If you have seen a company crash and burn because “the one guy who knew ________ left” – what was the important skill/information and what happened without them?
If you have seen a company crash and burn because “the one guy who knew ________ left” – what was the important skill/information and what happened without them?
Comments
A great manager. He knew how to lead people. Soft skills are so important.
I watched a company crash and burn as they protected one piece of shit and fired every person who reported them. Even when everyone reported someone that was being abused by the asshole (I was being abused), the company protected them.
Then 3 months later he was finally fired and the company stock took an 80% nosedive and has only recovered about 20% still.
But I’m at my new job crushing quota year after year so I look back and smile at that piece of shit.
Wait, what was the question?
…all the technical stuff, and worked a lot…
Aka me. I looked after all the payment machines, door timers, lighting, etc. They contracted the machines out to a company that worked Mon-Fri, 8am-5pm. Noone would look after the door timers, lighting, etc without upfront payment as they were known for not paying for several months. I was on call when there, and would help customers if they needed, no matter the hour, and did whatever was needed to keep the sites going. 6 months later, the company was in shambles, and later sold all their leases off to another company, and left the city
The guy who knew the clients. Had relationships with the clients. Who had the history of the clients & the company. They got rid of that guy and wadda know…. clients started bailing because they didn’t like how they were being treated and the guy who could smooth ruffled feathers wasn’t there.
The guy that knew we have a hurricane season š
Got rid of the CEO that actually took care of employees and grew the company exponentially. Explanation given was that they needed someone who could steward the company “at that level.” Really, the major investor company wanted to have their own guy in there. They threw around a bunch of pie in the sky promises about an IPO which was never gonna happen.
The people they successively brought in slashed and burned everything that made the place great. Got so bad we were forbidden from sending company wide goodbye emails which were par the course in the past. They try to reverse course on some stuff to stem the tide but damage was done. Also all the changes in leadership meant the product strategy was nonexistent and something that was the new flagship one year was deprecated the next. They are still plugging along but a shell of what they onfe were. Many, many people who made the place great saw the writing on the wall and got out of dodge.
My supervisor/head of department. I worked as a front-end dev in a very small and crappy marketing agency.
My supervisor was not only our sole back-end dev, but also the responsible for managing client lists, our monthly phone messages to clients, and the entire server that housed all files.
As soon as he left I was just going to work without anything to do, and soon after the agency fell through
My friend fixed LEDs for the patriots. Right after he left, Tom Brady left too.
My buddy used to work at a bar and did pretty much everything. Cook, DJ, and barback. Before he left he said they wont last a month without him. He was right. They shit down about a month after he left.
The official name is Bus Factor or how many employees could get hit by a bus before the company can’t operate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
There was a dude. He’d been there 10 years when I got hired. I knew more about databases and they wanted to promote me into a lead role. I told them to promote him instead and I’d help with the DB side. They didn’t he left. We were a creative space product that integrated with Photoshop. I don’t know shit about Photoshop. Company was bought, everyone was laid off except a skeleton crew to offshore all operations.
When I worked at EF Hutton the CEO was pissed that the top broker made more money than he did and let everyone know it. The broker left. Then the company got in trouble for check kiting, which was a form of collecting interest on money that was supposed to be in non interest accruing demand deposit accounts. Ego over profits.
So I was laid off a few months ago. I know everyone says the company will crash and burn without them, and while it is not crashing and burning, them laying me off is costing the company about 400,000 a month. About 6 months ago, the person in charge of logistics charges left the company, and then 2 weeks later, his boss left. I was fully trained to handle all of the logistics charges which involved SQL queries, working with other applications I will not name as it could out me, and cleaning all the data so it can be used to charge the vendors back the appropriate amount, and not a single other person was trained as it was implied i will be trained, and then train the rest of my team. Well I was laid off as “redundant” and only 1 member of my team was kept as she was the team member who has been there the longest. I am still in contact with her and she tells me all the time that there are company wide meetings about what I knew and how they can begin fixing the issue. While I feel bad for this person as she is catching a little bit of flak, I would never tell these people how it is done, and she has explicitly told me she doesn’t want to know.
My sales manager left and all of a sudden long term customers started leaving in droves. Turns out the Sales manager was spending a ton of money taking them all out and disguising the costs as if he was riding with salesman and paying for meals and events.
The (only) person who maintained and managed the data and databases.
LOL, yeah, me.
I went to work at a plastics plant. Started as a forklift driver, learned how to make mixes, how the machines worked, how to maintain everything.
I got promoted to maintenance, then to line manager, then plant manager.
The plant was sold. New guy comes in, fires everyone, changes everything. He tried to hire me back at 75% of my former pay. I told him to kick rocks.
He called me a week later and offered me my former position at the same pay, l told him I’d take a 10% raise. He hung up on me.
He called me again the following week and agreed to my terms.
The guy was an absolute ass to work for. Finally he pushed me too far,Ā told me l had no idea what l was doing. I walked. He screamed at me when l left that l wasn’t special, that he’d have me replaced before l got out of the parking lot.Ā
Over the next few weeks, lĀ got a couple of calls from former co-workers, telling me that everything was falling apart.Ā Place went out of business in six months.
This usually happens when the owner or owners sell the company to a bigger company.
Lol, it was my dad. He was the lead software engineer for the biggest client. The company he worked at built automation equipment, and they did work for a certain large glass manufacturer. They absolutely loved him.
Corporate removed the GM of his branch, and he got a bad feeling from the new guy. So he left and they lost that main customer within 6 months. The branch closed down less than a year after that.
The Coors company has long made ceramic lab filters. They custom made a large version of the mass produced lab filters and we had one at my company. We wanted another one so we placed an order. We were told that āXā retired and no one else could make them that large without cracking. X apparently could not impart whatever he did to others.
I have no idea if they gave up on making them as we switched to a different type after that. Maybe it was just a tall tale.
I was that gal once.
But it was my business. Honestly, I wasn’t doing great getting off of the ground, and decided I wasn’t wasting more time and money. Business ended up closing pretty much immediately as a direct result of the only employee losing interest.
Worked a cafe job after college. I put my heart and soul into that job, i was working almost every single hour it was possible to be scheduled. I knew the the entire regular customer base, everyone assumed i was the manager. I did 95% of front of house responsibilities. I worked my fucking ass off all summer.
Manager had it out for me, she was a townie mom that had a high school/mean girl mentality. As soon as labor day passed, she fire me because “we just dont need you anymore”. I let it go and took it because by that point i was tired.
I’ve seen her probably 10 times in the last 10 years, she has profusely apologized to me every single time. Says she has so much to be sorry for. The guilt, shame, and defeat is so palpable, written all over her face. I cant imagine how much she realized i did, and how upset people were when i was gone.
The owner sold the cafe shortly after i was gone too. I think the manager ran it into the ground/he didnt want to deal with her.
Carvana – they crashed and burned but recovered pretty damn well! I wish them well honestly, they treated me so well.
But I was a manager there abd their website was built on Salesforce. Part of the reason I was basically the go-to guy for difficult cases was that I could dig through Salesforce well and others didnt because the company really only trained on their UI – which made really good sense – but it was fed through Salesforce.
The IT people who set the Salesforce up all left. They had no idea what to do and had to constantly pay the expensive license for SF even though we didnt regularly “use” it. It would have just been too expensive to shut everything down and switch to their properity software even for a day. It would throw a wrench in thousands of transactions.
The person who knew the INDUSTRY left! The bozo board brought in 4 people in 3 years after he was gone to ātake overā – all they did was trash the company, they didnāt know the market/customer base, competition, products, sales cycle – and on and on. Oh, so why did they let him go? To SAVE $$$! Brilliant!
That was me. When I joined the company they were hemorrhaging money and barely surviving by getting loans from the owner’s parents. I identified two big reasons, bad shipping estimates and slow client onboarding because the entire process was manual. In the first month I put together a framework that turned the really bad manual process of estimating shipping into an automated data driven process that turned a 30% average loss per shipment into a 20% profit. For onboarding, the clients’ inventory used to be manually assessed sku by sku for international compliance. There were still a lot of errors because the people they had doing this dreadful task were minimum wage and definitely not experts in compliance. The company was able to onboard about 4 clients per month this way. Again, I put together a system that could automatically handle about 95% of the task in a fraction of the time with greater accuracy, so before I left they were able to onboard over 30 clients per month with the same size team. The company made such a turnaround that it got bought by a Fortune 50 company for around $40m. I even gave a presentation to their CEO on the systems I developed and got about $25k as a bonus for it. However, both of these systems required regular maintenance and good training for end users to make sure that they were being used appropriately. After I left, the systems weren’t maintained and none of the people who I had trained to use the systems were themselves knowledgeable enough about how they worked to train others adequately. The company quickly started falling apart to the point that they considered suing the previous owners.
I left my former employer as the foreman at a hardacape company to start my own outfit a year and a half ago.
The company is shutting down after this year.
It turns out people with 10+ years in the industry are basically non-existent. No one remembers to take care of their bodies. And when you offer shit pay to start, you’ll get shit help. They simply could not replace me, and they couldn’t afford my new self-imposed salary to get me back on board.
Part of me feels guilty to watch them struggle but man has my life improved since leaving.
The moral of the story is that if your company relies on a single person to operate, you’re probably doing something wrong.
I just watched a documentary on the Titan sub that imploded. They had a ton of “that guy” sounding the alarm – but money and ego led to death.
My partner is reluctantly that person. She likes where she works but they keep promoting people that can’t handle the job. So whenever she leaves for a vacation she comes back to a shit show. It’s frustrating because she feels she can’t take leave as she’ll be facing a mess when she gets back. Meanwhile the place runs better when certain people are on leave themselves.
Not sure really what the skill is. She’s hyper organised and observant. So she catches discrepancies and errors in things before they go to the next stage that other people miss. She’s always very good at logistics, so she keeps things together and keeps the workplace moving.
These skills are great but she can’t turn them off. So she comments on basically every single thing I do at home. We visited her family once and after a day of them all doing it I needed some time to myself.
That’s ADHD for ya.
An absolute star in an engineering company who despite growing his side of the business, increasing efficiency, cutting costs and gaining additional relevant training and qualifications in his own time, hadn’t had a meaningful pay rise in five years.
Gave notice after accepting a new position with a 60% pay increase and the company immediately countered with an 80% pay rise offer. That they knew his worth the entire time and refused to pay until they had to enraged him so much that they turned an amicable separation into a hostile one.
He came after their clients with a vengeance and while I think the company still exists it’s a lot smaller than before.
Had a guy at one job that landed us our largest client ever. Ford Motor Company. Ever heard of them? A $22 million dollar software contract.
They fired him immediately after the ink was dry on a trumped up bullshit “not a team player” thing to screw him out of their paying his percentage for the sale.
Company never found another big client after that, and 6 months later the layoffs started.
Transport company manager that was handling all the accounts in a major city left/got ran off. He had his own company up and running inside of two weeks and still handles all those accounts. Original company is still hanging on but there isn’t much left of it.
Not one individual guy, but I worked at a large, but struggling media company that was trying to turn the ship around. My team had been doing a full-court press on marketing and promotions and really getting the ratings up on our original programmingāconsiderably past where they would have been normally. We were punching way out of our weight class.
Well, there was some sort of political struggle in the C-Suite and the result was that our team got eliminated. The ratings went into a death spiral the very next week. Not exaggerating, things went pear-shaped within days.
Eventually the lack of promotional support led to the entire initiative failing, which led to the bankruptcy and ultimate sale of bits and pieces of the company until it essentially ceased to exist.
My manufacturing plant has had a huge downturn in the past 5 years. They changed the type of product they were making and decided to make lots of it. And with new machinery they had to move people up, fast, who didnāt have the experience to operate those machines. Well. That turned into broken machinery. Downtime. But they didnāt stop bitching. So itās gotten worse.
Thereās a notable difference in the quality of asphalt used in Oregon highways since my grandpa passed away.
He retired twice and stayed on as a consultant until the day he died. They called my grandma after he died and when she told them he had passed she said they seemed more broken up about it than she was after 40 years of marriage.
I make a product that requires a high quality bottle and cap. During covid, supplies were getting scarce. I secured some bottles, albeit lesser quality. But caps were a nightmare. I called my way up the supply chain.
Ended up talking to the owner of the biggest manufacturer of the caps I need in America. Turns out…. they’re completely shut down. There’s 1 guy in Slovakia that can fix and service their machine. He can’t travel because of covid.
I asked, with a mildly condescending tone, is there a manual? Or can you face time with this guy? Stonewalled. He’s the only guy and we’re waiting for him.
Luckily he didn’t die and came to America to fix the machine 8 weeks later.
I had a systems administrator die from COVID and he took several important passwords to his grave. This caused a huge compliance issue as backups were no longer accessible, since he never wrote down the passwords.
We had an application that was very literally our bread and butter. It was the only application the entire company used to enter their data in, everything that made us money went through this application. We were a company of about 200 and two IT teammates controlled the application. Only ones with admin access, only ones with any knowledge of how the thing worked etc. We had been in the process of building a team to support it but we never got that far. Company got bought out. They decided to cut the fat and let go everyone on the IT team except me probably because I was the one making the least amount of money. I was more than happy to watch the shit show. The company scrambled but honestly they were so big that our tiny company didn’t mean anything to them so they just treated everyone like shit and I left too
Apparently I was this guy and I didnāt even know it. I worked for an MSP (generic IT company) and was like the 4th employee. I was there for maybe 2ish years and by that time we were about 15 people strong. The company had a lot of good paying clients, and I knew the intricacies of every single one of them.
My job was to drive to each client once a week and do whatever IT task they needed to have done. Migrate an email server to the cloud? Done. Reset Karenās password again? Done. Replace the toner in the office printer? Done. I was basically contacted to do anything and everything they needed (IT related). Before I was hired, my job was done by the two guys who started the company and when they brought me on, they took a more administrative approach to grow the business.
I loved my job. I didnāt have to go to the same office every day, I had a company truck, company credit card to pay for gas, and freedom to take my time and do what needed to be done on my schedule. Eventually, the company grew too big and supported too many clients for just me to handle, so we hired more and more techs. However, I was by far the most experienced and technical person on the team (aside from the founders).
After about 2 years, I had a friend who worked at AWS reach out to me and suggested I apply to work there, so I did. And then I got the job. My current pay at the MSP was ~$42k/year and my job offer at Amazon was $80k with a $20k signing bonus, moving package, and stock optionsā¦so yup. I took the job and left the MSP.
About 8 months later the MSP fell apart. Apparently none of the other techs made my regular clients happy. One of the founders tried to do my job and quickly realized how much work I actually did for them. He realized it wasnāt sustainable and couldnāt keep up with the work. He told his business partner they had to hire like 3 more people to do my job, but the partner said they couldnāt afford it. Clients started getting upset at the subpar service from other techs, and one of the founding partners quit. In less than a year, the company went under and the other partner/founder moved north (California) to become a sommelier.
At no point did I ever expect to be the downfall of that company.
My former co-worker used to be a secretary at Lehman Brothers (yeah, that place). She had a high position at the company making 150k-250k a year in 2007. (Yup, she worked with someone very important.) Right before the company crashed, her boss asked her to shred some documents, and accidently noticed what those documents read (something like the company was going collapse soon and ordering all the higher ups to “cash out of their retirement funds ASAP” situation. She walked away with alot of money, and bought two houses during the great ressision, in cash, in NYC. She bought herself two homes; one-family home and a mutli-family home of 5-families (for rent).. She lives off the rents, she “retired at age 35” and sells vintage clothes as a side-hobby..
There was a printing shop that was around forever. The owner knew everyone in the business. He found out he could get a contract to print and fold small instruction sheets for a medicine. A huge contract to print millions of these things. He knew the guy who had the printer, another guy had the cutter, and another had the folder. These machines were not being used. He bought all 3 pieces without letting anyone find out about his contract so he got them cheap. Then he set it all up for continuous feed and he had one well paid guy running the entire thing. He made the investment back in the first print run and then it was a big money maker. Then he sold the business and retired.
The new owner saw one guy running this one print job. He thought all the guy was doing was feeding in paper and stacking the product from the other end. Obviously he was being overpaid for this. So he let that guy go and hired a cheaper hand to just put in the paper and stack the product. Well, that operator he let go was not just doing that. The 3 machines needed adjusting. Someone had to watch it. Someone who had the kind of experience that you can’t simply train someone to do. As the printer might be picking up paper a little off center you turn a knob to about here and if the folder is not creasing just right then you move a lever to about there. It was always checking and adjusting a little when needed. The operator simply got another high skill job at another print shop.
Without the experienced operator, the entire thing went off the rails. The product didn’t pass. He lost the contract. And that was a lot of the shop’s revenue at the time. It didn’t take long after that for the new owner to crash a 45 year old business.
When I worked for a major telecom, we had a manager, who had come up through the union ranks. He had built and programmed a Unix system consisting of several pcs, which took messages from long distance carriers, diagnosed the problems, referred the ticket to the appropriate work center, and when the problem was resolved and the ticket closed, tested the circuit again, and sent it back to the long distance carrier as resolved.
But he did not have a college degree, and when the company decided that all managers had to have degrees, he was let go.
Sadly, he was the only one that knew the system he had built in intimate detail. Myself and another tech could reboot the system, but if anything went wrong that didn’t get resolved with a reboot there wasn’t anything we could do (or would do, since neither of us was being paid for that job).
Ultimately the system died. Four technicians were assigned to do the work the system had been doing for as long as it took the company to put out a request for a new system, take bids on it etc, and get the new system built and installed. Which it turns out, it never was.
The company I used to work for was purchased specifically for the product my division worked on. A month after purchase they closed my division and let all of us go transferring out work to another division who had no clue what they were doing.
Six months later the product they wanted had to be discontinued because they had fucked it up beyond use. Six months after that the other division was closed down killing off their product as well. The buyers spent tens of millions of dollars and had an entire multiyear strategic plan flushed down the toilet in a year all because they closed the wrong division thinking they could save money by hiring cheaper and less skilled staff in a worse IT market.
(It is worth noting their āsave moneyā math never worked from the start. I found out they budgeted to hire five people to replace just me. Yes I was making more than the people in the other division, but I wasnāt anywhere near five times more. I didnāt even make enough to cover two people to replace me.)
My company is on the verge of this happening.
I work in a large hotel in a big city. The hotel is a bit old, built in the early 90s. With its age, the building has constant issues with things like plumbing, the walk in fridges, ceiling/wall leaks during rain etc.
Most of the problems are handled by 1 guy. He doesn’t trust any of the other engineers to do the job as good as he does, so nobody has been trained on a lot of the crucial tasks he does.
If he quits, retires, or gets hurt, the hotel is screwed. The utility schematics are so outdated that they aren’t accurate anymore, and none of the other engineers knows how things are connected, and what to do if there is a breakdown in one of the crucial systems.
That’s without mentioning that everything is already essentially held together with duct tape and prayers. Its going to be a clusterfuck once he leaves.
Back in the 60s, my Dad drove a delivery route delivering eggs to restaurants and stores. One restaurant had a great cook. His cooking was widely known and the restaurant was always packed. He asked for a raise and was told that they couldnāt afford it. Another restaurant offered him a substantial raise and he accepted. He had a growing family and needed the money. His former employer lost a lot of business and eventually closed.
While I don’t think this organization is even capable of crashing and burning, my dad worked there for over two decades. Started in a cube and worked his way up the ladder to one of the top names on the org chart. There are people all over the country that know him and have had meetings with him and attended seminars he has instructed at. My brother went with him once and said that a lot of people basically flocked to him in the hotel bar as soon as my dad had what appeared to be a free moment.
Anyways, new boss comes in and dismisses everyone at the top because they are the old guard. All of those relationships, all of that knowledge, everything just gone in a week. My dad got in touch with a colleague from one of those seminars and got hired for a new position doing the same thing he was already doing. Time will tell what the fallout is, but my dad at least made good on two decades of networking.
I read a story a while back, but I can’t find it, so hopefully I don’t butcher it. There was a guy who worked at a sausage (hot dog?) factory. His job was to push the carts full of sausages from the production area to the smoke house. Eventually his job was automated out and he was let go, but the quality of the product went down hill.
Nobody could figure out why the sausages had different flavor and texture. It was realized that the time it took for the guy to push the cart to the smokehouse was essential in the process. They hired the guy back and had him push the sausages through a winding corridor to mimic the time it would have taken him to traverse his old route. The sausages immediately got their flavor and texture back.
When he finally retired they had to automate his job by having the sausages traverse a time based path. I think they named the machine after him.
I thought it was a fun story, sorry I can’t find the original. Maybe someone else can.
No one left…the CEO that was on a very long sabbatical came back. Just destroyed any culture, morale, progress, etc. People left in drives (including me!).
The owner.
He understood ensuring employees were well paid and well treated. New owner was penny pinching, saving a dime and spending a dollar as a result.
They tried to promote me to supervisor when I left. I’m not dealing with underequiped crew and chasing after missing pay
I was that guy.
I worked for a company that provided services for buildings. The big high rise ones. Maintenance, repairs, etc.
I was one of the people who did the pricing, FP&A for contracts, budgetary stuff, etc. anf was part of a 4 person team that these Excel shenanigans nationally.
Anyways, company got bought out by a competitor. Competitor did not do what we specifically did (other ancillary services) so they wanted our expertise.
My team basically left to another competitor on the spot without telling me, leaving me in charge of everything.
I held on for about a year, all the while telling leadership that they needed to hire replacements. They never did. I tried taking vacation to prevent burnout, but was promptly denied. “No one can cover you.”
I left the company and, last I heard, the company was losing contracts. I attribute this to the company’s inability to get any other department to do what I (and my ex-team) did competently.
To answer the OP’s question directly: They lost years of domain knowledge on who our clients were, what their “quirks” were financially, risk knowledge, and generally knowledge about how our financial systems worked.
Head of tax left. Then finance. Then HR went on a tour telling everyone everything was fine. Reader, things were not fine.
At one point the company I worked for (retail store) had a safe that was broken. Me (asst manager) and my boss (store manager) knew how to get it open. There was a trick to it that took us weeks to get the hang of.
It cost a lot to fix that safe, and we complained about it constantly cause it was a nightmare to get open before we figured out the trick. The company refused to fix it for years, they said it was obviously working fine since we are able to open and close the store every day, there was no problem worth dropping that kind of money on.
My boss quit eventually (unrelated to the safe) and then it took them over a year to replace him, I also quit within about 6 months because the two of us were keeping everything afloat, without him I was in hell.
I didnāt even realize the situation I created until 2 days after my final shift the store is calling my cell phone. Left me a voice mail about how they havenāt been able to get cash for 2 days because nobody can open the safe, and they wanted to know how Iād been doing it.
I described it to them, but itās an hour away and Iām not going that far and they couldnāt understand. Also, if it was an ex coworker calling me and asking I might have helped more, but it was the corporate level regional manager filling in at the store (the guy who refused to drop the money to fix the safe in the first place), so I let him lie in his bed.
It was my problem for years and it got slept on, now that itās his problem for 2 days, itās an emergency.
The store was down for cash sales for like a month til it got fixed.
Not a crash and burn but almost a critical system failure.
New management came in and they were reviewing payments to outside labor and contracts and such. They found one such payment, annually paid to a fella out west. The payment was $20k a year.
They asked the wrong people and decided this was not necessary and cancelled the payments and retainer.
Apparently this guy was some expert code writer for a system long out of use, but very much in use by my company. Kind of like those memes you see in the IT world showing how all of this critical infrastructure relies on some small antiquated software no one knows about.
IT found out later, they were never asked or involved in the decision. They basically said without this dude we are fucked.
Management cut the check and heās on retainer .
It was myself (reception/dispatch) and our accounts admin, the only two admin for the entire office in a steel sheet manufacturing business.
Management didn’t know how to do either of our jobs and didn’t bother learning before we both left within 2 weeks of each other.
Last I heard, the company was fucked up big time as they weren’t able to pay their employees super as the account was still linked to the other admins phone number.
My wife worked at a preschool for years. She’d organize and delegate events, decorate for them, and generally just engage with every family that would come through the doors. Several long-time families and coworkers straight-up told her she was the face of the school, many many times. Most parents picked up on that pretty quickly, too. EVERYONE who entered that school knew her to some degree.
Over the next six months after she finally left, a flood of families followed suit and she had about 20 different families talk to her about leaving the school, as the sheer chaos, utterly abysmal events, and blatant licensing violations were far too much to handle. She had parents calling her in tears because of how the new administration treated them.
Currently, only 3 of her former coworkers are still there. She bailed a little less than a year ago, and is now enjoying a paid summer vacation!
Years ago I was the director of operations for a company that had approximately 1000 employees. I pretty much ran a good portion of the show with everyone under me except for the ceo and president. Unfortunately someone that controlled the books got a little too friendly with his drug dealer and ended up putting the company up his nose.
I took a nice vacation. As Iām getting back to find a job I get contacted about consulting at a startup that was a virtual carbon copy of my previous company. They agree to pay me a ridiculous amount of money that is mostly production based(if I donāt deliver, I donāt get paid much). Anyway, I delivered and I delivered big. Company took off almost immediately and I knew come the 90 day mark I was going to get a very healthy check. 90 days hits and I donāt get paid. The next day my contract was not picked up and I went home with the promise of a check in the mail.
I wait a couple of weeks and call the owner looking for my check. āOh it must have been lost, blah blah blah nonsenseā. Fast forward another week and I get a check thatās not signed. Then I get a check for the wrong amount. Once I come to the conclusion theyāre screwing me, I make one single call that lasts less than 60 seconds. The company that I was consulting for was new in the industry and didnāt know me, so the person that called me with an offer was this companies financier and they also owned the product being sold by this company.
I told the owner or the finance company, someone I am quite close friends with, that I delivered everything I said and then some, and they booted me and stiffed me.
My buddy tells me he will call me right back.
He calls the owner of the company to try to smooth all of this out, and apparently gets stonewalled.
Anyway, nothing changes. I am still not made whole. My buddy cuts the guy off. No more product to sell, and no more finance company backing the product. Also lost out on 6 weeks of funded sales due to my buddy needing to be properly reserved for refunds and cancellations.
That was nearly 20 years ago, and this still makes me happy. I hope Freddie reads this and it brings back stinging memories of screwing me out of my contracted pay.
The shop manager at a machining and manufacturing shop I worked for was let go. The reasons officially were something about his attitude, but it was because he had cancer and they didn’t want to deal with him needing time off.
So he gets let go and they bring in a new guy. Goes out of his way to “shake things up.” Moves people onto projects they had never worked on before, off of what they’d always done. People were doing things they’d never trained for, but the guy who could train them was now doing their old job…
Jobs kept getting rejected by QA. So the owner sided with the new shop manager and axed QA, and rubber stamped everything.
Shame that our clients were the US Navy and the US Postal Service. Because once those parts got rejected by them enough times, the work just ended.
In eight months they laid off 70-something percent of the floor workers. Mandatory overtime for the few remaining projects we had.
Less than a year later and they sold the building and a bunch of equipment, and moved halfway across the state to a smaller building.
Still open, but they went from nearly 100 factory workers and 5 main sales guys, to 10 and 1.
Not the same, but today I stopped by my old workplace to say hi. Wanted to keep some connections open.
It’s the first time I’ve seen my old boss since I left. I was underpaid by like 20k a year, had minimal support and respect.
Man, I wasn’t prepared – in the 6 months I’ve been gone, my old boss aged more than the 10 years I was there. Startling. Can’t say I have any regrets, but damn.
I was doing regular deliveries to this rental company and bumped shoulders with a scaffolding salesman in the GTA. He demanded a 200k salary, no questions asked expense account and a company vehicle (Camaro). New manager came in and thought it was bullshit. Hated everything about the sales guy. The manger decides to take away the car & expense account. Next thing you know I no longer have to make too many deliveries too that rental company.
I don’t know who this sales guy was connected to, but he promptly left and took his multiple million+ $ rental contracts with him.
DOGE got rid of the entire purchasing department at our NIH institute. The only person who has a purchase card in our department is a PhD in molecular biology. His main role is now purchasing, not science. Also, since the purchase card limit is $10k, we can not renew the service contract on the analytical instruments that analyze drugs for clinical trials.
My small town. They forced retirements so they could hire new people at lower wages. Of course the only place that had accurate water distribution maps was in the head of a guy they forced to retire. This is 20 years ago, and they had to give him close to $50,000 to get him to come back and work with somebody to get the maps on paper.
Didnāt āleaveā but died, and pretty much took the business with him.
He worked for a driving service that served people with disabilities who couldnāt drive (blind, old, etc.) he was always courteous and ON TIME. The other drivers were always inconsistent, late, not kind. Once he died the few other people who were decent left and the owner just canāt handle it now.
Haven’t crashed and burned or shut down but overextended and hurt badly for a while
Printing shop that dealt in a lot of large things. Big customers. Badly managed.
They decided they wanted to get into labels cause labels were/are supposedly quite lucrative.
They hired this one person (we’ll call them M) with a lot of experience in labels having come from a company that closed down recently-ish who worked as a rep and knew a ton about labels and business practices etc. M worked there about a year. And was building inroads to a bunch of their former clients from the previous place M had worked. M wad on really good terms with these clients and had a good relationship with them on a personal level.
Then tarrifs started hitting/not hitting, and M made sure to let the main sales rep person know that some things weren’t gonna make it to their date because of material acquisition issues. (Note M wasn’t selling again they were there in a management/support role for the big fancy new label press and the operator)
Come the initial promised ship date there was no product as they still hadn’t gotten material. As discussed. But cue a meeting where (and this may not be true as this is a 3rd hand retelling) the rep basically threw M under the bus saying that they had not informed the rep of the delay (there were emails)
Without review or notice the company fired M and continued on as usual.
However after Ms departure the work from Ms clients slowly and then all of a sudden dried up.
Last I heard the company had overxtended enough on this and other things that they had to do layoffs (I was one of them) and still haven’t rehired a bunch of people; the print operator doesn’t know enough to run everything themselves; and the label section is slowly burning down.
M is not the kind of person to go tell all their clients what happend. But their client base is the type to stay loyal to M and not due business with a company that fires someone just like that.
A software engineer I worked with had developed nearly every module for our companyās warehouse management system. He left after 30 years and then things started to break that no one knew how to fix. Warehouses were down for nearly a week while he negotiated his return. I donāt know what his salary ended up being but he did have every June and July off and we had a software deployment blackout during those months as a result. š
It was me. I was a middle manager at a small business 20 employees. I left. The manager was a micromanager and I kept her from bothering the crap out of everyone for almost 16 years.when I had my own personal issue, I didn’t have the emotional capacity to tow that line anymore. I left, she sold the company. She’s a millionaire, I’m unemployed and homeless.Ā
Never give someone your life, they’ll never pay full price.Ā
Maybe not crash and burned, but there was a guy who was close personal friends with the CEO. He owned so much company stock, that if he sold his shares, it had to be cleared with board of directors and filed with the SEC (SEC Rule 144) as a registered secondary offering. Well, the company got bought out, which included trading his shares. If he sold, it would have been really bad for the stock prices. So they gave him whatever job he wanted, and he worked with me. He was unfireable.
After a few years, some hotshot young manager fired him. The reasons were long and stupid, but it boiled down to, “I don’t like his attitude.” Instead of saying, “HAH, you can’t fire me!” He said, “okay,” and filed a registration statement to sell his shares. I don’t know how much he made, but it was more than $90 million. It was his right.
The board was forced to approve it, he paid taxes, and retired in his 40s. The company stock price fell about 15% that week. That manager was fired. Presumably out of a cannon.
The company didnāt ācrash and burnā, but I had a top 10 customer at my old company. They didnāt compensate me for it and gave all the associated comp to an older dude who was the head of my division. I asked around and was told that it wasnāt my customer, blah blah. So I made a formal appeal and right after they told me I needed to leave the company and tried to block me from the customer account.
So I left. My new company more than doubled my compensation immediately. Customer came with me to the new company, which has since bonused me for the customer account as well. Old company was shocked pikachu face when the customer walked with me.
Felt pretty good, I canāt lie.
When Hewlett Packard became HP, it had stopped being a family company. Fiorina essentially liquidated the value associated with the name to sell cheap crap at a premium and now HP is well known for cheap crap when long ago they were known for reliable quality.
Buying Compaq was a big signal of the direction they were going.
I work IT for truck stops, and the guy who basically invented the fueling system and helped integrate all its components is retiring this year.
I am so excited for the next several years to go thusly:
It’s gonna be glorious.
Company is still there, it’s not the kind of business that’ll ever really go under (assisted living facility). But I worked at one as a chef where the Executive Director, the boss of the entire facility, just got it. According to her, everyone’s job, from top to bottom, was doing our best to make the residents as happy as possible.
To do that, she knew she needed quality staff, and while she couldn’t do much compensation as that was above her, she treated everyone well and threw almost monthly employee raffle contests/celebrations. They would raffle off like 65″ TVs, pizza ovens, gift cards for massages and stuff, it was cool, kept staff morale high, and the residents loved to see the staff appreciated beyond their thanks.
All of the department heads followed her ethos: if the residents requested it and we could reasonably do it, we were to do it, regardless of cost or effort. We blew past budgets monthly, but she argued to corporate we were like 98% full with a ridiculously high resident satisfaction rate compared to other facilities in the area.
I think they passed her up for a promotion, for like the third or fourth time, and a competitor offered her her dream job with significantly better pay and benefits. None of us could leave her for blaming, as much as we all wanted her to stay.
Within four months of her last day, six out of the seven department heads had resigned, with several being walked out day of despite giving the required months notice. The kitchen, our department, held out the longest at like 5.5 months before our culinary director got fed up with 80 hour weeks and being expected to manage a menu on a budget that could barely cover half.
While department heads were resigning, a new executive director started, and immediately everything shifted from “It’s about the residents,” to “They need to learn to live within our budgets.” Every new manager cared more about advancing their career or their side businesses than they did about the job, but they religiously stayed within budget. With every new manager, their staff started to leave in droves.
It’s been under 2 years since I left, and only one of the original five chefs is still there. All of them had multiple years of service with the company, and they all left because of how everything changed. It sucks, for those 8 months under the original director, I was honestly the happiest I’ve ever been at a job, and by the time I left it was one of (but not even close to) the worst I’d ever had.
Edit: Just to add, as soon as the original director left, anything employee appreciation themed beyond an occasional pizza party was gone, including employee of the month. After she left, multiple residents began to voice their dissatisfaction with how the facility was being run, especially to us chefs. They didn’t blame us, the employees, but several of them who had never shown any aggression to staff regularly talked about telling X manager off, and it wasn’t a medical/mental shift. It was management.
Several residents moved out of the facility entirely after the original director left, and noted the change in service quality was the #1 reason. One couple moved to another facility to be closer to family, and chose to live in a competitors facility across the street from one of ours in their new location.
Oh. It was so much more stupid than that.
I worked for a company that contracted with doctor offices and hospitals to handle insurance billing. Thatās what the entire Operations department did. They knew all the players on both sides, all the federal and state regulations, and all the places where they could push, tweak, or untangle paperwork and get the money.
The company decided to offshore those tasks. To India. Well after India was no longer the country you wanted to offshore anything to. Then they laid off the entire Ops department. Eighty people suddenly without a job. Somewhere around a thousand worker-years of institutional knowledge gone, like you snapped your fingers.
It took two weeks of absolutely nill productivity while those of us in IT had to deal with the overseas contractors inventing problems and breaking shit so they could hide that they had no way to meet their service levels, but the company turned around and rehired as many of the people theyād laid off as possible. To my surprise, they got about two-thirds of them back. People who understand medical billing have never been short of work, but I can see where a lot of them just wanted their old job back.
Once they got the Ops department back, they put them on training the contractors – which didnāt work – and then supervising them – which didnāt work. At the time, the company was being purchased by a multi-national health ācareā corporation and had just signed a contract that more than doubled their client base with one company. First, the new client sued the pants off the company, and when it was clear that company management was actually just as stupid as they sound, the new owners simply took over the clients and systems and shut it down.Ā
Iād quit about a year before all that went down. Honestly, every smart person in IT saw the writing on the wall and went looking for an off-ramp as well.
I tend to think these type of stories are fake, but then it occurred to me that I saw them all the time when I was in the military. There would be a single NCO or soldier in the unit who had the training and/or certifications for a given task, they would get out or transfer, and we would be screwed for weeks, months, and sometimes permanently because no one else either knew how or could legally do it. So they definitely happen.
Lol i was the master electrician of record for a solar company and left and took my license with me. And womp womp they went out of business 3 months later because of it