At my previous place of employment, we were purchased by a large company as a strategic checkbox on their resume in a bid to get slurped up by an even bigger company. Also we had a nice revenue stream. =)

After months of torture and wishywashing about, they came up with a plan to unify the (now 7 or 8 smaller companies and 2 big ones) billing systems. After a few more months they scrapped that plan. All this time, we are sitting on our hands, knowing the cobbled together billing system we have could do more than all theirs put together. It couldn't do it all but still we could do a better job of holding them over while they attempt a new plan (none of the smaller companies billing people are in on any planning, keep in mind...)

More months go by and they decide, having a new and exciting unworkable plan, to fire us all. They keep a minimal staff on for a few months (isn't nice to know you will be released 6 months in advance?) to keep things going while the "integration takes place."

In order to get severence packages they made us sign waivers and guarantees that we wouldn't have contact with current employees or try to get our jobs back or work for the company in a consulting role for 1 year.

At 10 months gone, the few who didn't quit are making huge salaries (to keep them from quitting) and our old jobs are up on monster.com. Best of all, they can't get people to take the jobs supporting our old billing systems while they try and finish obsoleting the job they are hiring for since people really aren't that stupid.

Meanwhile, our perl and C code, MySql and Sybase DBs, and mod_perl websites continue to tick along, being maintained by one or two programmers, flawlessly making them money as they slowly alienate more and more customers who can't get anyone on the phone who knows how to fix their billing issues.

Try and guess if I'll take their calls in January? =)

Oh yeah, they would never let us change any root passwords after they bought us so the same one is still there 2 years later, even though they have fired almost everyone who ever installed or managed the boxen!

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

In reply to RE: Dilbert does Perl by extremely
in thread Dilbert does Perl by Ovid

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