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Management decisions can become costly when experienced employees are ignored.

The following story is about an employee involved in a phone system decommissioning project of 3,800 phone numbers.

He learned that 200 of these numbers were vanity phone numbers that upper management used.

Engineering repeatedly warned management about the changes, but higher executives demanded that everyone comply without questioning their decisions.

So they did… and the consequences became impossible for upper management to ignore.

Uh oh! If only they had listened, right? Let’s take a closer look!

Follow all managerial orders on Phone System decom with no questions asked

This happened in 2024.

I was working on a phone system decommissioning project involving 3,800 phone numbers.

Two hundred of them were vanity numbers.

Upper management was running the project.

This employee and his colleagues were instructed to comply without question.

They quickly got into the mindset of not taking well-thought-out and reasoned feedback from the nerd bench.

It got to the point of, “Do what you are told. We aren’t interested in what you have to say.”

The vanity numbers were for the C-level suite, regional VPs, and high-earning salespeople.

We had the meeting notes strongly rebuking engineering for pushing back on changes.

We were told to simply “comply.”

AT&T disconnected all 3,800 numbers, including the 200 vanity numbers.

An AT&T service disconnect went out for 3,800 numbers, including 200 vanity numbers.

It took 30 days for AT&T, and then crap really hit the fan.

It was epic to be on a 67-person meeting.

Where our service delivery manager showed the CEO, CIO, CFO, CMO, and seriously annoyed salespeople the upper management directive to simply “follow all directives and ask no questions.”

The way upper management managed people changed eventually.

People were shown the door right after.

Upper management changed significantly for the better.

No one on the nerd bench took any offers of moving into either SDM or PM roles.

This is a great example of why companies should listen to the people who actually understand the systems they are changing.

The meeting notes demanding that engineering stop pushing back made the eventual fallout especially satisfying.

I hope company bosses and managers learn something from what OP shared here.

Let’s check out the comments of other people on this story.

The outcome was delicious, says this one.

This user shares their personal thoughts.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employer who has an unexpectedly hard time retrieving a company vehicle from a fired employee.

Here’s an idea from this one.

Finally, this story is opaque, says this one.

“Just do what you’re told” rarely ends well in the workplace.