#by /u/KetzerMX

[prorevenge]

Hey politician/boss! No IT system for you. Have a good start of year.

Really long, but it's worth it.

First the background. I used to work as an IT assistant for the government (not United States, not saying more) in education, I worked in the coordination of a subsystem for highscool level education focused in creating and administrating new schools in small rural towns, so each school could not have more than 100 students (otherwise, the school was passed to another subsystem). This administration system was new for my state and was only 5 years old, yet it was still not fully recognized (think of it being in betha mode). Also because of that, most of its work and methods were improvised and adapted to fit the way things were.

My state is big and a lot of it has mountains, this means that the furthest school was 20hrs away from the state's capital and the fastest way (which took 5hrs) was taking a light aircraft, (which is expensive considering the low salaries of the teachers). That also means that a lot of the communities didn't have access to internet, some didn't even have light, so my Immediate boss (the supervisor of the IT department) who is a cool and easygoing lady with a degree in software development, made an entire software system from zero to make the job easy for everyone. This way, teachers on remote communities only had to travel to the nearest town with internet and only go to the coordination. Everything ran smooth.

However, the state was too cheap to pay for the hosting and the domain name, so she paid for all of it. Also, since it was not really recognized as a full subsystem our contracts said we were just teachers, so software development was not listed as part of the job (These two details are important later).

Since it is a government system, elections changed everything. The old boss got replaced by a politician who didn't knew how things worked. He immediately started to question how things worked. The flexibility and decentralization were the things that he didn't liked the most since it escaped his control. He started to change things his way but the senior staff are not push-overs and tell him how some of his ideas are bad in a very gentle and well-explained way... he doesn't care and act likes an asshole. Then, as a good ol' politician, he begins to hire "recommended workers" (family and friends of other politicians), which are more malleable. Once they are established, the boss then fires my supervisor and replace it with a recommended worker. He also fires the supervisor of Human resources... who was the husband of my supervisor ... and does this at the end of the year.

Now, being education-related, the start of the year is really busy, so everyone (but the recommended) adviced against it. But boss is a politician, he has experience in administration and he trusts that this new blood will be able to pull it off.

Until the bad news arrived: my supervisor blocked the software so no one could use it unless she is paid for it. The boss is outraged and starts to work in a sue. He starts being an asshole with the old guard for "being complicit", so they quit (around 45% of all the staff) ... including the layer (the only worker in the legal department). He then takes it on my and asks me to rebuild the system, and gives me a week to do so... my speciality is design and front-end so I tell him I can't. A long angry sermon later, I quit.

He sues her, but the demand is really badly redacted and does not proceeds because all of the software was at her name. She only gives back a raw SQL database and that's it.

So the year starts and the teachers are furious that the system is not working, and that they have to handle everything through the institutional mail (which is awful to use in slow internet connections) and had to do several trips to the coordination. The parents are not happy at all either, and we are talking about country folk and indigenous people, not precisely the kind of people you like to mess with.

Chaos followed. The state's secretary of education wasn't happy at all.

tl;dr new boss is asshole fires two very important employees including the developer of the internal system. She blocked the system and the demand of the boss fails. 45% of the most experienced employees quit too. Chaos

(source) story by (/u/KetzerMX)