Staff Were Told To Destroy Every File From The Old Billing System — And It’s Making Them Uneasy
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Replacing outdated software requires patience, planning, and someone who understands how the old system actually works. Management’s shortcut was eliminating the entire team that had maintained its custom software for decades.
Executives then ordered every manual and digital record destroyed before their replacement system was remotely ready.
Find out what went down next.
Delete the Legacy Knowledge department? Okay.
A former employer has decided to shoot themselves in the foot with a bazooka. I thought I’d share it here so you can laugh at them too.
In a nutshell, the business built it’s own in-house software which is designed to cover all aspects of the business.
From invoicing, tracking stock, creating reports, semi-automating direct debit billing, and virtually everything else; a thousand “sub-areas”.
As such, the business ended up with three “IT departments”.
One was more hardware issues & basic IT issues, there was the “medium” IT department who could fix small issues within specific sub-areas of the software, and the “Legacy” team who worked on the rawest base level of the software and had kept it functioning for over 20 years.
Senior management decided to make a big change.
In an effort to cut costs, the senior management decided that the Legacy team were no longer required as they were creating a whole new software anyway & would be ditching the old one “within a year or so”.
In doing so, they also insisted that the large office they occupied was completely emptied.
This included several huge filing cabinets of paperwork, compromising dozens of core manuals, and countless hundreds of up-to-date “how to fix” documentation pieces as well as earlier superceded documents they could refer back to too.
The team decided to double-check to make sure that’s really what management wanted.
The Legacy team sent an e-mail to the seniors basically saying “Are you sure?”, to which they (eventually) received a terse e-mail back specifically stating to “Destroy all paperwork”.
They were also ordered to “Delete all digital files” to free up a rather substantial amount of space on the shared drive, and wipe their computers back to factory settings.
So, it was all shredded, the files erased totally, & the computers wiped. The team removed every trace of their existence as ordered, and left for greener pastures.
It didn’t take long before this decision really backfired.
It’s been three months, and there was recently a power outage which has broken something in the rebooted system.
The company can no longer add items into stock, which means invoicing won’t work (as the system reads as “can’t sell what we don’t have”).
In turn, this means there’s no invoices for the system to bill.
So, it’s back to pen, paper, and shared excel sheets to keep track of stock, manually typing invoices into a template, and having to manually check every payment received against paper invoices.
All of which is resulting is massive amounts of overtime required to keep up with demand.
There isn’t a quick fix.
The company has reached out to the Legacy Team, but they’ve all said without the manuals they were ordered to destroy or erase, they’re not sure how to fix it.
The new system is still “at least a year out”.
On the positive side, two of the senior managers have a nice large office to share & sit in.
The managers really should’ve waited until the new system was up and running before getting rid of anything to do with the old system.
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Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.
This is a good point!
Management really messed up.
Yes, this probably does happen a lot.
This person would’ve made a suggestion to management.
Another person shares her husband’s pet peeve about many companies.
A power outage broke the legacy system, leaving employees to handle stock, invoices, and payments manually. Management contacted the former team, but the experts could not help without the documentation they had been ordered to destroy.
Commenters called the disaster painfully predictable and celebrated the Legacy team for following those reckless instructions perfectly.
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