At certain jobs, it’s obvious when people from the outside are brought in to learn how everything works because the big bosses are going to eventually hire a bunch of folks.

It’s sad, but that’s the way it goes sometimes…

And this person who wrote this story on Reddit handled that kind of situation the best way they could…by maliciously complying!

Check out what they had to say.

“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.

A guy was sent down…but they knew what that really meant.

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.”

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.

You got it!

Oh that’s when we all stopped, looked at each other, and grinned.

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.

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…”

They really put him through the ringer.

To our friend’s credit, he tried. Oh he tried for DAYS.

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.

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.

It seems like these workers really made their mark!

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.”

Check out what Reddit users had to say.

This reader thinks they know the way it should really work.

Another Reddit user nailed it.

This individual said this sounds like a nightmare.

One Reddit user wants to know why managers don’t listen to the workers…

And one reader said competent managers get taken away a lot because they’re in demand.

Some people in charge just can’t get out of their own way.

You see it all the time!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.