Employee maliciously complies when told to 'train replacement' ends up keeping job.

Corporate takeovers can ruin a job. New workplace policies, new culture, and mass firings. Look at what Elon Musk did with Twitter. When people are being let go, it's insulting when the higher-ups hire your placement and ask you to train them.

On a popular Reddit thread in the Malicious Compliance Subreddit, one tech employee has to train their replacement, and the replacement is not prepared.

They write:

To keep it short, 15 years ago, I worked for a local computer programming company that made automation software. Our company got bought out by a bigger national company, and after the dust settled, corporate decided they would send a 'liaison' down to our local office. To 'learn how you do things to be a better bridge between offices.'

AKA: 'Hey, 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, but our new corporate overlords had spoken. A month or so later, our 'liaison' fellow is ready to go.

'So, show me the interface!' he said. Oh, that's when we all stopped, looked at each other, and grinned. You see, it took us so long to bring new people up to speed because 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.'

No, we coded everything by hand. Our main program accepted straight-up VB files. Not even scripts, full-on files, and our new friend 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; it's the most common one we use and is about 1,500 lines of code in its 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 just to write the entire thing from scratch. So up here is where we're declaring our global variables.' To our friend's credit, he tried. Oh, he tried for DAYS. And whenever we thought he was about to figure something out, we intentionally switched him to an even worse one.

We hired requiring a computer science degree, six months of on-site gearing up, and another six months of shadowing before we let ANYONE handle a project independently. 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.

We ran that department for five years before the inevitable revolving door of upper management decided to bring in a new 'easier to use' suite. People are STILL kvetching, 'Man, I miss X; it could have done this in half the time.' Instead of a five-man team upkeeping everything, we have multiple departments that still can't manage to fix a broken image link in the new stuff ten years later.'

The internet loves a dunk on management story.

lockinber says:

Brilliant, it just shows the management didn't understand what was happening.

purpleoctopustrolley says:

This happens when managers have no idea how the day-to-day works. All these 'seems like a good idea' ideas make the job harder.

StormBeyondTime says:

I'll give the liaison guy lots of points for doing his best in so many ways while he was there and telling you the truth. And for the latter part, the new upper management didn't sandbox or test the software before pushing it, did they?

Make it so that nobody can do your job then nobody can fire you.