Friday, November 27, 2020

New Boss Fires Admins, Major Systems Go Downhill


When are these people ever going to learn that the moment you mess with the IT department is the moment that you ultimately kickstart your rapidly impending demise. Also, the strange obsession that some companies have with making the IT department as cheap as possible could not be more of a misguided business practice. 

Check out another juicy pro revenge tale with this story about an electric organ revenge that was years in the making.

1.

Text - r/ProRevenge u/the_asperger_admin • 1y + Join New boss mobs and then fires admin. Major systems go downhill and boss is in hot water. [Crossposted to O r/MaliciousCompliance and O r/talesfromtechsupport and O r/sysadmin on advise from my readers. Or not. This is a new account, and it seems crossposting was denied]

2.

Text - [This happened about a year ago, i have a new job now. Still, i made a throwaway account to protect people involved. Mostly i made it to protect me. If my former boss burns in hell due to this, well, i'm ok with that and at least he will be able to afford the heating bill.] So, i worked for this multinational company for over a decade as a system administrator. My responsibility was in the area of manufacturing, mostly for central systems that work on data flow between the manufacturing s

3.

Text - I won't go into too much detail, but i decided to make the stuff web based for easier deployment of updates. It worked great, and over time more and more functions got ported into this easy to enhance/easy to update system. Partly new stuff, partly decades-old software that was in dire need of replacement. After about a decade, this system was rather central to the manufacturing process in many ways, and yes, there were hot-standby servers, multiple backups each day and so on. Due to the

4.

Text - I always had the support of my varying bosses over the years (we change middle managment a lot). In comes another new boss. In the first ever talk we have, he complains that the software is written in [programming_language] because thats "so outdated". I tell him its actively developed and used by a number of Fortune500 companies for their backend and/or frontend systems. He's not happy. He also asks me how i do all the paperwork for the project and how my former bosses managed the projec

5.

Text - A few weeks later, my boss accuses me the work as a "separate company within our company" and it has to stop, and it doesn't matter if the whole company approves of my work and speaks highly of me. I have to do much more (completely useless) paperwork, get approval for every small change or bugfix from two people and is generally a dick when it comes to my work. He also loudly complains that i work alone on my projects and that i try to ruin the company by doing so - i have it on file tha

6.

Text - More bullying follows, and over the next year my boss starts taking away all of my duties, one at a time. This results in me not always making my 40+ work hours per week. You can only read reddit so much per day before you start going insane. Now, after everything is over, i realize that was his main tactic after all, get me fired for now working as long as my coworkers. But it just didn't click with me at the time, because nothing like that had ever happened to me. Boss forces me to trai

7.

Text - The NEXT day, after having to attend to an expensive one hours training course (and then having lunch), HR calls me in and tells me it is my last day of work. I don't have the usual 90 day period, but it's my last day of being employed. This is rather unusual in my country and only legal if both parties agree. I agree, though, since i get a nice severance package and unemployment benefits starting the next day. I don't mention to HR that i was planning to quit the next month anyway becaus

8.

Text - I have one hour to clean out my desk and say goodbye to my coworkers. The last thing i do is to have one my "backup" delete my accounts (as per company policy) while i watch. This includes my admin account in my web system, then i leave. I go home, cut all company access to my privately owned public source code management temporarily, then i work through the weekend to basically fork my own project under a new name, renaming all the classes and stuff, and release it back on my SCM under t

9.

Text - What i accidentally-on-purpose forget to mention in the heat of the moment is that all the system documentation for the web system is also stored on the system and is linked to the user account of whoever wrote it (me for everything, in this case). "ON DELETE RESTRICT" is active, so deleting a user account with active documentation is now allowed. But there is also a known safety in the software that prevents deleting admin accounts through the interface, so my coworker happily types the

10.

Text - A week goes past and then the messages starts flooding in (we used a well known messaging app for real time communication and also started using it for private messaging as well, since my group are still good friends). Parts of the system aren't doing their job and parts of the manufacturing process has ground to a halt in multiple production plants. The documentation is nowhere to be found and they can't figure out what is wrong. From what i gather, after i left they realised that i had

11.

Text - Chaos ensued, emergency meetings were held. (The company always held meetings instead of working to fix the problem whenever something went wrong). That is when they started contacting me. Backup: "You need to come in and fix the problem right away. Company central is already on the phone AND THEY ARE GOING APESHIT!" (adds lots of details on the problem and also on what is happening in the company) Me: "Sorry bro, i don't work for the company anymore." Backup: "But it's your system!" Me:

12.

Text - Me: "First, since i don't work there anymore, you just violated company policy by telling me all that stuff. Could get you fired for that - but i'm not going to, you're the SOMEWHAT innocent bystander in this." Me: "Secondly, on the day i was fired, HR told be that they wanted to get me out the door right away because a disgruntled worker with my kind of system knowledge is a security nightmare." Backup: "But you aren't disgruntled, are you." Me: (playing it safe) "No. But there is know w

13.

Text - Me: "See, the company can't do a lawsuit against their own employees if something goes wrong by accident. Suppliers have similar statements in their contracts and are also insured. I'm neither of those and if i do something wrong (or the company just states i did even if i didn't), i'm suddenly in deep financial trouble. I just can't take the risk." Backup: "What if we hire you as an external supplier/ contractor". Me: "I'd have to open a company, get insurance, go through negotiation wit

14.

Text - Me: "Sorry, i can't help the company, because it would be a risk to me. And it would be against your own company policy to ALLOW me to help." Backup: "Pretty please?" Me: "Tell you what. Call up company central yourself - don't go through boss - and tell them exactly what had happened. Tell them you broke the system by deleting those user accounts on your bosses order. And tell them you didn't know what would happen, because you didn't have enough training and experience - you just relied

15.

Text - Turns out, Backup actually did phone up company central a few days later. Boss went through hell, got fired and got himself on the "never hire again anywhere in this company" blacklist for ANOTHER expensive stunt he pulled, which the company realized shortly after he was kicked out. How do i know? I still have lots of friends at that company and hear stuff through the grapevine. Backup still has his job, and a new, even more incompetent boss. So Backup is ready to find a new job. Yesterda

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