[Arthalion]

Heh, I've got one even better than that. An acquaintance of mine was laid off from his programmer/analyst (really sysadmin) job at a major corp, and was asked to train his replacement. After 12 years of running their systems, and turning what began as an ancient IBM 360 mainframe app into the central hub of a now global Sun network, they actually expected him to teach the entire system to an Indian replacement who barely spoke passable English, and to do so in 45 days. In theory, the training would garner him an $8,000 "severance bonus", but he was basically told that a refusal would result in a bad reference.

He trained the guy, but like he said "you can't pack 12 years of hacks, optimizations, and work arounds into 45 days of training". After he quit, the Indian H1-B brought the system down three times in as many months, each time idling over a thousand workers...the guy finally quit in the middle of the third failure claiming that he "couldn't take the stress of the job". They bounced through three new sysadmins over the following six months, none of whom really understood the intricacies of maintaining data integrity when you're synchronizing seven datacenters on four continents, and eventually outsourced the whole thing after giving up on the idea of an in-house sysadmin. The company that they'd outsourced to declared the whole system "unmanageable, unworkable, and outdated" and recommended that they go through a nearly $10 million dollar "upgrade" to optimize their systems.

At that point, the company came back to him and offered $30,000 for a six month project to fully document the databases and systems that he'd developed so that they could be upgraded by this company. When he returned, he discovered that all of the previous IT management had been fired by a new CIO because of their "inept" handling of the transition, and that everyone involved with his layoff was history. After learning that, he pointed out to the CIO that for $10 million, he could sysadmin the entire system for 100 years at $100,000 a year (he'd only been making $55k a year before being laid off). The CIO accepted on the spot.

So in the end, he got his job back, his paycheck was doubled, and the new CIO was awarded a huge bonus for "saving" the company $10 million bucks.

Now THAT'S what I call mismanagement :-\

[cyborg]

Wow they sure learned their lesson. I wonder how many times that same mistake has been repeated by other companies? Wow.

[stylin19a]

You hit the nail on the head. I trained my replacements. I showed them how to press the buttons and I wrote the documentation for the processes>
How do I tell them what i KNOW and how i KNOW when to do.
The cleint can't swallow their pride, and are mired in various outages...sometimes, the lowest bidder is the lowest bidder for a reason.

[m87339]

Now THAT'S what I call mismanagement :-\

Yes -- the idea that any organization would allow itself to get to the point where it is held hostage by one individual is truly mismanagement. There should be rigorous procedures in place and documentation standards and policies to ensure continuity. What if your "hero" won the lottery? The affect on the enterprise would be the same.

The structure should be in place to allow a talented sysadmin to use his/her creative abilities to create procedures to increase efficiency and effectiveness and then turn it over to a stable operational organization. Anthing less suggests that the individual in question has no sense of dicsipline and doesn't care about the enterprise to which they work. They are just hacks who have been able to take a small amount of knowledge and leverage it to make themselves "indespensible."

I have seen these types of "heros" before in my almost 30 years of IT -- I get them fired as soon as possible since they are mavericks who do more harm than good.