Sometimes, organisations lose their best employees in an attempt to curtail expenses. Taking to X, a Twitter user named Tanuj revealed how an experienced staff engineer was let go in his former company due to an attempt to cut costs. He was laid off unceremoniously and his farewell meeting was just 12 minutes long.
However, karma hit the company sometime later. The payment service started to malfunction. It was then discovered that the engineer was single-handedly keeping the system running.
“Turns out he was manually fixing edge-case data corruption every night for 3 years. Nobody even knew…” he wrote.
The post went viral on the microblogging site and gained more than two million views. One reacted: “The ultimate corporate backfire.
Management fires the most critical asset to make a spreadsheet look good, completely blind to the fact that his invisible, daily manual fixes were the only thing keeping the core database alive.”
The poster however maintained that both the engineer and the company were at fault: “That staff engineer could have done 2 fixes
– fix the issue permanently instead of manual patching
– made his work visible and valuable to the company. May be he had selfish motive to keep that to himself..”
Another commenter also blamed the engineer for never automating the system. “So the staff engineer never automated or even documented a vital piece of upkeep for years and made themselves the single point of failure? Sounds very cool and responsible…” the comment read.
Another remark read: “Classic bus factor. If one person is silently fixing prod every night, that is not heroism, it is missing automation and missing docs…”