never learnt the right way.
Despite this lack of knowledge, they think they are gods of programming.
At the end of the day, the ‘right’ way is the way that your manager wants it.
So, I argued about the right way to complete the task. I pointed out that the entire application had been written this way and that importing the data any other way would take magnitudes of effort longer. Eventually I convinced the lead programmer, but the supervisor lost his mind.
I mentioned in a meeting that I was still working along doing it the right way and he snapped at me and said we’re not doing it that way. Yelling at me in front of everyone.
Honestly, this guy seems like he is playing with fire.
Later that day he took me into a meeting and told me that he was taking me off the data migration. I think he thought I was going to be upset. I wasn’t. I was happy. I didn’t want to do this in an insufferably difficult way.
Word got up to our manager and he pulled me into a meeting and told me that the supervisor had no authority to reassign work. I told him, all the same, I’d prefer not to be put back on this.
That supervisor and his programming team are not going to look good.
And I’m the only one who has some of the answers the need. They’ve had to take time from our database admin who is extremely busy handling day-to-day requests for the executive teams. He’s so busy he has to work on his vacations.
Now for half a year they’ve been fumbling around. The business told them last month that they wanted it done RIGHT NOW. They said, best we can do is early next year. That won’t happen either.
The company is really shooting itself in the foot here.
They have endless meetings, often in front of me, about how to handle the 100s of millions of rows, and I’m the only one that has the answers and I say nothing. I do not want to be involved with this toxic crap.
Three weeks ago, they fired 5 people from our team. Some of those people are some of the only people who have domain knowledge about the old company’s products. Now they just fired three more developers.
If he plays this right, he could be seen as the hero of the department.
They are in a world of hurt. I’m guessing that eventually they’re going to ask for my help. I don’t know what I’m going to say.
For now, there’s so little pressure on me to do anything. I pick up tickets off the backlog and finish them at a leisurely pace while chaos unfolds around me.
He is in a great situation, though it does look like he burned some bridges, so he does need to be careful.
Read on to see what the people in the comments think about this story.
He really should be looking for a new job, just in case.
This would buy him some time.
Always leverage any advantage that you have.
It is possible that he could make a lot of money in this situation.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a researcher who complained about being excluded from a trip only to watch the university cancel the whole thing.
His job isn’t as secure as he seems to think it is.
He is playing with fire, but it looks like he might win in the end. Companies, however, often don’t like workers who act like this, so I don’t think he should consider his job safe.
They might have him fix some problems and then fire him anyway. If he is willing to stand up to his supervisor once, he will almost certainly do it again.