Boss Fires IT Guy, Makes Him Delete All The Files Despite Being Advised Not To, Realizes His Mistake Too Late

I've found in my many years in IT that just because it's an IT based company that doesn't mean the management has the faintest clue how their own products and processes work. They're usually business grads who are taught that "a good manager can manage any company" and laugh off the suggestion that their ignorance is actually harmful. (spoiler: their ignorance is very harmful)

I went through a similar experience. The small company I was working for ran out of work, but the owner dragged his feet laying me off formally. So that's about 2 weeks with almost no income. Then he dragged his feet with the paperwork so that I could claim EI. Three weeks. Then of course it was about 6 weeks before I got EI payments, so that's nine weeks with no income. I found another job a couple months later with better pay, only to get a frantic phone call a few weeks in *demanding* that I come back at once to the previous company because they got some work. When I pointed out that I had found another job, he insisted that I *must* come in weekends and evenings to work for him. Um... nope.

I retired after 20 years with the IT department in a publicly owned utility company. I was team lead for the ERP/Database group. I earned a decent 6-figure salary. My specialization was SAP/HANA and virtualization technology. The company spent my last year trying to recruit a replacement without success. Ultimately they had to hire me back as a consultant for another 2 years until they got somebody. They paid me 2-1/2 times my old salary, plus a fixed 40 hours per week, plus 100% remote work from home, while I was also collecting my retirement pension. No money for employee raises, but massive budget for professional services. The irony is that when the new CIO came on board five years earlier, the first thing he had everybody do was to write up a succession plan, which I did in great detail. Management never acted on my 6-page succession plan to benefit the company, so in the end I was the beneficiary of their oversight.

Knew of a similar situation years back. Not IT but in a parks department. A fellow had worked for years getting a new park set up and was promised the managers job once it happened. Higher ups hired their starchild instead and offered the old guy a job working in the damned basement of HQ. He decided to just quit and on his last day they made him clean out his office. Before computers so a few of his friends helped him pile all the maps, documents, records etc in a burn pile by the field office and burn it. They spent years playing catch up.

People who manage IT teams or people should have some understanding of what things like "prototypes" and "coude source safes" and data archiving, and LDAP and VMware etc. etc. etc. actually are. And it's often a disaster to have a marketing person manage an IT group. They talk to each other but the words don't seem to mean the same things. Thay have a different mindset entirely. The smart ones know what they don't know and have interpreters. It's sweet to leave the power-mad types to stew in their own stupidity.