I had a guy walk out before lunch the first day. He saw our codebase and noped the fuck out. Best decision he made. To his credit, he went into directors office and said he wouldn’t be coming back.
Tends to be more "don't need the job".
Most of us will go "well this is awful" and start applying elsewhere. If you don't need the money or are someone getting constant offers your options open up to things like that.
Yes. I have a friend who has noped out of several jobs because conditions changed. He doesn't particularly need the money, but likes to do tech stuff for fun. If it's not going to be fun, he gets gone. And he tends to get gone quite quickly.
One example: boss has an all-staff meeting and states "I just fired the level one support people because they all suck--I need all you level two support and developers to start answering the support calls--everybody is now level one support". Friend states in front of 40 people "I won't do it". Boss says "then you're fired". "ok...bye, it's been great, everybody."
> If it's not going to be fun, he gets gone
There's a youtube channel I watch whose motto is "if you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong", and I'm definitely trying to incorporate that into my life.
I worked at a place where a new hire didn't come back from lunch the first day...pissed a few other people in the office too because she was going to pick up lunch for them (and they had already given her the money).
Was working at a large public company in the HQ. It was no real big secret that the company was failing and steaming full speed ahead towards bankruptcy. We'd already had 2 rounds of layoffs and then anyone else with a lukewarm IQ saw the writing on the wall and left.
That left an opening for my team's supervisor role and I applied for it thinking that I could at least get a management credit on my resume while I rode this old girl to the bottom of the sea. They passed me up and went with an outside hire.
I think he was there maybe a month before he realized just how bad he fucked up. He was gone inside of 3 months because some "too good to pass up" offer came up.
I later connected with him on LinkedIn and he confirmed that he started looking like a week after orientation.
When we hired our current developer, he laughed at our code base for our main company software... then recommended we sued the company that wrote it... Thankfully he stuck around
I've had the exact same thing happen at my company: new PHP dev aces all the interview questions/problems, gets hired, goes through induction on the morning of the first day, spends the afternoon reviewing the codebase, calls in the following morning to tell us he's resigning. In fairness, the codebase *was* dogshit. It's now slightly more refined dogshit.
I still don't know the details but I received word to start locking accounts and removing access to someone just moments after I handed her a door access card.
She'd been there maybe only about an hour with her on-boarding partner.
Yeah my record is someone like this. Lasted 1 hour and 10 mins. The commute was much worse than she had anticipated. She mulled it over for the hour while being introduced to everyone and concluded that she wouldn't be able to do it every day. Apologized profusely. Left.
I don't think she instigated it. She seemed pretty happy and chatty when I handed her the card and the email hit my inbox as she was walking out the door. I almost called her back in but decided it wasn't my job to tell her.
Either she alarmed or pissed off her boss during the office walk through (weird because she's pretty chill lead developer) or her background check wasn't finished and started throwing up late flags.
New manager, Day 1 demanded certain s/w be installed on his PC, helpdesk said they will see if they can get it approved, flips out and demands admin privileges to his PC, cusses out the helpdesk. Day 2, 9am meeting with HR. 9:05, please disable new managers account.
> Flipping out on day 1 usually is a good way to get fired.
I wish that happened to one of the managers from 2 jobs ago. His first day was nothing but complaining about his workspace, his monitors, keyboard, mouse, laptop. The whole shebang! Had a message from his manager asking us to swap out various components for him.
We had someone a number of years back, who demanded we give him all of his technology immediately. When we didn't give it to him, he proceeded to contact HR to file a complaint against the entire IT department.
The trouble was, he was still a couple weeks before his start date.
HR, being ever helpful, told us to just get him his equipment.
It took them a couple years to finally realize they screwed up and get rid of him, but those were a couple years of him demanding *fucking everything*.
Doesn't sound like a very good HR department, if they don't realize that someone filing a complaint against an entire department just for following company policy is horseshit.
I'm surprised people do anything on day 1. My last three jobs have been browse in your phone all day for like a month after your orientation until it's go home time.
I’ve watched hires walk in the door and turn around and walk out in less than an hour. Hiring managers didn’t know how to communicate the roles expectations very effectively. “What do you mean I have to work at a location an hour away?” “I have to
Pay for parking?” Gone.
I remember interviewing for a job at the library during college and I asked how parking worked, and they said everyone needs to pay the meters besides directors who get parking spots.
They were, and presumably still are, paying minimum wage.
That's what they told me on my first day. I laughed at that and said that this is a deal breaker. A few hours into my onboarding the HR lady approached me again. They gave me a badge for the companies garage and reduced my in office days to 1-2 per month.
I worked a software startup gig in a downtown west coast city years back. They were this way. There was room in the parking garage downstairs, but they were "holding onto it" for "expected growth." The paid lots nearby were all $250 ish a month. This was 15 years ago. People legit left over it.
Well of course. That’s essentially a $250 net reduction of your wage. I would totally not work somewhere with that ridiculous attitude. I would ask/check during interviewing however…
Totally agree. Only way I found out was word of mouth. I actually wanted the job as it was, believe it or not, walking distance from my place. Ahhh to be young and single and blow half my income on swanky downtown condos!
I've only had one job in my life (Georgetown, Washington DC) where I would have had to pay for parking and the company handled it for the garage on the same block.
Crazy that an employer wouldn't include that (you should ask for it when negotiating salary if you don't see it in your offer though), most parking garages for monthly is not very expensive, usually 100-200 bucks tops. To let a good hire go because of that is truly insane.
EDIT: I'll clarify, the best way to get this setup is to have the org setup and pay for the badge themselves, and that way it isn't taxable income. I only mentioned it as part of "negotiating salary" to mean in terms of asking for it as a part your perks. That's what my company above did for me, I talked to the garage about the spot and then facilitated getting the account setup in their name and form of payment.
If somebody already decided the role isn't for them on day 1 nevermind an hour chances are for the hiring manager screwed up in a big way if they didn't make the basic expectations clear.
I once did three interviews for a job where the office I was interviewing at was a 5 minute drive from my apartment.
I was only 2 years out of college so still pretty green at the time. I assumed (and we all know what they say about that) that the job location was going to be in the building I interviewed in (three times!).
When they sent over an offer letter I noticed that the work location was a different address. It was in a whole other city about 45 minutes down the interstate.
I noped out of that one.
Yeah I had a job change the location on me. Since posting the ad it was decided the location would close/move. They were very clear on that fact though.
Had a guy walked out of the office after ten minutes. Apparently he got into an argument over a parking space - he was using a disabled spot reserved for a specific individual.
A guy would assign tickets to himself, sit on them for a week and then just close them without a resolution or a reply.
His defense was "if the issue was that important, they would reach out again or ask me for an update".
So essentially, the dude did no work whatsoever, everyone including our boss quickly found out and yeah that was it. The impressive part was that it still took 3 months before he got fired.
3 months is quick. I'm jealous of how quickly worthless people are getting let go. It seems like my company it's a minimum of 3 years, they move worthless people around from team to team until there is a RIF.
Here’s a reverse version:
A buddy of mine is a pretty competent systems engineer who moved to a small town for a more relaxed pace and better work life balance. Got hired into a small company doing MSP work. The lead engineer had been at the company for years and must have taken shittysysadmin posts as his personal dev plan. My buddy spent the morning reviewing documentation, tickets, the various code bases being used and asked to meet with the CEO.
The lead engineer got walked right after lunch. Apparently, among many other sins:
A single, very poor password used as the DA and root passwords for all customers.
Unsecured VPN tunnels to all customers with default allow from the office and this dude’s home address.
Credentials hard coded into every script. Every script was basically a for-do SSH loop with a bunch of unchecked shell commands run as root.
Keyloggers on all company devices going back to dudes personal Hotmail account.
There was a lot more, I’ve forgotten it all. It was terrifying to listen to.
I had something like this, except that I was joining the team as a second SA to the guy who had already been there 7 years. Dude knew absolutely fuck all. Within weeks, I had replaced a ton of his "procedures", fixed our broken Exchange DAG (that, according to him, was "working as intended"), thrown out and recreated our DR/BC plan with full testing. There was so much more that I discovered and fixed over time.
Kicker was, he was not let go, even after I exposed his woeful incompetence (and I wasn't even trying to do so, just trying to do my job). Management were soft as shit and kept him on for another... wait for it... 7 fucking years. This is even though our manager was well aware that this dude literally made shit up as he went along. Not only that, but since I started and actually began fixing people's issues (he would try to fix stuff, give up, and tell them "it's supposed to be like this" or "it is what it is, it can't be fixed so you'll just have to live with it"), the user base realised he was a charlatan and actively avoided calling him for support, going straight to me instead.
Guy hated my guts since day one and made my life a misery wherever possible. The outcome? Over that 7 years, I eventually became his manager. I was the one who had to put him on a PIP and fire him afterwards, when he inevitably couldn't deliver. At which point, he openly admitted to having lied on his resume 14 years prior and completely blagged his way into and through the job. Spoiler: we all knew that already, mate.
Good fucking riddance.
Wow, the irony is, it's like a few other stories here where the new guy comes in, says he can do it better and all that. But your guy is actually right.
A client that used us for upper tier support hired an in-house tech to help with all the typical user issues. When I met him he was touting all his expertise in networking and all things IT you won't be needed here soon, blah blah
I get a call later that week from them saying nothing works, no access to Internet or server resources by the whole office. Found out he put an old unmanaged switch at his desk and looped a cable in the same switch. He was gone the next day.
I always tell the new green techs that they haven’t been in IT until they’ve accidentally shut down the network. I worked with one guy who did the same thing and when I found and corrected it said “no way that caused it! These switches are smart enough that they shut that down! See?” Then plugged the cable back in. The calls from the nearby desks immediately shouting that the “internet” (network) was down were not amusing. The look on his face was.
> I always tell the new green techs that they haven’t been in IT until they’ve accidentally shut down the network.
Years ago I was visiting a client site, large government department.
I was in the server room doing something on the console. The process completed and I had some time so I stretched out in the chair to chill and promptly kicked the UPS off, knocking both servers offline. I was in the middle of getting them back up when the office manager came running in, saw me working and was like "thank god you were here" because he just assumed it was a server crash. Good times.
I worked IT in the Air Force. At the time, I was a system administrator for the base and I had 3 coworkers and our team needed one more. We ended up hiring someone that was working at one of the high-schools in town. He was kind of quiet, but picked up things quick and we all got along.
After about 1 month of getting him up to speed our unit commander and chief come find him and take him away. We all had no idea why. Come to find out that the FBI was investigating him for underage content.
We had a guy working in our tech config room and one day some guys in suits showed up with management and took him away.
They were Secret Service agents. This goof had color-copied a $100 bill and used it to buy a drink in our building's cafeteria.
Like when I was a kid I remember kids trying it with like $1's and crinkling up the paper to try to make it seem softer in like elementary school. The cashier who took it had a mental disability.
Worth noting our business is a high-theft environment, not retail but the kind of things where workers have to go through metal detectors on the way out to make sure they're not walking off with things. We have 9 figure contracts with security vendors for video at all our locations, including our corp HQ.
Stupid stupid stupid.
Secret service doesn't fuck around when it comes to that. Even in my little podunk high school, someone tried to use fakes in the vending machine and someone got a very stern talking to by the Secret Service agents.
Many printers imprint unique fingerprints pointing to which printer the item was printed on, whether it was money or not. This is a legal requirement for printers to be manufactured, and it's pretty well documented (so easy for you to find out about). That can, at times, help track-down where it was printed and sometimes by whom. It's pretty wild honestly, but the second hand market breaks that sourcing chain kinda easily depending on what exactly you're printing.
Now if you're needing to print IR-ink things get even more wild. I had to set that up for a prior employer once so only certain people could print on them. And that's on top of the unique marking I mentioned above.
Vending machine operators don't like being stiffed by fake money, especially when one kid decides to tell their friends about the "hack" to get free drinks.
Not my story but one of a friend of mine:
At one of his first jobs out of college, his supervisor ended up *having a seat* with Chris Hansen. Between the arrest and the airing, nobody besides for management knew why the guy was gone.
Friend was watching Dateline one night, and there he was...
I'll bite, was the IT manager for a small company for about 10 years.
Guy was running his business off the company equipment, buying/reselling motorcycle parts. CEO confronted him about it, he said >!fuck you!< to the CEO and had to immediately disable his account with all his customer info on it. whoops.
Indian guy pretended to be an expert in a line of engineering software that does fluid dynamic simulation. The interview was a task to complete something difficult in the software and he seemed to pass with flying colors. We later learned he outsourced the job. First day they gave him the backlog of work and he had 0 clue on how to do it. Was walked out pretty hastily.
Big dude showed up to interview in a suit and passed all our background checks and was really good at programming. Offered a job to start right away. Next day shows up in a dress with painted nails and puts a picture of themself in a fursuit as a icon for skype and email. My bosses were irish catholics and walked them out of the building within the first hour. The company got sued for discrimination.
CEO got a divorce with his wife because he was seeing the HR director on the side. The front desk receptionist then proceeded to hit on the CEO with the HR director present at a company party, he welcomed the advances. They got into a fight and the CEO ended up firing the receptionist.
Not fired, but we paid a guy to move his family of 6 across the country after a big sob story. He worked for us for about 8 hours then took the company laptop with all our source code information and went to a competitor.
I miss that job. And that's how I got into cybersecurity
>"Big dude showed up to interview in a suit and passed all our background checks and was really good at programming. Offered a job to start right away. Next day shows up in a dress with painted nails and puts a picture of themself in a fursuit as a icon for skype and email. My bosses were irish catholics and walked them out of the building within the first hour. The company got sued for discrimination.This just
Would be funny if this was his thing. Gets hired by company, goes fully furry and then get fired and collect the settlement. Moves on to the next company to repeat it.
I heard of a guy who worked construction and did this with overtime. He would agree to work for straight wages over 40 hours a week, boss would happily agree, and then he'd file a complaint with the state dept. of labor.
An honest-to-God professional troll. Incredible.
No doubt he had carefully researched the backgrounds of the bosses and knew he was set for a solid payday.
Linux guy who didn’t understand sudoers files or basics of managing Linux without the help of a management suite that would do it all for him. He interviewed well and had Certs, in the real world though, he was completely helpless
I'm more used to the variant where they blame their lack of ability on the fact that it is open source.
I've literally heard that in the past few weeks, and as a bonus, they blamed the wrong software.
> Big dude showed up to interview in a suit and passed all our background checks and was really good at programming. Offered a job to start right away. Next day shows up in a dress with painted nails and puts a picture of themself in a fursuit as a icon for skype and email. My bosses were irish catholics and walked them out of the building within the first hour. The company got sued for discrimination.
Don't leave us hanging! How'd that lawsuit play out?
This was in Connecticut so he had a lot of support from the state. I had to put legal holds on the accounts and put forward all communications on record in a trial. I don't know the exact settlement, but I think the company lost around 600k, so however much that was divvied between the lawyer and the client is unknown to me. Pretty good for 1 day of work
Can you tell us what his motivation was? Did he do it intentionally to sue or just hid his true self for the interview to avoid not getting hired for it?
>Indian guy pretended to be an expert in a line of engineering software that does fluid dynamic simulation. The interview was a task to complete something difficult in the software and he seemed to pass with flying colors. We later learned he outsourced the job. First day they gave him the backlog of work and he had 0 clue on how to do it. Was walked out pretty hastily.
SW Engineer here. I got multiple invites on LinkedIn doing exactly this. They apply somewhere with my credentials and someone in India does the job. I just do the interviews. I would get a cut.
Heard about this one
got an email he couldn't open as AV blocked it, tried the web access, ditto, couldn't turn off AV. So went into server room, and used a server to open it
it had a virus
he was gone
I feel like the OP's question was more about duration of tenure, and I don't have any interesting stories of those, but I had a 0-100 like yours that was pretty insane.
I had this guy who was working a t2-ish support role that we discovered had a development background and I was running an internal solutions team and was trying to get the budget for him to come over to my side. He started putting in more and more hours on my team and I kept asking for the budget but kept getting stonewalled. He said he needed more money and what he was doing was worth it, and I agreed.
Nothing about his attitude/demeanor up to this point had been any more than, "if they can't make it happen, I'd rather just go back to being a tech." I finally got the two partners to agree to a negotiation sitdown with the guy and they take him into a conference room (I think they were dialed in IIRC), talk for a while, then he emerges from the room, walks up to my desk and (clearly very upset) says, "this is bullshit, if these fuckers are going to treat me this way, I'll just put a bomb in the code on a deadman's switch!" And then goes out to leave.
Regardless of how I felt about him or his situation or how they were treating him, I didn't really like that threat. This was like on a Friday and I had PTO Monday, but I was told I needed to go in on Monday and handle the termination.
The cherry on top, though, was it turned out there were some changes made to our GPO about a week prior that had prevented his user from remoting into his dev VM and he hadn't mentioned this to anyone. So, for like five days leading up to his blowup, he had just been sitting at his desk pretending to work and couldn't have coded the logic bomb anyway.
I also have another 0-100 story. Same company shortly after the incident above, we had a sister startup that our two partners, CIO, IT manager, and I were a part of. We were building/selling a UCaaS type thing.
In the other company, I was still in the solutions role which also included things like business analysis, analytics, some light DBA crap, among other responsibilities (gotta love smaller companies). I had been trying to get some of our ops managers more involved in performance analysis for their teams and wanted to give them all Excel. The partners weren't ready to go to 365 because someone years ago left an EC2 running and they got fucked or something along those lines. Turned out we have a volume key for Office 2010 which was good enough for what I was trying to do.
I asked the IT manager how many activations we were allowed, and he said he didn't know since only CIO had access to the volume license portal. CIO said we had plenty. Like 200. Our entire company was a bit shy of 200, so he told me to not worry about it. I proceeded with the required installs (\~20) and all the ops managers were very happy. Until the installs started deactivating.
IT and I go back to the CIO and ask about all the deactivations since we're now fielding the same questions from all the ops people. He explains that he had recently created a firewall rule that must be blocking the phone home to the activation servers and (again) to not worry about it. We had recently switched from ASAs to Fortigates and he had done the bulk of the configuration, but this still didn't sit right with us, so we login to review. We found nothing that suggested we were blocking anything like that. The config was pretty flat, and we recognized everything as rules we knew about.
We thought about it for a while and figured there was no way CIO was the only person to have access to the licensing portal since he was technically a contractor. We asked the managing partner if he had access. He said he used the late former CEO's account for vendor things like this. He failed to mention that when we changed our domain, and he demanded any expense related to it be eliminated. Thankfully we still owned the domain, so we spun up an inbox using the dead CEO's alias and did a password reset. We had licenses for tons of MSFT products including Office 2010, but it didn't really look like we had 200...
About this time over at the sister company, one of our clients called us because the system wasn't working. Calls weren't terminating and everything was just a fast busy. The PBX was working just fine, AWS wasn't having any issues, we could ping, other PBXs were just fine, their site was fin, so the next step was to look at the trunking provider. We discovered two crazy things: we had every single one of our customers on the same fucking trunking account, and it appeared to be thousands of dollars in arrears.
We escalated to the partners and went back to the Office license issue. IIRC, we determined we only had something like five licenses, but by now more people in the company were using it, not just the ops managers. I had been trying to get us on 365 for a while and even had a very small pilot running with just senior leadership, but now I was going to need to ask for that to be like sextupled in size and this company was very cheap. While we were working through that, one of the partners calls our office frantic, "you guys need to shut CIO out of everything RIGHT THE FUCK NOW! Drop everything and lock him out! No email, no servers, no VPNs, firewalls, vendor accounts nothing everything goes down now! If any of our sister company clients call you guys for anything you tell them you don't work there any longer and direct them to CIO's cellphone!"
We start locking accounts and changing passwords. Of course this was also a Friday. I called him back to confirm that we completed that and asked what happened. After IT manager told the partner about the trunking account, the partner called CIO to ask if billing was fucked up because some people were having issues with the system. CIO apparently immediately went ballistic and started threatening to sue each and every one of us for reasons. It later turned out that the sister company (which was primarily CIO's operation) wasn't doing too well financially because I forget what, but he had been keeping secrets.
Monday rolls around and the partners ask me to take over the CIO's responsibilities in the interim while they try to find someone else.
Wednesday arrives and a process server serves our receptionist with a giant folder of scary looking shit. One of the partners happened to be in the office that day so he takes it and then comes to me and explains we are being accused by the Business Software Alliance of using pirated or otherwise unauthorized copies of Office 2010.
That launched a year worth of quarterly self-audits and quarterly payments of $25,000 and an immediate move to 365 for the whole company. Which was now my problem and by now the only help I had in the tech department was IT manager and the fines destroyed any chance of hiring help, or giving us raises.
Fucking fantastic situation.
Similar, but it was a helpdesk guy with local admin who got tired of AV blocking his collection of NES ROMs he brought in to play on his downtime. So he uninstalled it since he had rights.
About 30 minutes later a director of IT came stomping over yelling "WHERE IS " and *ripped* his PC out from under his desk and threw it across the room. His computer was hitting our network shares with thousands of intrusions a second, which thankfully got stopped by other security. I think the only reason the director didn't do the same to the guy was because there were too many witnesses.
I used to work at a casino on the help desk. Random tasks and nothing having to do with the machines on the floor just normal password resets or vdi resets. A new data base admin was hired. She went through her 1 week new hire training. She lasted exactly 4 hours. She deleted a whole SQL gaming db that had not been backed up and it was the production database. She was there and after lunch she was gone. Never seen anyone walked out so quickly in my life.
Yikes. Was the person responsible for not backing up prod also walked out? Because it sounds like they should have been, that was an accident waiting to happen.
The quickest I personally witnessed was just over a week. We had hired a network engineer and for some reason he thought he was management. He was looking at our ticket board and asking where we were at with our tickets. We thought maybe he was waiting for something because he wanted to work on the ticket but nope. We confirmed with our IT director that he was not management and had no place acting like our manager. He was a network specialist and that's it.
We had a departmental meeting on a Friday afternoon, about 15 of us in the conference room and this guy would not stop talking over Senior Management. A manager would start to say something and this guy would cut him or her off because he didn't like what they were saying or he thought he could put it better. He was warned multiple times to keep his mouth shut, and he didn't.
By Monday afternoon he had been terminated
New contractor-to-hire helpdesk provided by TEKsystems was caught by security supposedly scanning our network on his second day of work using a rubber ducky.
Immediately fired.
Fuck teksystems. I used them once, most regrettable. I was a ui designer and was heading into UX. They placed me at a job where I was given heavy JS tasks and I had zero clue what I was doing. It was embarrassing. Only upside for me was it was all remote work and the team was so massive I went unnoticed for 7 months did prob 8 hours of real work but was required to bill 60 hours a week. So I did and got paid for it. Contract was up and I left and told teksystems to eat shit and never call me again.
USB device that acts like a HID (human interface device; ex: Keyboard)- it is actually a full computer and can execute programs and code…bypasses most antivirus because the OS thinks it is a mouse or key board
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/usb-rubber-ducky-penetrationtesting/
Years ago the place I worked had **just** hired a new sales guy. While the sales manager was giving him the general tour he was introduced to a coworker of Japanese descent ... and this idiot decided to use his hands to squint his eyes and say "me so Chinese"
... the sales manager just asked him to follow him back to the HR department so they could tear up everything they had just signed.
This isn't funny at all but I couldn't help but laugh. Not at the joke but at the sheer stupidity for someone to do that and think it wouldnt be an issue.
I always wonder what goes through racists/sexists/homophobes etc heads when they do stuff like this and think nobody will care.
Showed up high af and then started trying to argue about the processes and how we did things to our in front of the site lead and project engineers in charge.
Walked him out immediately.
We hired a bunch of contractors for a big migration project in a factory environment. First half of the day was safety training, getting hard hats, vests, glasses, etc. After lunch we had them start pulling PCs and deploying. One of the guys took out a pc and an hour later was missing. Not answering his cell, no contact at all. We had to have the whole factory searched twice, all hands (it was 14 acres under roof). No sign of the guy at all.
That evening, we get a call from the recruiter telling us the guy just decided to go home. Took all of his safety gear and the PC with him.
He gave it back, and the safety gear the next day. Used the excuse he felt unsafe and anxious and had to leave with an anxiety attack. It was enough that the higher ups didn’t press it and let it go, even though they were pretty pissed.
Yknow, wouldn't surprise me if that was true.
I've had severe panic attacks a few times and the irrational fear and impulse to "escape" is overwhelming.
Wouldn't be out of the ordinary (for someone with panic attacks) to bail first and realise the consequences afterwards.
Guy got a junior position at my work and instead of spending time learning how we do IT, he was poring over the employee handbook and all the HR materials like he was studyin' for an exam. Since I was one of the senior folks he was supposed to shadow, I had the opportunity to ask if he was worried about HR. He told me that there was always a loophole somewhere in every company's policies, and he was lookin' for it to exploit it to his benefit. He them went onto brag about how he'd scammed a couple of his previous employers and even the city he lived in (Something about the city law says all parking bollards have to be painted in florescent colors, but he found a couple at a local park that weren't painted, so intentionally rode his bicycle into one after dark and then threatened to sue the city. They cut him a check to shut him up.) He was lookin' to do the same thing at my work.
I went straight to the Director and advised her to cut him loose. He was gone the next day.
We hired a guy who had been NYPD, retired after 20 years and went to IT school. We had no problem with newbs, we happily sent people to training. He was hired as user support staff for a “remote” office. Actually corporate headquarters and our division provided coverage.
We also had a ticketing system. All calls, and I do mean ALL calls, had to be logged because we supported multiple offices and often had help desk staff cover other offices, including the one Mr police guy was at.
Well he refused to use the ticketing system. He wrote all calls on a white board. Remember the tv show Homicide? Yeah just like that. So how is somebody a state away supposed to read the whiteboard??? Our boss told him this was not an option and he disagreed.
So the boss was a psycho bitch on wheels and took him out behind the woodshed so to speak. He quit the next day. We were all relieved.
> So the boss was a psycho bitch on wheels
Oh boy, memories of my early career. People who manage helpdesks, field service or other support either have incredibly thick skin, anger issues or are just plain insane. It must be a combo of dealing with Karen/Ken customers all day AND dealing with some of the goofballs who work for you also. L1 helpdesk is lit-rally one step above driving the espresso machine at Starbucks, both pay and expectations wise. You need to really be tough to deal with the revolving door and the combo of great troubleshooters, idiots, newbies and customers.
I can relate to this so much in a completely unorthodox way. Was a paramedic for 12 years, had breakdown, company offers me a transition into a totally new role. Nobody knew what I would get, so I made a resume and a general interests list. I put something like “excellent with computers” in the lightest sense possible. More like “I know how to use Microsoft office, email, and I’m like 30 so I understand how to USE computers”. Well, I got offered a job doing data entry, which quickly turned into an unofficial tech support job.
Our real tech guys are understaffed, overworked and can’t help you in a moments notice, that’s where I *somehow* come in.
I’ve taken so much shit from employees when I can’t figure out a technical problem in 5 minutes, cause I have to google a million things and cross my fingers.
One day I had the privilege of bumping into one of the IT guys I’ve spoken on the phone with a number of times to get him to help me help someone else. Dude just smirked at me, and not in a dickish way, kind of like an older brother would when you do something minor like a cartwheel.
If it wasn’t for Reddit, I wouldn’t be able to do anything at my incredibly weird job.
Thank you to all you beautiful IT people and thanks for also making me laugh at your comments
First guy deleted his boss's accounts on server and management tools to prevent boss from granting access to a new hire.
Another guy refused to allow endpoint management tools on his work laptop. He was gone within two days.
To be honest it's on them for giving him a laptop WITHOUT the endpoint management software.
Now if it was a personal machine I'd agree, company could pound sand or give me a work machine.
If for some reason my job said I needed to install EMS outside of a vdi on my personal computer I'd laugh at them, if I started a job where that was the requirement, I would be working through hyper v
i hate working on remote VDIs, way slower than developing locally (germany doesn't have great internet), but we get work devices and no BYOD as it should be
I'll never install managed work profile software on personal devices, that's a no go
This goes back to my field service days.
The MSP I worked at also did domestic PC setups for some of the Aussie retailers, internet services providers, etc. Back then, customers usually paid with a card, though we would also have to handle cash... so much cash.
Said cash had to be deposited in the office safe within 48hrs of receiving, which the manager would then bank.
A new employee starts - things seem okay. His admin skills are on point, networking skills are solid, and is getting great customer review scores, hitting targets and earning pretty much every performance bonus on offer 🤑
There was just one problem. His cash wasn't making it to the office safe.
In less than 1 month this bloke went from being our newest shooting star employee to arrested fellon.
We started compulsary police record checking from about that time onwards.
In my experience these are the same people who will assign you a ticket (with no warning, usually, just stealthily dropped in your queue) they can’t figure out after doing 0 legwork or not understanding how level 2/escalation works. If they succeed at higher levels they also become the people who check other’s queues and jump down someone’s throat if they don’t understand the resolution the tech put in no matter how serviceable it was. I saw one of these people get hopping mad because she tried to take over a ticket a tech was actively working on, at the user’s desk, then it got resolved with something like “issue resolved - password reset and user was able to log in.” Said tech had a fucking fit that she didn’t understand how the issue was resolved. Just like.. mind your own queue and chill, dude. She wound up getting walked off site for behavior like that every day.
I’ve seen it more than a few times and all these people were similar in attitude. “That’s not my job, so it’s yours.”
You are literally so spot on. Usually she’ll send me a screenshot out of the blue with no supporting information or marks on the screenshot. Only when I go “and???” does she then give me info. Still surprised she’s with us even though she basically lied about her experience and still to this day says “A&D” when talking about Active Directory.
Guy made a comment about not liking Brasilian people because they bring gayness into the workplace (on a Teams chat that included a number of managers). Got fired the next day after an anonymous report.
I used to be an IT Recruiter - got a guy hired as a senior dev ifor the Social Security Administration. Set to make just shy of $200k per year. Walked him into the building, introduced him to his manager in person, and he was fired by the time I made it back to my office 25 minutes away. The manager (35ish year old woman) showed the new hire to his desk, and gave him her contact info. He immediately sent her a photo of his dick. The amount of groveling I had to do after that was astounding lol. All the guys references checked out - absolutely no clue what was going through his head.
> absolutely no clue what was going through his head.
If this dude was going to get $200K from the SSA, guaranteed he's some sort of obscure-tech wizard, like the only one who knows how to work on some esoteric piece of mainframe software they use. Those guys sometimes...don't get out much. Having your female boss give you contact info may have been very much misinterpreted. Amazing that he went from new employee to full on creeper so quickly though!
I heard a similar story from someone I know who works in healthcare IT...there's some really cobwebby corners in those tech stacks and a few of these wizards exist...and some cross the line.
You are correct about him, he was a COBOL dev. He seemed relatively normal, but obviously wasn't. Needless to say he was blacklisted from our company. Not sure if he was from the government side, but I'd imagine he was at least from the SSA.
On site consultant. Day 1 sent to the customers site, the customer was government.
10am or so the phone call comes from the client saying they had removed him from site and we need to go google his name.
Convicted drug smuggler who avoided jail due to claiming he had end stage cancer or something.
Had similar new guy hired for 24/7 lvl 1 NOC role. Showed up first day, not 2nd. Was unreachable, recruiter let us know he didn't realize he was going into 24/7 roster and taking calls.
Saw something similar about 10 years ago, but he did quit in person, half way through his 3rd day. On day 2 he complained about how he didn't have Visio installed by default because "I want to spend most of my time doing network design", and on the 3rd day he quit because there was "too much to learn" (someone showed him our internal tools like the client DB and monitoring system)
At an MSP - Guy came in on the first day, demanded all the admin passwords / admin access for everything. Was told no.
He stormed into HR to complain. HR / management sent him packing shortly afterwards.
Some time ago on a DoD IT contract that requires 8570 cert. Joe Sample had his .PDF of the cert, got hired. The verification code wouldn't validate. Turned out, Joe Sample photoshopped his 8570 certification. Was released within the week.
OK, something like that almost happened to me! I was told in my interview I needed an 8570 but the contractor I worked through said I'd have 90 days after hire to earn a Security+. Day 1 I was asked for my Sec+. I said "I have 90 days per Ms. Williams at tech outsourcing company". My DoD site manager said "nope, she wrong. Need it now" Several phone calls and meetings over the next 24 hours. DoD site manager's boss didn't wanna wait another four weeks to advertise and interview again. He said "OK, you have two weeks to earn a Security+. Meanwhile, we will advertise your position. Good luck." I spent the next nine days cramming, 10 hours a day. Day 10 I called him as I emailed my CompTIA certificate and my ID number. Boss and his boss were impressed that I earned a Security+ in ten days. Only reason I left that job was because no one could guarantee my contract would be renewed. Am still friends with my former manager there.
I'm not sure who has what leeway. I've seen promising new-hires get 90days-6mo to acquire their 8570. I think some DoD contractors have more creative ways of onboarding employees like give them non-contract work while they paper up.
Sounds like you stepped up to the challenge w/o resorting to forgery. --for realizies --respect/congrats.
Quickest was two weeks. Guy did a speed run of all the greatest hits; fell asleep in a meeting, invited a female coworker to have a threesome with his and his gf (including pics to share), was generally a dick and refused to do calls/hardware config. We actually used his name as a metric for how long you’d been there. Let’s say his name was Jimmy.
I lasted about 75 jimmy’s. Not bad.
But other than that, we’ve had morons take a whole store down, refuse to do calls because of social anxiety (why’d take a help desk role then?) and one who screamed at my boss for asking him to come in for the hybrid role he signed up for, then blaming it on his diabetes and low blood sugar.
That last one became an inside joke. Any time one of us would get stressed, we’d buy each other a coke and tell them their diabetes is acting up (we weren’t exactly the most HR friendly team, but we -were- pros when we needed to be).
But yeah, I’ve seen a lot. IT is so bizarre, because if you just -do the job- you are seen as a paragon of hard work, when I really do all my work in half a day and play games lol.
CFO called up a relatively junior helpdesk agent asking why his PC didn't work. CFO was told that the PDF labelled "invoice" he'd just opened had malware in it so we'd had to isolate his PC.
CFO flipped his lid, demanded to have his PC re-enabled or he'd see that the helpdesk agent never worked in this industry again, blah blah. (also our ticketing system literally had some automatic big flashing text for CFO tickets saying something like "just do whatever this guy says"). The terrified helpdesk agent temporarily re-enabled the PC so the CFO could grab a couple of important files.
10mins later the helpdesk agent was fired on the spot for going against the malware isolation policy.
Hilariously, one of the files that the CFO rescued from the PC was the "invoice" PDF, despite being aware that it was infected. He managed to infect another two PCs, "just in case" it had some real information in it, virus be damned.
IMO it was on the helpdesk manager. He actually watched the agent do the whole thing without interjecting once. Then when the agent finished, helpdesk manager fired him.
It was almost like he was looking for excuses to fire him, except that made no sense because we were really understaffed at the time. Maybe he fucked his wife or something.
>> ticketing system \[...\] automatic big flashing text for CFO tickets \[...\] "just do whatever this guy says"
> terrified helpdesk agent temporarily re-enabled the PC
> helpdesk agent was fired on the spot
Why can a L1 call boy re-enable an infected PC? CFO and the fucker who created that big flashing text are still employed I guess?
Before covid, guy fell asleep in front of our boss during training. OK, boss is a good guy. Gives him a break.
Second day, they also fell asleep during training... They went home come afternoon. They were picked up by their mom. They weren't all that young, either.
We had a guy go in on a Saturday for server room maintenance. He stopped responding about halfway through and was later found on the floor, passed out with numerous empty bottles
Hired a guy to handle crystal reports (20 years ago). He seemed to not produce and kept having insurmountable issues that wasn’t his fault. The Director told me he wasn’t actually working all this time, didn’t know what he was doing but not in CR. So I suspected he had embellished his resume and sat down with him and said let’s write a report.
So he clicked around and knew the gig was up. He stands up and says “What did that son of bitch tell you.” I just sat there, “What do you think he said?” He packed up his personal stuff and walked out. Never heard from him again.
An MSP Sales Guy (on his second day) was doing, what I can only assume, meth in the bathroom.
I pulled him out and sent him home. Owner sent him a term notice the following day.
manager at first suggested us follow a process/procedure for new hires. tech did not listen to him and went his own way, the old way. manager caught the incorrect setup and mentioned to go do it the new way. he refused, and then there was back and forth arguing. tech then got louder and shouted, i was in the room as an intern so i packed up and left since it was just about closing time. as i walked out i saw the COO around the corner and she heard everything.
next week i was no longer an intern and I replaced the tech. If you have disagreements then don’t hang your dirty clothes. work it out with your management and close the fucking door
CSB here.
I got hired at an MSP. First few months were rough. Any question you asked you got a blank stare. Or you'd get I donno did you google it? And I took those lumps and stopped asking. Productivity went down but I thought hey if they won't help me I will just do what I can and update my resume. Over time this lessoned. I was welcomed eventually and after proving to 2 Sr Sys Admins WHY you'd create a global security group and nest in the domain local security group I was given a bit more leeway.
One of my co-workers was appallingly terrible to work with. He'd openly mock others he felt smarter than. He'd openly criticize in front of others and berate simple mistakes. Just bad all around.
We got a new ops manager and this jerk(the bad co-worker) adjusted folder permissions on a major client. Which opened the FINANCE folder for all employees and they were understandably irate. He called em and said he was working on it. He fixed it eventually and they wanted a FULL dress down on the outrageous issue.
He mocked the Ops manager and told him to mind his business. The Ops manager was only trying to calm the situation and this jerk got up and told him off in front of us all.
He'd been there 10 years!! And in the snap of a finger in front of us all he said XXXXX pack your stuff you no longer work here.
HAHAHA was such an awesome experience to see the self-proclaimed know-it-all get canned!
Onboarded a contract developer from an agency and gave him access to our code repositories. A few hours later, a frontend dev called me asking for advice on if the new contractor's behavior could be considered sexual harassment and showed me a recording of their onboarding meeting / screenshare with him. Among other concerning things (uTorrent, Tor Browser, inappropriate desktop wallpaper that was *definitely* not associated with their agency), the recording showed his local environment constantly redirecting to NSFW sites and him claiming our code was responsible.
Turned out contractor's 'agency-issued device' was a personal gaming laptop riddled with malware and a prolific quantity of porn. The agency later discovered he was running an image of his agency-issued device in a VM, but he would do the majority of his work on his personal host system. His access was revoked mid-call.
Servers set to reboot overnight, network boot was configured as the primary boot source. New second line engineer added servers to a client imaging container.
One unattended xml file and 24 hours later, all servers were imaged with Windows 10 LTSB.
He was the scapegoat for the IT manager who was saving his ass in front of the college board of directors.
Didn’t see out his first week.
We had a contractor who had been with us 6 months and was about to become official employee. On the day of being hired, Said contractor reboots phone system for whole company in mid afternoon, does not even do clean reboots, does both a/b side near same time. Whole org loses all active calls. Contactor who was going to be signing hiring papers is now fired and escorted out before 4pm.
Large manufacturer. IT headquarters located onsite at largest production facility. MSP brought in new resident contractor for onsite support. Level 2 field work mostly. Not the most technical candidate but whatever there's room to grow and learn. Couple days of onsite training is mostly "follow facility rules and you're termination-proof. Job as long as you want it. Last termination involved a firearms issue."
There's a train that circles the plant, tracks run between the two IT buildings, a short walk from each other. No biggie, you're on the clock getting paid to chill and surf reddit until train passes if it's ever an issue. Day 1 post-training: cleared for full plant access. New dude has no chill and climbs over train between two cars while it's in slow roll in full view of site security.
Site security walks him offsite and de-badges him. Company bans him. MSP fires him.
They hired a new Marketing guy without putting him through our standard basic computer knowledge test. Dude couldn't fucking use a computer at all. Was out the door after the first week when I showed management that he had put in more tickets in a single week than the entirety of the rest of the staff in the last 8 months.
Dude was nice enough, but you shouldn't take a job doing digital marketing if you can't even open the start menu, let alone figure out how to open a browser on your own.
Bank suffered a disaster at the hands of a spiteful former employee.
CEO brought in a consulting company to assess, and he asked me to come help out (I had worked for him, he had only started with this new bank a few weeks prior, and trusted me so paid me as an independent contractor to make sure the consulting company was doing what they needed to do.)
Lead consultant came in on a Monday, goal was to assess then schedule the rest of the team to come do the work to rebuild.
I come after I finish my 9-5 to see what’s up. I get here at 5:30. Within an hour I discover:
1) the consultant had removed the VPN appliance “to make sure the ex-employee can’t get back in”. The VPN device was also the firewall/router. And they weren’t using NAT. The entire org was live on the open internet. It’s a bank.
2) he saw all the blinking lights on the switch rack and decided “there must be collisions” so he started unplugging and reseating cables randomly without keeping track of what was where. Some people couldn’t print anymore, others couldn’t get to the internet, others couldn’t reach the exchange server, others couldn’t reach the mainframe.
3) the consultant had added himself to the Board of Directors email distribution list. With his personal email. “So I can make sure he email system is working while I’m at home”
By 7pm his contract was terminated
Me. Overdosed two days before starting a new job while out celebrating getting said job. I woke up two days later in the hospital having missed the first day and had to explain I wouldn’t be able to make it to training that week. Everything was setup and ready to go for me to start.
I’m now 9 months clean, and have a much better job than the one I was originally going to have. Don’t do drugs kids.
Remote worker. Day 1, boss remotes into his computer to help with something. Boss notices an active LogMeIn session and goes, "what's that about?". Boss's connection drops and we never hear from the guy.
The only assumption we could make is that he outsourced himself and it was the "contractor" on his computer.
At an old workplace of mine, we hired a new Senior Linux Admin. The first day, he asked what SSH was. I have absolutely no idea how he got past the interview.
It makes you wonder whether the guy was really oblivious in the interview process or the hiring manager really screwed up in the interview process to not make it clear the expectations of the role. The guy may have technically been fired, but it sounds more like he quit because the role wasn't what he wanted to do. In cases like that where somebody quits or effectively quits in the first week due to deciding it isn't for them either they found a better job and didn't want to outright say that or some aspect of the hiring process failed.
I helped with hiring a guy, not the best but seemed capable of the job. He started on a monday, he didn't last until mid-day wednesday.
For one thing, day fucking ONE dude comes in and starts spouting nasty shit about gay people at full conversational volume. Office manager was in earshot and gave me a "you serious with this guy?" look.
My manager wanted to give him another shot- that would have been *it* had it been my call...
Tuesday, he was 4 hours late.
Wednesday, he walks in, and decides to start the day with a honest to god racist "joke." That was it. In a couple hours he was out.
Dude was cartoonishly bad at being professional, and I don't really have a high bar. But *fuck.*
I used to work for a company that provided SaaS software and services to state governments and the US federal government. Network admin starts Monday morning.
By 10am, he's telling us all about how he's a sovereign citizen and does all the crazy shit they do. He doesn't believe in taxes, uses "non-road diesel" in his truck, etc. He apparently had several active lawsuits involving the state we lived in (not sure who was suing who).
When we come back from lunch, he was gone. Our boss overheard the commentary from him, said something to HR, and he was out.
I guess it's a bad idea to be anti-government and work for the government.
"I'm not commuting, I'm travelling! Am I being detained??"
Having worked with a lot of ex-military and government employees, you'd be surprised how many fit into this category. That's totally ironic, especially for the military ones who were quite literally owned by the government they hate for 8 or more years, told what to do, where to be, etc.
Not fired, but quit. Three successive heads of IT were hired for a company where most of the IT team (the ones who didn't need them for visa sponsorship etc) and developers had left after the previous head of IT left after a dispute with the clueless young lady wife of the owner who had retired and let her run the business. They had conned people by not letting on that the department they were being hired to run, which was absolutely critical to the business, had imploded and most people had left, until their first day on the job, and for some reason thought people would stay.
15 minutes after he (the Contractor) walked out on rebuilding a WinServer 2000 system and said he was going to lock me out (I was the Controller and internal IT admin). I called the President and the personal friend of the President who referred him and he was gone.
Not the same as a hire, but nobody threatens Management and gets to stay. (Probably true anywhere!)
Not quickest in getting fired, like only working 1 day and getting fired, but the quickest I've seen someone get fired from a fuck up was: We service computers at a prison among other things. So you can't bring certain things onto the prison grounds, like more than $20 in your pocket, no cigarettes, no mary jane, etc because the government thinks you are trying to smuggle in contraband. Anyway, Employee left a Marlboro pack in his car, but instead of cigs, it contained joints. Car was searched upon entry like every time, guards found the joints, employee was immediately arrested. As soon as word got back to his manager, the employee was terminated too.
Dba didn't like he got reassigned to managing a rather closed object store. He chose not to take back ups in the lower environment where the app data build was done.
Some one screwed up, corrupted the data build. Management calls for restore. Dba falsified logs to show he had been taking them, they just were garbage. Other admin double checked and reported truth. He was bounced in fifteen minutes flat while a third admin confirmed.
I was hired once and after I got settled in I was talking to my boss and he said that they originally hired another guy but he didn’t show up his 2nd day. After a few days he called and let them know he got arrested on his way home and assured them he would be in the next day. They told him not to worry about it.
Seen 2 people fired pretty damn fast.
1.) Tech comes in. When supposed to be learning and training - spends time watching youtube in a small window in the bottom right of his screen that everyone can easily see. Gets fired promptly. However manager should have really given him more direction and warning. The manager was shit at the time and I don't think he was given enough to do so occupied himself the way he could.
2.) Tech comes in but then proceeds to break up with his girlfriend and then have his car break down - resulting in multiple days of either being late to work or calling in for leave. Manager fires him for calling in for leave while not giving a fuck about his circumstances. Again, I think he should have been given more of a chance and I hope the guy came out on top in the end.
So my boss and I are doing interviews with people for a new Network Manager. Mind you this was for an IT dept that consisted of 4 FTE positions. (including myself and the IT manager) We went over that hey this job requires you to be on-call.. But either my boss or myself would be onsite on the weekends, and would take the direct calls.. We'd only call them in if their was a bigger problem. Or if one of us was on vacation they may be asked to help answer after hours calls.. (which honestly we maybe got one a month and it was usually because someone had forgotten their password)
Sounds great. The guy can start that day, as he'd been desperate for a job.. Okay, we do all the ppwk. Finish it, I get a call that someone is having a problem. Guy is going over stuff with HR --benefits etc.. picking stuff.. Tell him I'll be back in 15 min. My boss had left at that point to some executive mtg.
I come back, Our main accountant had some problem with his PC. The new guy, got on his machine and proceeded to copy the accountants passwords and all the account info the guy had and emailed it to his personal email using the Accountants email. --Like WTF? yeah the app had crashed and just needed a reboot.. I walk in, see what's going on..
And the accountant had seen this guy do this, and was like WTH did you do?
I was like what's going on, 20 min later cops are there, escorting him out in cuffs. My boss is like wtf is going on, I fill him in. And before the cops get there, he'd tried to run off, and the accountant got decked by him. Only reason he didn't get away was we had a guard at the entrance..
This guy had gotten jobs at other places and stuck around long enough to get access to accounts and passwords and was selling them online..
I mean hell it hadn't even been 2 hours since we'd hired him.. And we were working on the background check. All we were going to have him do till everything cleared was have him move some boxes. (and we'd told him that)
A friend of mine was a VP at a media company and oversaw IT. They had to take backups offsite to a bank to keep in a safety deposit box. Every week, for 2 years my friend had to do this.
Well the db goes belly one day and they can’t get it up. Backups on the SAN aren’t working either. They decide they need the offsite backups. My friend drives to the bank, brings back the disks, and connects them to his laptop to see what’s there so they could restore.
Fucking. Empty.
Long story short, the IT guy never put the backups on disk because he was just too lazy to bother. Fired him the next day. They did somehow manage to get the db backup and going.
My friend was driving blank backup disks to a bank for years….
I saw an MCSE bounced out of the office two weeks into a new job--at a government agency, no less.
21 years ago, I worked for a state agency that had all its business logic on mainframes and big Unix systems in a central office, but a vast multi-site NetWare installation (1200 or so stations, 60-ish field offices) for file sharing, print sharing, backups, workstation management, authentication, and basically everything else.
We had one Windows server to support one application (Remedy^1 Helpdesk), and were about to bring a second online to support something that needed SQL Server. So, we hired our first MCSE.
MCSE showed up and starting giving the Novell admins grief on day 1 about their poor little eDirectory setup (which worked damn well), lamented all this "NetWare garbage" on his Windows workstation, and immediately started agitating for a migration to Active Directory. His only reason was that Active Directory was "better" (not objectively true in 2003), and since we had *two* Windows servers, it'd save having to replicate policies and user accounts (there were none in common) on all both of them.
Management said, without any hesitation, "No." We'd need to retrain the whole desktop support staff, migrate 60 offices in two time zones, roll out new station clients, and for what? Labor-saving for the new guy on one server?
Genius decided to show us. He set up an AD forest on a discarded PC--hosted in his cube, joined the two Windows servers to it over a long holiday weekend, unknowingly broke Helpdesk for the whole agency, and took the following Monday off.
Our public-facing SLA was a legislative mandate. We had a (completely unrelated) outage on a service in my (Unix) side of the house, and calls started to back up. Not only could helpdesk not add tickets from angry public, but none of us could log into the Windows servers to un-wedge Remedy, couldn't raise MCSE on his phone, and effectively had a lost day for anything that couldn't happen on paper or the mainframe.
We (Unix team) got our stuff fixed by yelling at the apps team who also rolled stuff out over the long weekend without testing, but helpdesk had to rely on notes they'd taken by hand to know who to call back.
MCSE didn't make it to 8:02 on Tuesday before being handed a box by HR to clean out his desk.
^1 Apologies for unearthing any suppressed trauma.
3 hours, this guys first day comes in late then steals a coworkers lunch and starts telling the coworker how he is going to bang the coworkers wife....
For his safety he was quickly fired.
FYI the coworker in this case was a very tall well built guy and the nicest person I have ever worked with. Only reason the person in question lived.
About 20 minutes. She turned up for work as expected to find that she had no workstation, none of us knew who she was, the only person who did know who she was, and what her role was, was the owner, and he was uncontactable. Sis knew she was walking into a shitshow and noped the fuck out after ten minutes of awkward silence. Smart woman. It took me way longer to figure out what a disorganised train wreck that job was.
Just got a guy out of server support call center training and it was a struggle. First day on the phones he shows up with headphones on listening to music and bobbing his head, bosses daughter walks by, he leers at her and says, “Who’s tappin dat ass?” loud enough for the whole floor to hear. Guy lasted less than an hour.
I had one recently.
Got a slack from HR on new Hire's start date asking if I could see where he was connecting to his Zoom meetings from since his connection was choppy, and he was not answering their questions about it. He was not connecting to Zoom from the state we had shipped his laptop to, and wasn't actively connecting from his corp machine either.
Turns out I already had suspicions because he had been trying to install VPN software on his brand new company machine we had sent him. (We're fully remote).
Pretty sure he was not real and was one of those contractor farm in other countries deals.
We disabled him completely day 2...
Luckily due to this experience we were able to convince HR / Management that all new hires need to start their first couple days in office, even if it means we have to fly them in and get a hotel etc.
I saw someone get fired the first day in the office.
Morning - Does HR work
later Morning - Gets laptop, admin creds, policies etc
Lunch -
After Lunch - Dude logs into a DC and makes a DNS change. He deleted a CNAME that was pointing to a WAF cluster for a client facing app, and everything crashes. Took a bit to sort out.
Dude had no ticket, no one asked, he just randomly did this, in the middle of a change freeze, and kept working like it was nothing. After gathering the logs and asking him why he did it (he didn’t tell anyone he had done it until we had the evidence) he looked at his boss and said “it just didn’t look right to me” and shrugged.
You could hear a pin drop, everyone’s jaw was on the floor. No one could comprehend what was just said.
His boss told him “follow me” walked him to HR and fired him on the spot.
Start to finish? 6 hours.
I’ve seen a few of them during my career, varying degrees of stupidity, the chip stealer is the best. I worked at a large company known for free snacks and lunch. This guy did the absolute bare minimum. I caught him sleeping multiple times, whatever man, so long as I’m not doing your job…
Cue covid. There’s nobody in the office. He’s deemed essential and starts showing up to work at like 5am when he should be starting at 7. The staff that fills the snacks takes photos of the shelves setup for whomever is allowed in the office at this point. Bare minimums. They start noticing that the racks are empty by 7.
There’s cameras everywhere. They find him going from station to station taking the small bags of potato chips. Multiple days. He’s let go in mid march and could’ve spent the next 2 years sitting in the office doing not much. To those who haven’t worked in an environment like this, free means moderation. He could’ve taken a bag from each kitchen and never got caught.
I was going to say higher up in IT (aka anything that is not T1/T2) it’s completely understandable to not take support calls. But then I read it again and noticed the „hired a help desk tech“
That’s outrageous lmao
Edit: Grammar
Edit 2: Chill guys. Anybody takes calls from everybody and aims to help out - just human interaction basics. I still don’t think it is a good idea to promote cutting the Helpdesk-Line and calling somebody else.
IT manager here - fired a person within 30 minutes of learning they looked up confidential HR information on a protected drive, then tried to use that information to get an raise. Abuse your sysadmin privileges, do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight to unemployed.
We hired a new guy for our 8pm to 8am NOC Unix admin position. I worked the 8am to 8pm shift, so we would hand off any info during the shift change. The new guy claimed to have 8 years of experience as a Unix admin at Walmart.
Fast forward to his first day after training. I stayed late to walk him through his first ticket to ensure he knew how to handle it properly. The ticket was to add NFS mounts to `/etc/fstab` and mount them with the proper permissions. What I thought would be a 10-minute task turned into an hour-long tutorial on NFS, mounts, permissions, and more. It became clear that he had lied on his resume and was just trying to get his foot in the door. I didn't mind training someone who was green, but the real issue was that he had lied about everything.
I decided to test his knowledge: "So you use VIM, right?" I asked. His response: "Oh yeah, all the time." I continued, "So you know the joke, how do you exit VIM?" He laughed and said, "Haha, oh yeah, that's funny." Then I asked, "So how do you exit VIM?" He threw out some random suggestions.
The next day, I reached out to my manager and informed him that the new hire had zero experience and was a liability. My manager replied, "But he passed the test and had 8 years of experience." That night, a quick Google search revealed that the guy had two felonies, a handful of other charges, and was out on bail. I sent my manager the mugshots from his arrest and a newspaper article about him mugging people using a Craigslist Apple phone scam. Needless to say, he wasn't there that night for the shift change.
I had a guy walk out before lunch the first day. He saw our codebase and noped the fuck out. Best decision he made. To his credit, he went into directors office and said he wouldn’t be coming back.
The self respect we all wish we had.
Tends to be more "don't need the job". Most of us will go "well this is awful" and start applying elsewhere. If you don't need the money or are someone getting constant offers your options open up to things like that.
Yes. I have a friend who has noped out of several jobs because conditions changed. He doesn't particularly need the money, but likes to do tech stuff for fun. If it's not going to be fun, he gets gone. And he tends to get gone quite quickly. One example: boss has an all-staff meeting and states "I just fired the level one support people because they all suck--I need all you level two support and developers to start answering the support calls--everybody is now level one support". Friend states in front of 40 people "I won't do it". Boss says "then you're fired". "ok...bye, it's been great, everybody."
> If it's not going to be fun, he gets gone There's a youtube channel I watch whose motto is "if you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong", and I'm definitely trying to incorporate that into my life.
If your new co-workers joke about how you came back from lunch on your first day and not everyone does that -- they're not joking.
I worked at a place where a new hire didn't come back from lunch the first day...pissed a few other people in the office too because she was going to pick up lunch for them (and they had already given her the money).
I've heard a quick cash grab but sheesh
We blamed him (in jest) for everything that went sideways for the next two years.
Was working at a large public company in the HQ. It was no real big secret that the company was failing and steaming full speed ahead towards bankruptcy. We'd already had 2 rounds of layoffs and then anyone else with a lukewarm IQ saw the writing on the wall and left. That left an opening for my team's supervisor role and I applied for it thinking that I could at least get a management credit on my resume while I rode this old girl to the bottom of the sea. They passed me up and went with an outside hire. I think he was there maybe a month before he realized just how bad he fucked up. He was gone inside of 3 months because some "too good to pass up" offer came up. I later connected with him on LinkedIn and he confirmed that he started looking like a week after orientation.
When we hired our current developer, he laughed at our code base for our main company software... then recommended we sued the company that wrote it... Thankfully he stuck around
I don't know this man or your company, but I want to give him a medal.
I've had the exact same thing happen at my company: new PHP dev aces all the interview questions/problems, gets hired, goes through induction on the morning of the first day, spends the afternoon reviewing the codebase, calls in the following morning to tell us he's resigning. In fairness, the codebase *was* dogshit. It's now slightly more refined dogshit.
Spaces or tabs?
Spaces in even row numbers, tabs in uneven. \#ChaoticNeutral
I still don't know the details but I received word to start locking accounts and removing access to someone just moments after I handed her a door access card. She'd been there maybe only about an hour with her on-boarding partner.
That’s actually pretty common, people do the whole “this place/role wasn’t what I expected” and they quit straight after orientation.
Yeah my record is someone like this. Lasted 1 hour and 10 mins. The commute was much worse than she had anticipated. She mulled it over for the hour while being introduced to everyone and concluded that she wouldn't be able to do it every day. Apologized profusely. Left.
Oh if I am making progress in a job interview, you bet I do a test run if I can.
I don't think she instigated it. She seemed pretty happy and chatty when I handed her the card and the email hit my inbox as she was walking out the door. I almost called her back in but decided it wasn't my job to tell her. Either she alarmed or pissed off her boss during the office walk through (weird because she's pretty chill lead developer) or her background check wasn't finished and started throwing up late flags.
New manager, Day 1 demanded certain s/w be installed on his PC, helpdesk said they will see if they can get it approved, flips out and demands admin privileges to his PC, cusses out the helpdesk. Day 2, 9am meeting with HR. 9:05, please disable new managers account.
Flipping out on day 1 usually is a good way to get fired.
> Flipping out on day 1 usually is a good way to get fired. I wish that happened to one of the managers from 2 jobs ago. His first day was nothing but complaining about his workspace, his monitors, keyboard, mouse, laptop. The whole shebang! Had a message from his manager asking us to swap out various components for him.
We had someone a number of years back, who demanded we give him all of his technology immediately. When we didn't give it to him, he proceeded to contact HR to file a complaint against the entire IT department. The trouble was, he was still a couple weeks before his start date. HR, being ever helpful, told us to just get him his equipment. It took them a couple years to finally realize they screwed up and get rid of him, but those were a couple years of him demanding *fucking everything*.
Doesn't sound like a very good HR department, if they don't realize that someone filing a complaint against an entire department just for following company policy is horseshit.
I'm surprised people do anything on day 1. My last three jobs have been browse in your phone all day for like a month after your orientation until it's go home time.
What software was he so worked up about?
Probably CCleaner.
I would be glad he did it day 1 vs later when they embed themselves into the department making it harder to remove them.
I’ve watched hires walk in the door and turn around and walk out in less than an hour. Hiring managers didn’t know how to communicate the roles expectations very effectively. “What do you mean I have to work at a location an hour away?” “I have to Pay for parking?” Gone.
"I have to Pay for parking" is crazy
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I remember interviewing for a job at the library during college and I asked how parking worked, and they said everyone needs to pay the meters besides directors who get parking spots. They were, and presumably still are, paying minimum wage.
That's what they told me on my first day. I laughed at that and said that this is a deal breaker. A few hours into my onboarding the HR lady approached me again. They gave me a badge for the companies garage and reduced my in office days to 1-2 per month.
I worked a software startup gig in a downtown west coast city years back. They were this way. There was room in the parking garage downstairs, but they were "holding onto it" for "expected growth." The paid lots nearby were all $250 ish a month. This was 15 years ago. People legit left over it.
Well of course. That’s essentially a $250 net reduction of your wage. I would totally not work somewhere with that ridiculous attitude. I would ask/check during interviewing however…
Totally agree. Only way I found out was word of mouth. I actually wanted the job as it was, believe it or not, walking distance from my place. Ahhh to be young and single and blow half my income on swanky downtown condos!
I've only had one job in my life (Georgetown, Washington DC) where I would have had to pay for parking and the company handled it for the garage on the same block. Crazy that an employer wouldn't include that (you should ask for it when negotiating salary if you don't see it in your offer though), most parking garages for monthly is not very expensive, usually 100-200 bucks tops. To let a good hire go because of that is truly insane. EDIT: I'll clarify, the best way to get this setup is to have the org setup and pay for the badge themselves, and that way it isn't taxable income. I only mentioned it as part of "negotiating salary" to mean in terms of asking for it as a part your perks. That's what my company above did for me, I talked to the garage about the spot and then facilitated getting the account setup in their name and form of payment.
If somebody already decided the role isn't for them on day 1 nevermind an hour chances are for the hiring manager screwed up in a big way if they didn't make the basic expectations clear.
Yeah to use OPs example, did no one talk about what the typical day on the helpdesk looked like? Taking phone calls never came up?
An hour away? As in no you're not working in the building we told you, it's actually another one?
I once did three interviews for a job where the office I was interviewing at was a 5 minute drive from my apartment. I was only 2 years out of college so still pretty green at the time. I assumed (and we all know what they say about that) that the job location was going to be in the building I interviewed in (three times!). When they sent over an offer letter I noticed that the work location was a different address. It was in a whole other city about 45 minutes down the interstate. I noped out of that one.
Yeah I had a job change the location on me. Since posting the ad it was decided the location would close/move. They were very clear on that fact though.
Had a guy walked out of the office after ten minutes. Apparently he got into an argument over a parking space - he was using a disabled spot reserved for a specific individual.
A guy would assign tickets to himself, sit on them for a week and then just close them without a resolution or a reply. His defense was "if the issue was that important, they would reach out again or ask me for an update". So essentially, the dude did no work whatsoever, everyone including our boss quickly found out and yeah that was it. The impressive part was that it still took 3 months before he got fired.
I think he moved to my company. And he’s been there ever since.
I think he replicated and moved to LOTS of companies!
3 months is quick. I'm jealous of how quickly worthless people are getting let go. It seems like my company it's a minimum of 3 years, they move worthless people around from team to team until there is a RIF.
Here’s a reverse version: A buddy of mine is a pretty competent systems engineer who moved to a small town for a more relaxed pace and better work life balance. Got hired into a small company doing MSP work. The lead engineer had been at the company for years and must have taken shittysysadmin posts as his personal dev plan. My buddy spent the morning reviewing documentation, tickets, the various code bases being used and asked to meet with the CEO. The lead engineer got walked right after lunch. Apparently, among many other sins: A single, very poor password used as the DA and root passwords for all customers. Unsecured VPN tunnels to all customers with default allow from the office and this dude’s home address. Credentials hard coded into every script. Every script was basically a for-do SSH loop with a bunch of unchecked shell commands run as root. Keyloggers on all company devices going back to dudes personal Hotmail account. There was a lot more, I’ve forgotten it all. It was terrifying to listen to.
I had something like this, except that I was joining the team as a second SA to the guy who had already been there 7 years. Dude knew absolutely fuck all. Within weeks, I had replaced a ton of his "procedures", fixed our broken Exchange DAG (that, according to him, was "working as intended"), thrown out and recreated our DR/BC plan with full testing. There was so much more that I discovered and fixed over time. Kicker was, he was not let go, even after I exposed his woeful incompetence (and I wasn't even trying to do so, just trying to do my job). Management were soft as shit and kept him on for another... wait for it... 7 fucking years. This is even though our manager was well aware that this dude literally made shit up as he went along. Not only that, but since I started and actually began fixing people's issues (he would try to fix stuff, give up, and tell them "it's supposed to be like this" or "it is what it is, it can't be fixed so you'll just have to live with it"), the user base realised he was a charlatan and actively avoided calling him for support, going straight to me instead. Guy hated my guts since day one and made my life a misery wherever possible. The outcome? Over that 7 years, I eventually became his manager. I was the one who had to put him on a PIP and fire him afterwards, when he inevitably couldn't deliver. At which point, he openly admitted to having lied on his resume 14 years prior and completely blagged his way into and through the job. Spoiler: we all knew that already, mate. Good fucking riddance.
Omg you became HIS manager? This is effing priceless. Hats off to you man, massive respect for your expertise and how you handled him.
Wow, the irony is, it's like a few other stories here where the new guy comes in, says he can do it better and all that. But your guy is actually right.
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Oh man. That is wild. I wonder what that interview guy does tho. That’s crazy
He does interviews
A client that used us for upper tier support hired an in-house tech to help with all the typical user issues. When I met him he was touting all his expertise in networking and all things IT you won't be needed here soon, blah blah I get a call later that week from them saying nothing works, no access to Internet or server resources by the whole office. Found out he put an old unmanaged switch at his desk and looped a cable in the same switch. He was gone the next day.
It’s always those ones I swear lmfao
I always tell the new green techs that they haven’t been in IT until they’ve accidentally shut down the network. I worked with one guy who did the same thing and when I found and corrected it said “no way that caused it! These switches are smart enough that they shut that down! See?” Then plugged the cable back in. The calls from the nearby desks immediately shouting that the “internet” (network) was down were not amusing. The look on his face was.
> I always tell the new green techs that they haven’t been in IT until they’ve accidentally shut down the network. Years ago I was visiting a client site, large government department. I was in the server room doing something on the console. The process completed and I had some time so I stretched out in the chair to chill and promptly kicked the UPS off, knocking both servers offline. I was in the middle of getting them back up when the office manager came running in, saw me working and was like "thank god you were here" because he just assumed it was a server crash. Good times.
I worked IT in the Air Force. At the time, I was a system administrator for the base and I had 3 coworkers and our team needed one more. We ended up hiring someone that was working at one of the high-schools in town. He was kind of quiet, but picked up things quick and we all got along. After about 1 month of getting him up to speed our unit commander and chief come find him and take him away. We all had no idea why. Come to find out that the FBI was investigating him for underage content.
We had a guy working in our tech config room and one day some guys in suits showed up with management and took him away. They were Secret Service agents. This goof had color-copied a $100 bill and used it to buy a drink in our building's cafeteria. Like when I was a kid I remember kids trying it with like $1's and crinkling up the paper to try to make it seem softer in like elementary school. The cashier who took it had a mental disability. Worth noting our business is a high-theft environment, not retail but the kind of things where workers have to go through metal detectors on the way out to make sure they're not walking off with things. We have 9 figure contracts with security vendors for video at all our locations, including our corp HQ. Stupid stupid stupid.
Secret service doesn't fuck around when it comes to that. Even in my little podunk high school, someone tried to use fakes in the vending machine and someone got a very stern talking to by the Secret Service agents.
How does the secret service catch wind of money getting printed from a printer and used in a local vending machine?
Many printers imprint unique fingerprints pointing to which printer the item was printed on, whether it was money or not. This is a legal requirement for printers to be manufactured, and it's pretty well documented (so easy for you to find out about). That can, at times, help track-down where it was printed and sometimes by whom. It's pretty wild honestly, but the second hand market breaks that sourcing chain kinda easily depending on what exactly you're printing. Now if you're needing to print IR-ink things get even more wild. I had to set that up for a prior employer once so only certain people could print on them. And that's on top of the unique marking I mentioned above.
Vending machine operators don't like being stiffed by fake money, especially when one kid decides to tell their friends about the "hack" to get free drinks.
Not my story but one of a friend of mine: At one of his first jobs out of college, his supervisor ended up *having a seat* with Chris Hansen. Between the arrest and the airing, nobody besides for management knew why the guy was gone. Friend was watching Dateline one night, and there he was...
> oh yeah that guy
I'll bite, was the IT manager for a small company for about 10 years. Guy was running his business off the company equipment, buying/reselling motorcycle parts. CEO confronted him about it, he said >!fuck you!< to the CEO and had to immediately disable his account with all his customer info on it. whoops. Indian guy pretended to be an expert in a line of engineering software that does fluid dynamic simulation. The interview was a task to complete something difficult in the software and he seemed to pass with flying colors. We later learned he outsourced the job. First day they gave him the backlog of work and he had 0 clue on how to do it. Was walked out pretty hastily. Big dude showed up to interview in a suit and passed all our background checks and was really good at programming. Offered a job to start right away. Next day shows up in a dress with painted nails and puts a picture of themself in a fursuit as a icon for skype and email. My bosses were irish catholics and walked them out of the building within the first hour. The company got sued for discrimination. CEO got a divorce with his wife because he was seeing the HR director on the side. The front desk receptionist then proceeded to hit on the CEO with the HR director present at a company party, he welcomed the advances. They got into a fight and the CEO ended up firing the receptionist. Not fired, but we paid a guy to move his family of 6 across the country after a big sob story. He worked for us for about 8 hours then took the company laptop with all our source code information and went to a competitor. I miss that job. And that's how I got into cybersecurity
Ok you win, no wonder you moved to infosec lol
>"Big dude showed up to interview in a suit and passed all our background checks and was really good at programming. Offered a job to start right away. Next day shows up in a dress with painted nails and puts a picture of themself in a fursuit as a icon for skype and email. My bosses were irish catholics and walked them out of the building within the first hour. The company got sued for discrimination.This just Would be funny if this was his thing. Gets hired by company, goes fully furry and then get fired and collect the settlement. Moves on to the next company to repeat it.
There’s no way that wasnt intentional. It’s just TOO perfect. I actually cracked up knowing that was the goal before I got to the last line.
I heard of a guy who worked construction and did this with overtime. He would agree to work for straight wages over 40 hours a week, boss would happily agree, and then he'd file a complaint with the state dept. of labor.
And that's why as a boss you know your employees rights and respect them regardless of if the employee doesn't want them respected.
An honest-to-God professional troll. Incredible. No doubt he had carefully researched the backgrounds of the bosses and knew he was set for a solid payday.
Linux guy who didn’t understand sudoers files or basics of managing Linux without the help of a management suite that would do it all for him. He interviewed well and had Certs, in the real world though, he was completely helpless
This is more common than you think.
I'm more used to the variant where they blame their lack of ability on the fact that it is open source. I've literally heard that in the past few weeks, and as a bonus, they blamed the wrong software.
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dm me a copy
> Big dude showed up to interview in a suit and passed all our background checks and was really good at programming. Offered a job to start right away. Next day shows up in a dress with painted nails and puts a picture of themself in a fursuit as a icon for skype and email. My bosses were irish catholics and walked them out of the building within the first hour. The company got sued for discrimination. Don't leave us hanging! How'd that lawsuit play out?
This was in Connecticut so he had a lot of support from the state. I had to put legal holds on the accounts and put forward all communications on record in a trial. I don't know the exact settlement, but I think the company lost around 600k, so however much that was divvied between the lawyer and the client is unknown to me. Pretty good for 1 day of work
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Can you tell us what his motivation was? Did he do it intentionally to sue or just hid his true self for the interview to avoid not getting hired for it?
>Indian guy pretended to be an expert in a line of engineering software that does fluid dynamic simulation. The interview was a task to complete something difficult in the software and he seemed to pass with flying colors. We later learned he outsourced the job. First day they gave him the backlog of work and he had 0 clue on how to do it. Was walked out pretty hastily. SW Engineer here. I got multiple invites on LinkedIn doing exactly this. They apply somewhere with my credentials and someone in India does the job. I just do the interviews. I would get a cut.
Heard about this one got an email he couldn't open as AV blocked it, tried the web access, ditto, couldn't turn off AV. So went into server room, and used a server to open it it had a virus he was gone
I feel like the OP's question was more about duration of tenure, and I don't have any interesting stories of those, but I had a 0-100 like yours that was pretty insane. I had this guy who was working a t2-ish support role that we discovered had a development background and I was running an internal solutions team and was trying to get the budget for him to come over to my side. He started putting in more and more hours on my team and I kept asking for the budget but kept getting stonewalled. He said he needed more money and what he was doing was worth it, and I agreed. Nothing about his attitude/demeanor up to this point had been any more than, "if they can't make it happen, I'd rather just go back to being a tech." I finally got the two partners to agree to a negotiation sitdown with the guy and they take him into a conference room (I think they were dialed in IIRC), talk for a while, then he emerges from the room, walks up to my desk and (clearly very upset) says, "this is bullshit, if these fuckers are going to treat me this way, I'll just put a bomb in the code on a deadman's switch!" And then goes out to leave. Regardless of how I felt about him or his situation or how they were treating him, I didn't really like that threat. This was like on a Friday and I had PTO Monday, but I was told I needed to go in on Monday and handle the termination. The cherry on top, though, was it turned out there were some changes made to our GPO about a week prior that had prevented his user from remoting into his dev VM and he hadn't mentioned this to anyone. So, for like five days leading up to his blowup, he had just been sitting at his desk pretending to work and couldn't have coded the logic bomb anyway.
I also have another 0-100 story. Same company shortly after the incident above, we had a sister startup that our two partners, CIO, IT manager, and I were a part of. We were building/selling a UCaaS type thing. In the other company, I was still in the solutions role which also included things like business analysis, analytics, some light DBA crap, among other responsibilities (gotta love smaller companies). I had been trying to get some of our ops managers more involved in performance analysis for their teams and wanted to give them all Excel. The partners weren't ready to go to 365 because someone years ago left an EC2 running and they got fucked or something along those lines. Turned out we have a volume key for Office 2010 which was good enough for what I was trying to do. I asked the IT manager how many activations we were allowed, and he said he didn't know since only CIO had access to the volume license portal. CIO said we had plenty. Like 200. Our entire company was a bit shy of 200, so he told me to not worry about it. I proceeded with the required installs (\~20) and all the ops managers were very happy. Until the installs started deactivating. IT and I go back to the CIO and ask about all the deactivations since we're now fielding the same questions from all the ops people. He explains that he had recently created a firewall rule that must be blocking the phone home to the activation servers and (again) to not worry about it. We had recently switched from ASAs to Fortigates and he had done the bulk of the configuration, but this still didn't sit right with us, so we login to review. We found nothing that suggested we were blocking anything like that. The config was pretty flat, and we recognized everything as rules we knew about. We thought about it for a while and figured there was no way CIO was the only person to have access to the licensing portal since he was technically a contractor. We asked the managing partner if he had access. He said he used the late former CEO's account for vendor things like this. He failed to mention that when we changed our domain, and he demanded any expense related to it be eliminated. Thankfully we still owned the domain, so we spun up an inbox using the dead CEO's alias and did a password reset. We had licenses for tons of MSFT products including Office 2010, but it didn't really look like we had 200... About this time over at the sister company, one of our clients called us because the system wasn't working. Calls weren't terminating and everything was just a fast busy. The PBX was working just fine, AWS wasn't having any issues, we could ping, other PBXs were just fine, their site was fin, so the next step was to look at the trunking provider. We discovered two crazy things: we had every single one of our customers on the same fucking trunking account, and it appeared to be thousands of dollars in arrears. We escalated to the partners and went back to the Office license issue. IIRC, we determined we only had something like five licenses, but by now more people in the company were using it, not just the ops managers. I had been trying to get us on 365 for a while and even had a very small pilot running with just senior leadership, but now I was going to need to ask for that to be like sextupled in size and this company was very cheap. While we were working through that, one of the partners calls our office frantic, "you guys need to shut CIO out of everything RIGHT THE FUCK NOW! Drop everything and lock him out! No email, no servers, no VPNs, firewalls, vendor accounts nothing everything goes down now! If any of our sister company clients call you guys for anything you tell them you don't work there any longer and direct them to CIO's cellphone!" We start locking accounts and changing passwords. Of course this was also a Friday. I called him back to confirm that we completed that and asked what happened. After IT manager told the partner about the trunking account, the partner called CIO to ask if billing was fucked up because some people were having issues with the system. CIO apparently immediately went ballistic and started threatening to sue each and every one of us for reasons. It later turned out that the sister company (which was primarily CIO's operation) wasn't doing too well financially because I forget what, but he had been keeping secrets. Monday rolls around and the partners ask me to take over the CIO's responsibilities in the interim while they try to find someone else. Wednesday arrives and a process server serves our receptionist with a giant folder of scary looking shit. One of the partners happened to be in the office that day so he takes it and then comes to me and explains we are being accused by the Business Software Alliance of using pirated or otherwise unauthorized copies of Office 2010. That launched a year worth of quarterly self-audits and quarterly payments of $25,000 and an immediate move to 365 for the whole company. Which was now my problem and by now the only help I had in the tech department was IT manager and the fines destroyed any chance of hiring help, or giving us raises. Fucking fantastic situation.
That's why CIOs shouldn't have admin access!
hashtag small company shit
Similar, but it was a helpdesk guy with local admin who got tired of AV blocking his collection of NES ROMs he brought in to play on his downtime. So he uninstalled it since he had rights. About 30 minutes later a director of IT came stomping over yelling "WHERE IS" and *ripped* his PC out from under his desk and threw it across the room. His computer was hitting our network shares with thousands of intrusions a second, which thankfully got stopped by other security. I think the only reason the director didn't do the same to the guy was because there were too many witnesses.
I MUST know what is inside the package!
I used to work at a casino on the help desk. Random tasks and nothing having to do with the machines on the floor just normal password resets or vdi resets. A new data base admin was hired. She went through her 1 week new hire training. She lasted exactly 4 hours. She deleted a whole SQL gaming db that had not been backed up and it was the production database. She was there and after lunch she was gone. Never seen anyone walked out so quickly in my life.
Yikes. Was the person responsible for not backing up prod also walked out? Because it sounds like they should have been, that was an accident waiting to happen.
Probably why they were hiring a DBA.
Fair point! Also a cautionary tale to any new admin: assume your predecessor didn't back anything up and act accordingly.
Agreed. The new hire is far less responsible for this problem than the person responsible for the database.
They should have also fired the idiot that didn't backup a production database.
The quickest I personally witnessed was just over a week. We had hired a network engineer and for some reason he thought he was management. He was looking at our ticket board and asking where we were at with our tickets. We thought maybe he was waiting for something because he wanted to work on the ticket but nope. We confirmed with our IT director that he was not management and had no place acting like our manager. He was a network specialist and that's it. We had a departmental meeting on a Friday afternoon, about 15 of us in the conference room and this guy would not stop talking over Senior Management. A manager would start to say something and this guy would cut him or her off because he didn't like what they were saying or he thought he could put it better. He was warned multiple times to keep his mouth shut, and he didn't. By Monday afternoon he had been terminated
This is what I fear I look and sound like when I open my mouth in a meeting.
New contractor-to-hire helpdesk provided by TEKsystems was caught by security supposedly scanning our network on his second day of work using a rubber ducky. Immediately fired.
Fuck teksystems. I used them once, most regrettable. I was a ui designer and was heading into UX. They placed me at a job where I was given heavy JS tasks and I had zero clue what I was doing. It was embarrassing. Only upside for me was it was all remote work and the team was so massive I went unnoticed for 7 months did prob 8 hours of real work but was required to bill 60 hours a week. So I did and got paid for it. Contract was up and I left and told teksystems to eat shit and never call me again.
a rubber ducky?
USB that executes commands when plugged in. Generally a hacking tool.
USB device that acts like a HID (human interface device; ex: Keyboard)- it is actually a full computer and can execute programs and code…bypasses most antivirus because the OS thinks it is a mouse or key board https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/usb-rubber-ducky-penetrationtesting/
Years ago the place I worked had **just** hired a new sales guy. While the sales manager was giving him the general tour he was introduced to a coworker of Japanese descent ... and this idiot decided to use his hands to squint his eyes and say "me so Chinese" ... the sales manager just asked him to follow him back to the HR department so they could tear up everything they had just signed.
This isn't funny at all but I couldn't help but laugh. Not at the joke but at the sheer stupidity for someone to do that and think it wouldnt be an issue. I always wonder what goes through racists/sexists/homophobes etc heads when they do stuff like this and think nobody will care.
Showed up high af and then started trying to argue about the processes and how we did things to our in front of the site lead and project engineers in charge. Walked him out immediately.
We hired a bunch of contractors for a big migration project in a factory environment. First half of the day was safety training, getting hard hats, vests, glasses, etc. After lunch we had them start pulling PCs and deploying. One of the guys took out a pc and an hour later was missing. Not answering his cell, no contact at all. We had to have the whole factory searched twice, all hands (it was 14 acres under roof). No sign of the guy at all. That evening, we get a call from the recruiter telling us the guy just decided to go home. Took all of his safety gear and the PC with him.
There are easier ways to steal a PC... and probably better ones...
He gave it back, and the safety gear the next day. Used the excuse he felt unsafe and anxious and had to leave with an anxiety attack. It was enough that the higher ups didn’t press it and let it go, even though they were pretty pissed.
Yknow, wouldn't surprise me if that was true. I've had severe panic attacks a few times and the irrational fear and impulse to "escape" is overwhelming. Wouldn't be out of the ordinary (for someone with panic attacks) to bail first and realise the consequences afterwards.
Guy got a junior position at my work and instead of spending time learning how we do IT, he was poring over the employee handbook and all the HR materials like he was studyin' for an exam. Since I was one of the senior folks he was supposed to shadow, I had the opportunity to ask if he was worried about HR. He told me that there was always a loophole somewhere in every company's policies, and he was lookin' for it to exploit it to his benefit. He them went onto brag about how he'd scammed a couple of his previous employers and even the city he lived in (Something about the city law says all parking bollards have to be painted in florescent colors, but he found a couple at a local park that weren't painted, so intentionally rode his bicycle into one after dark and then threatened to sue the city. They cut him a check to shut him up.) He was lookin' to do the same thing at my work. I went straight to the Director and advised her to cut him loose. He was gone the next day.
We hired a guy who had been NYPD, retired after 20 years and went to IT school. We had no problem with newbs, we happily sent people to training. He was hired as user support staff for a “remote” office. Actually corporate headquarters and our division provided coverage. We also had a ticketing system. All calls, and I do mean ALL calls, had to be logged because we supported multiple offices and often had help desk staff cover other offices, including the one Mr police guy was at. Well he refused to use the ticketing system. He wrote all calls on a white board. Remember the tv show Homicide? Yeah just like that. So how is somebody a state away supposed to read the whiteboard??? Our boss told him this was not an option and he disagreed. So the boss was a psycho bitch on wheels and took him out behind the woodshed so to speak. He quit the next day. We were all relieved.
> So the boss was a psycho bitch on wheels Oh boy, memories of my early career. People who manage helpdesks, field service or other support either have incredibly thick skin, anger issues or are just plain insane. It must be a combo of dealing with Karen/Ken customers all day AND dealing with some of the goofballs who work for you also. L1 helpdesk is lit-rally one step above driving the espresso machine at Starbucks, both pay and expectations wise. You need to really be tough to deal with the revolving door and the combo of great troubleshooters, idiots, newbies and customers.
I can relate to this so much in a completely unorthodox way. Was a paramedic for 12 years, had breakdown, company offers me a transition into a totally new role. Nobody knew what I would get, so I made a resume and a general interests list. I put something like “excellent with computers” in the lightest sense possible. More like “I know how to use Microsoft office, email, and I’m like 30 so I understand how to USE computers”. Well, I got offered a job doing data entry, which quickly turned into an unofficial tech support job. Our real tech guys are understaffed, overworked and can’t help you in a moments notice, that’s where I *somehow* come in. I’ve taken so much shit from employees when I can’t figure out a technical problem in 5 minutes, cause I have to google a million things and cross my fingers. One day I had the privilege of bumping into one of the IT guys I’ve spoken on the phone with a number of times to get him to help me help someone else. Dude just smirked at me, and not in a dickish way, kind of like an older brother would when you do something minor like a cartwheel. If it wasn’t for Reddit, I wouldn’t be able to do anything at my incredibly weird job. Thank you to all you beautiful IT people and thanks for also making me laugh at your comments
First guy deleted his boss's accounts on server and management tools to prevent boss from granting access to a new hire. Another guy refused to allow endpoint management tools on his work laptop. He was gone within two days.
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Ouch…
I guess they wanted to avoid the lawsuit of firing a guy on LTD more than hire useful help
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I don't like nanny software, but at the end of the day, it's a work laptop. There is no winning that battle.
To be honest it's on them for giving him a laptop WITHOUT the endpoint management software. Now if it was a personal machine I'd agree, company could pound sand or give me a work machine.
If for some reason my job said I needed to install EMS outside of a vdi on my personal computer I'd laugh at them, if I started a job where that was the requirement, I would be working through hyper v
i hate working on remote VDIs, way slower than developing locally (germany doesn't have great internet), but we get work devices and no BYOD as it should be I'll never install managed work profile software on personal devices, that's a no go
This goes back to my field service days. The MSP I worked at also did domestic PC setups for some of the Aussie retailers, internet services providers, etc. Back then, customers usually paid with a card, though we would also have to handle cash... so much cash. Said cash had to be deposited in the office safe within 48hrs of receiving, which the manager would then bank. A new employee starts - things seem okay. His admin skills are on point, networking skills are solid, and is getting great customer review scores, hitting targets and earning pretty much every performance bonus on offer 🤑 There was just one problem. His cash wasn't making it to the office safe. In less than 1 month this bloke went from being our newest shooting star employee to arrested fellon. We started compulsary police record checking from about that time onwards.
So funny, because we currently have a lvl1 who loves to say “that’s not my job”. Lady, you signed up for tier 1 helpdesk, that is indeed your job.
In my experience these are the same people who will assign you a ticket (with no warning, usually, just stealthily dropped in your queue) they can’t figure out after doing 0 legwork or not understanding how level 2/escalation works. If they succeed at higher levels they also become the people who check other’s queues and jump down someone’s throat if they don’t understand the resolution the tech put in no matter how serviceable it was. I saw one of these people get hopping mad because she tried to take over a ticket a tech was actively working on, at the user’s desk, then it got resolved with something like “issue resolved - password reset and user was able to log in.” Said tech had a fucking fit that she didn’t understand how the issue was resolved. Just like.. mind your own queue and chill, dude. She wound up getting walked off site for behavior like that every day. I’ve seen it more than a few times and all these people were similar in attitude. “That’s not my job, so it’s yours.”
You are literally so spot on. Usually she’ll send me a screenshot out of the blue with no supporting information or marks on the screenshot. Only when I go “and???” does she then give me info. Still surprised she’s with us even though she basically lied about her experience and still to this day says “A&D” when talking about Active Directory.
Guy made a comment about not liking Brasilian people because they bring gayness into the workplace (on a Teams chat that included a number of managers). Got fired the next day after an anonymous report.
> Brasilian people because they bring gayness into the workplace What does that even mean? lol?
I guess their only familiarity with Brazil was carnival and not the myriad of UFC champions lmao.
Probably saw the shirtless guys in trunks who like to practice a form of wrestling. Maybe misunderstood
I used to be an IT Recruiter - got a guy hired as a senior dev ifor the Social Security Administration. Set to make just shy of $200k per year. Walked him into the building, introduced him to his manager in person, and he was fired by the time I made it back to my office 25 minutes away. The manager (35ish year old woman) showed the new hire to his desk, and gave him her contact info. He immediately sent her a photo of his dick. The amount of groveling I had to do after that was astounding lol. All the guys references checked out - absolutely no clue what was going through his head.
I can only think it was a speed run challenge.
> absolutely no clue what was going through his head. If this dude was going to get $200K from the SSA, guaranteed he's some sort of obscure-tech wizard, like the only one who knows how to work on some esoteric piece of mainframe software they use. Those guys sometimes...don't get out much. Having your female boss give you contact info may have been very much misinterpreted. Amazing that he went from new employee to full on creeper so quickly though! I heard a similar story from someone I know who works in healthcare IT...there's some really cobwebby corners in those tech stacks and a few of these wizards exist...and some cross the line.
You are correct about him, he was a COBOL dev. He seemed relatively normal, but obviously wasn't. Needless to say he was blacklisted from our company. Not sure if he was from the government side, but I'd imagine he was at least from the SSA.
On site consultant. Day 1 sent to the customers site, the customer was government. 10am or so the phone call comes from the client saying they had removed him from site and we need to go google his name. Convicted drug smuggler who avoided jail due to claiming he had end stage cancer or something.
Had similar new guy hired for 24/7 lvl 1 NOC role. Showed up first day, not 2nd. Was unreachable, recruiter let us know he didn't realize he was going into 24/7 roster and taking calls.
Saw something similar about 10 years ago, but he did quit in person, half way through his 3rd day. On day 2 he complained about how he didn't have Visio installed by default because "I want to spend most of my time doing network design", and on the 3rd day he quit because there was "too much to learn" (someone showed him our internal tools like the client DB and monitoring system)
He was on call day two?
At an MSP - Guy came in on the first day, demanded all the admin passwords / admin access for everything. Was told no. He stormed into HR to complain. HR / management sent him packing shortly afterwards.
Some time ago on a DoD IT contract that requires 8570 cert. Joe Sample had his .PDF of the cert, got hired. The verification code wouldn't validate. Turned out, Joe Sample photoshopped his 8570 certification. Was released within the week.
OK, something like that almost happened to me! I was told in my interview I needed an 8570 but the contractor I worked through said I'd have 90 days after hire to earn a Security+. Day 1 I was asked for my Sec+. I said "I have 90 days per Ms. Williams at tech outsourcing company". My DoD site manager said "nope, she wrong. Need it now" Several phone calls and meetings over the next 24 hours. DoD site manager's boss didn't wanna wait another four weeks to advertise and interview again. He said "OK, you have two weeks to earn a Security+. Meanwhile, we will advertise your position. Good luck." I spent the next nine days cramming, 10 hours a day. Day 10 I called him as I emailed my CompTIA certificate and my ID number. Boss and his boss were impressed that I earned a Security+ in ten days. Only reason I left that job was because no one could guarantee my contract would be renewed. Am still friends with my former manager there.
I'm not sure who has what leeway. I've seen promising new-hires get 90days-6mo to acquire their 8570. I think some DoD contractors have more creative ways of onboarding employees like give them non-contract work while they paper up. Sounds like you stepped up to the challenge w/o resorting to forgery. --for realizies --respect/congrats.
Quickest was two weeks. Guy did a speed run of all the greatest hits; fell asleep in a meeting, invited a female coworker to have a threesome with his and his gf (including pics to share), was generally a dick and refused to do calls/hardware config. We actually used his name as a metric for how long you’d been there. Let’s say his name was Jimmy. I lasted about 75 jimmy’s. Not bad. But other than that, we’ve had morons take a whole store down, refuse to do calls because of social anxiety (why’d take a help desk role then?) and one who screamed at my boss for asking him to come in for the hybrid role he signed up for, then blaming it on his diabetes and low blood sugar. That last one became an inside joke. Any time one of us would get stressed, we’d buy each other a coke and tell them their diabetes is acting up (we weren’t exactly the most HR friendly team, but we -were- pros when we needed to be). But yeah, I’ve seen a lot. IT is so bizarre, because if you just -do the job- you are seen as a paragon of hard work, when I really do all my work in half a day and play games lol.
CFO called up a relatively junior helpdesk agent asking why his PC didn't work. CFO was told that the PDF labelled "invoice" he'd just opened had malware in it so we'd had to isolate his PC. CFO flipped his lid, demanded to have his PC re-enabled or he'd see that the helpdesk agent never worked in this industry again, blah blah. (also our ticketing system literally had some automatic big flashing text for CFO tickets saying something like "just do whatever this guy says"). The terrified helpdesk agent temporarily re-enabled the PC so the CFO could grab a couple of important files. 10mins later the helpdesk agent was fired on the spot for going against the malware isolation policy. Hilariously, one of the files that the CFO rescued from the PC was the "invoice" PDF, despite being aware that it was infected. He managed to infect another two PCs, "just in case" it had some real information in it, virus be damned.
That one was on the CFO, not the new helpdesk agent. Shouldn't have been fired.
IMO it was on the helpdesk manager. He actually watched the agent do the whole thing without interjecting once. Then when the agent finished, helpdesk manager fired him. It was almost like he was looking for excuses to fire him, except that made no sense because we were really understaffed at the time. Maybe he fucked his wife or something.
Maybe it was a test? Like, they want to know that the agent will follow policy no matter who it involves? A pretty psychopathic way to do it, if so.
A lot of managers shouldn't be managers. They just like the pay. The help desk manager just cared about himself.
>> ticketing system \[...\] automatic big flashing text for CFO tickets \[...\] "just do whatever this guy says" > terrified helpdesk agent temporarily re-enabled the PC > helpdesk agent was fired on the spot Why can a L1 call boy re-enable an infected PC? CFO and the fucker who created that big flashing text are still employed I guess?
Man that sucks. Poor junior helpdesk hopefully the CFO faced consequences!
Consequences? That's for people in lower positions! /s
Before covid, guy fell asleep in front of our boss during training. OK, boss is a good guy. Gives him a break. Second day, they also fell asleep during training... They went home come afternoon. They were picked up by their mom. They weren't all that young, either.
Damn, that one's kind of a bummer. It depresses me seeing guys like that. There's always a story and it's always a sad one.
We had a guy go in on a Saturday for server room maintenance. He stopped responding about halfway through and was later found on the floor, passed out with numerous empty bottles
Hired a guy to handle crystal reports (20 years ago). He seemed to not produce and kept having insurmountable issues that wasn’t his fault. The Director told me he wasn’t actually working all this time, didn’t know what he was doing but not in CR. So I suspected he had embellished his resume and sat down with him and said let’s write a report. So he clicked around and knew the gig was up. He stands up and says “What did that son of bitch tell you.” I just sat there, “What do you think he said?” He packed up his personal stuff and walked out. Never heard from him again.
An MSP Sales Guy (on his second day) was doing, what I can only assume, meth in the bathroom. I pulled him out and sent him home. Owner sent him a term notice the following day.
manager at first suggested us follow a process/procedure for new hires. tech did not listen to him and went his own way, the old way. manager caught the incorrect setup and mentioned to go do it the new way. he refused, and then there was back and forth arguing. tech then got louder and shouted, i was in the room as an intern so i packed up and left since it was just about closing time. as i walked out i saw the COO around the corner and she heard everything. next week i was no longer an intern and I replaced the tech. If you have disagreements then don’t hang your dirty clothes. work it out with your management and close the fucking door
CSB here. I got hired at an MSP. First few months were rough. Any question you asked you got a blank stare. Or you'd get I donno did you google it? And I took those lumps and stopped asking. Productivity went down but I thought hey if they won't help me I will just do what I can and update my resume. Over time this lessoned. I was welcomed eventually and after proving to 2 Sr Sys Admins WHY you'd create a global security group and nest in the domain local security group I was given a bit more leeway. One of my co-workers was appallingly terrible to work with. He'd openly mock others he felt smarter than. He'd openly criticize in front of others and berate simple mistakes. Just bad all around. We got a new ops manager and this jerk(the bad co-worker) adjusted folder permissions on a major client. Which opened the FINANCE folder for all employees and they were understandably irate. He called em and said he was working on it. He fixed it eventually and they wanted a FULL dress down on the outrageous issue. He mocked the Ops manager and told him to mind his business. The Ops manager was only trying to calm the situation and this jerk got up and told him off in front of us all. He'd been there 10 years!! And in the snap of a finger in front of us all he said XXXXX pack your stuff you no longer work here. HAHAHA was such an awesome experience to see the self-proclaimed know-it-all get canned!
Onboarded a contract developer from an agency and gave him access to our code repositories. A few hours later, a frontend dev called me asking for advice on if the new contractor's behavior could be considered sexual harassment and showed me a recording of their onboarding meeting / screenshare with him. Among other concerning things (uTorrent, Tor Browser, inappropriate desktop wallpaper that was *definitely* not associated with their agency), the recording showed his local environment constantly redirecting to NSFW sites and him claiming our code was responsible. Turned out contractor's 'agency-issued device' was a personal gaming laptop riddled with malware and a prolific quantity of porn. The agency later discovered he was running an image of his agency-issued device in a VM, but he would do the majority of his work on his personal host system. His access was revoked mid-call.
Servers set to reboot overnight, network boot was configured as the primary boot source. New second line engineer added servers to a client imaging container. One unattended xml file and 24 hours later, all servers were imaged with Windows 10 LTSB. He was the scapegoat for the IT manager who was saving his ass in front of the college board of directors. Didn’t see out his first week.
Emory University?
What fucking moron even lets the server BIOS have network boot be enabled? That was 100% avoidable.
We had a contractor who had been with us 6 months and was about to become official employee. On the day of being hired, Said contractor reboots phone system for whole company in mid afternoon, does not even do clean reboots, does both a/b side near same time. Whole org loses all active calls. Contactor who was going to be signing hiring papers is now fired and escorted out before 4pm.
Large manufacturer. IT headquarters located onsite at largest production facility. MSP brought in new resident contractor for onsite support. Level 2 field work mostly. Not the most technical candidate but whatever there's room to grow and learn. Couple days of onsite training is mostly "follow facility rules and you're termination-proof. Job as long as you want it. Last termination involved a firearms issue." There's a train that circles the plant, tracks run between the two IT buildings, a short walk from each other. No biggie, you're on the clock getting paid to chill and surf reddit until train passes if it's ever an issue. Day 1 post-training: cleared for full plant access. New dude has no chill and climbs over train between two cars while it's in slow roll in full view of site security. Site security walks him offsite and de-badges him. Company bans him. MSP fires him.
I worked at a plant with rails and related equipment, and Rail Safety is no joke. It literally takes a fraction of a second to become raspberry jam.
They hired a new Marketing guy without putting him through our standard basic computer knowledge test. Dude couldn't fucking use a computer at all. Was out the door after the first week when I showed management that he had put in more tickets in a single week than the entirety of the rest of the staff in the last 8 months. Dude was nice enough, but you shouldn't take a job doing digital marketing if you can't even open the start menu, let alone figure out how to open a browser on your own.
Bank suffered a disaster at the hands of a spiteful former employee. CEO brought in a consulting company to assess, and he asked me to come help out (I had worked for him, he had only started with this new bank a few weeks prior, and trusted me so paid me as an independent contractor to make sure the consulting company was doing what they needed to do.) Lead consultant came in on a Monday, goal was to assess then schedule the rest of the team to come do the work to rebuild. I come after I finish my 9-5 to see what’s up. I get here at 5:30. Within an hour I discover: 1) the consultant had removed the VPN appliance “to make sure the ex-employee can’t get back in”. The VPN device was also the firewall/router. And they weren’t using NAT. The entire org was live on the open internet. It’s a bank. 2) he saw all the blinking lights on the switch rack and decided “there must be collisions” so he started unplugging and reseating cables randomly without keeping track of what was where. Some people couldn’t print anymore, others couldn’t get to the internet, others couldn’t reach the exchange server, others couldn’t reach the mainframe. 3) the consultant had added himself to the Board of Directors email distribution list. With his personal email. “So I can make sure he email system is working while I’m at home” By 7pm his contract was terminated
Me. Overdosed two days before starting a new job while out celebrating getting said job. I woke up two days later in the hospital having missed the first day and had to explain I wouldn’t be able to make it to training that week. Everything was setup and ready to go for me to start. I’m now 9 months clean, and have a much better job than the one I was originally going to have. Don’t do drugs kids.
Remote worker. Day 1, boss remotes into his computer to help with something. Boss notices an active LogMeIn session and goes, "what's that about?". Boss's connection drops and we never hear from the guy. The only assumption we could make is that he outsourced himself and it was the "contractor" on his computer.
At an old workplace of mine, we hired a new Senior Linux Admin. The first day, he asked what SSH was. I have absolutely no idea how he got past the interview.
I would place a lot of money on that he did indeed sign up for that.
It makes you wonder whether the guy was really oblivious in the interview process or the hiring manager really screwed up in the interview process to not make it clear the expectations of the role. The guy may have technically been fired, but it sounds more like he quit because the role wasn't what he wanted to do. In cases like that where somebody quits or effectively quits in the first week due to deciding it isn't for them either they found a better job and didn't want to outright say that or some aspect of the hiring process failed.
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I helped with hiring a guy, not the best but seemed capable of the job. He started on a monday, he didn't last until mid-day wednesday. For one thing, day fucking ONE dude comes in and starts spouting nasty shit about gay people at full conversational volume. Office manager was in earshot and gave me a "you serious with this guy?" look. My manager wanted to give him another shot- that would have been *it* had it been my call... Tuesday, he was 4 hours late. Wednesday, he walks in, and decides to start the day with a honest to god racist "joke." That was it. In a couple hours he was out. Dude was cartoonishly bad at being professional, and I don't really have a high bar. But *fuck.*
I used to work for a company that provided SaaS software and services to state governments and the US federal government. Network admin starts Monday morning. By 10am, he's telling us all about how he's a sovereign citizen and does all the crazy shit they do. He doesn't believe in taxes, uses "non-road diesel" in his truck, etc. He apparently had several active lawsuits involving the state we lived in (not sure who was suing who). When we come back from lunch, he was gone. Our boss overheard the commentary from him, said something to HR, and he was out. I guess it's a bad idea to be anti-government and work for the government.
"I'm not computing, I'm operating a numerical manipulation appliance"
"I'm not commuting, I'm travelling! Am I being detained??" Having worked with a lot of ex-military and government employees, you'd be surprised how many fit into this category. That's totally ironic, especially for the military ones who were quite literally owned by the government they hate for 8 or more years, told what to do, where to be, etc.
I just hit the exact same point in *my* career but I've been doing this fucking bullshit for about 26 years now...
Not fired, but quit. Three successive heads of IT were hired for a company where most of the IT team (the ones who didn't need them for visa sponsorship etc) and developers had left after the previous head of IT left after a dispute with the clueless young lady wife of the owner who had retired and let her run the business. They had conned people by not letting on that the department they were being hired to run, which was absolutely critical to the business, had imploded and most people had left, until their first day on the job, and for some reason thought people would stay.
15 minutes after he (the Contractor) walked out on rebuilding a WinServer 2000 system and said he was going to lock me out (I was the Controller and internal IT admin). I called the President and the personal friend of the President who referred him and he was gone. Not the same as a hire, but nobody threatens Management and gets to stay. (Probably true anywhere!)
Not quickest in getting fired, like only working 1 day and getting fired, but the quickest I've seen someone get fired from a fuck up was: We service computers at a prison among other things. So you can't bring certain things onto the prison grounds, like more than $20 in your pocket, no cigarettes, no mary jane, etc because the government thinks you are trying to smuggle in contraband. Anyway, Employee left a Marlboro pack in his car, but instead of cigs, it contained joints. Car was searched upon entry like every time, guards found the joints, employee was immediately arrested. As soon as word got back to his manager, the employee was terminated too.
Dba didn't like he got reassigned to managing a rather closed object store. He chose not to take back ups in the lower environment where the app data build was done. Some one screwed up, corrupted the data build. Management calls for restore. Dba falsified logs to show he had been taking them, they just were garbage. Other admin double checked and reported truth. He was bounced in fifteen minutes flat while a third admin confirmed.
I was hired once and after I got settled in I was talking to my boss and he said that they originally hired another guy but he didn’t show up his 2nd day. After a few days he called and let them know he got arrested on his way home and assured them he would be in the next day. They told him not to worry about it.
Seen 2 people fired pretty damn fast. 1.) Tech comes in. When supposed to be learning and training - spends time watching youtube in a small window in the bottom right of his screen that everyone can easily see. Gets fired promptly. However manager should have really given him more direction and warning. The manager was shit at the time and I don't think he was given enough to do so occupied himself the way he could. 2.) Tech comes in but then proceeds to break up with his girlfriend and then have his car break down - resulting in multiple days of either being late to work or calling in for leave. Manager fires him for calling in for leave while not giving a fuck about his circumstances. Again, I think he should have been given more of a chance and I hope the guy came out on top in the end.
So my boss and I are doing interviews with people for a new Network Manager. Mind you this was for an IT dept that consisted of 4 FTE positions. (including myself and the IT manager) We went over that hey this job requires you to be on-call.. But either my boss or myself would be onsite on the weekends, and would take the direct calls.. We'd only call them in if their was a bigger problem. Or if one of us was on vacation they may be asked to help answer after hours calls.. (which honestly we maybe got one a month and it was usually because someone had forgotten their password) Sounds great. The guy can start that day, as he'd been desperate for a job.. Okay, we do all the ppwk. Finish it, I get a call that someone is having a problem. Guy is going over stuff with HR --benefits etc.. picking stuff.. Tell him I'll be back in 15 min. My boss had left at that point to some executive mtg. I come back, Our main accountant had some problem with his PC. The new guy, got on his machine and proceeded to copy the accountants passwords and all the account info the guy had and emailed it to his personal email using the Accountants email. --Like WTF? yeah the app had crashed and just needed a reboot.. I walk in, see what's going on.. And the accountant had seen this guy do this, and was like WTH did you do? I was like what's going on, 20 min later cops are there, escorting him out in cuffs. My boss is like wtf is going on, I fill him in. And before the cops get there, he'd tried to run off, and the accountant got decked by him. Only reason he didn't get away was we had a guard at the entrance.. This guy had gotten jobs at other places and stuck around long enough to get access to accounts and passwords and was selling them online.. I mean hell it hadn't even been 2 hours since we'd hired him.. And we were working on the background check. All we were going to have him do till everything cleared was have him move some boxes. (and we'd told him that)
A friend of mine was a VP at a media company and oversaw IT. They had to take backups offsite to a bank to keep in a safety deposit box. Every week, for 2 years my friend had to do this. Well the db goes belly one day and they can’t get it up. Backups on the SAN aren’t working either. They decide they need the offsite backups. My friend drives to the bank, brings back the disks, and connects them to his laptop to see what’s there so they could restore. Fucking. Empty. Long story short, the IT guy never put the backups on disk because he was just too lazy to bother. Fired him the next day. They did somehow manage to get the db backup and going. My friend was driving blank backup disks to a bank for years….
I saw an MCSE bounced out of the office two weeks into a new job--at a government agency, no less. 21 years ago, I worked for a state agency that had all its business logic on mainframes and big Unix systems in a central office, but a vast multi-site NetWare installation (1200 or so stations, 60-ish field offices) for file sharing, print sharing, backups, workstation management, authentication, and basically everything else. We had one Windows server to support one application (Remedy^1 Helpdesk), and were about to bring a second online to support something that needed SQL Server. So, we hired our first MCSE. MCSE showed up and starting giving the Novell admins grief on day 1 about their poor little eDirectory setup (which worked damn well), lamented all this "NetWare garbage" on his Windows workstation, and immediately started agitating for a migration to Active Directory. His only reason was that Active Directory was "better" (not objectively true in 2003), and since we had *two* Windows servers, it'd save having to replicate policies and user accounts (there were none in common) on all both of them. Management said, without any hesitation, "No." We'd need to retrain the whole desktop support staff, migrate 60 offices in two time zones, roll out new station clients, and for what? Labor-saving for the new guy on one server? Genius decided to show us. He set up an AD forest on a discarded PC--hosted in his cube, joined the two Windows servers to it over a long holiday weekend, unknowingly broke Helpdesk for the whole agency, and took the following Monday off. Our public-facing SLA was a legislative mandate. We had a (completely unrelated) outage on a service in my (Unix) side of the house, and calls started to back up. Not only could helpdesk not add tickets from angry public, but none of us could log into the Windows servers to un-wedge Remedy, couldn't raise MCSE on his phone, and effectively had a lost day for anything that couldn't happen on paper or the mainframe. We (Unix team) got our stuff fixed by yelling at the apps team who also rolled stuff out over the long weekend without testing, but helpdesk had to rely on notes they'd taken by hand to know who to call back. MCSE didn't make it to 8:02 on Tuesday before being handed a box by HR to clean out his desk. ^1 Apologies for unearthing any suppressed trauma.
3 hours, this guys first day comes in late then steals a coworkers lunch and starts telling the coworker how he is going to bang the coworkers wife.... For his safety he was quickly fired. FYI the coworker in this case was a very tall well built guy and the nicest person I have ever worked with. Only reason the person in question lived.
About 20 minutes. She turned up for work as expected to find that she had no workstation, none of us knew who she was, the only person who did know who she was, and what her role was, was the owner, and he was uncontactable. Sis knew she was walking into a shitshow and noped the fuck out after ten minutes of awkward silence. Smart woman. It took me way longer to figure out what a disorganised train wreck that job was.
Just got a guy out of server support call center training and it was a struggle. First day on the phones he shows up with headphones on listening to music and bobbing his head, bosses daughter walks by, he leers at her and says, “Who’s tappin dat ass?” loud enough for the whole floor to hear. Guy lasted less than an hour.
I had one recently. Got a slack from HR on new Hire's start date asking if I could see where he was connecting to his Zoom meetings from since his connection was choppy, and he was not answering their questions about it. He was not connecting to Zoom from the state we had shipped his laptop to, and wasn't actively connecting from his corp machine either. Turns out I already had suspicions because he had been trying to install VPN software on his brand new company machine we had sent him. (We're fully remote). Pretty sure he was not real and was one of those contractor farm in other countries deals. We disabled him completely day 2... Luckily due to this experience we were able to convince HR / Management that all new hires need to start their first couple days in office, even if it means we have to fly them in and get a hotel etc.
I saw someone get fired the first day in the office. Morning - Does HR work later Morning - Gets laptop, admin creds, policies etc Lunch - After Lunch - Dude logs into a DC and makes a DNS change. He deleted a CNAME that was pointing to a WAF cluster for a client facing app, and everything crashes. Took a bit to sort out. Dude had no ticket, no one asked, he just randomly did this, in the middle of a change freeze, and kept working like it was nothing. After gathering the logs and asking him why he did it (he didn’t tell anyone he had done it until we had the evidence) he looked at his boss and said “it just didn’t look right to me” and shrugged. You could hear a pin drop, everyone’s jaw was on the floor. No one could comprehend what was just said. His boss told him “follow me” walked him to HR and fired him on the spot. Start to finish? 6 hours.
I’ve seen a few of them during my career, varying degrees of stupidity, the chip stealer is the best. I worked at a large company known for free snacks and lunch. This guy did the absolute bare minimum. I caught him sleeping multiple times, whatever man, so long as I’m not doing your job… Cue covid. There’s nobody in the office. He’s deemed essential and starts showing up to work at like 5am when he should be starting at 7. The staff that fills the snacks takes photos of the shelves setup for whomever is allowed in the office at this point. Bare minimums. They start noticing that the racks are empty by 7. There’s cameras everywhere. They find him going from station to station taking the small bags of potato chips. Multiple days. He’s let go in mid march and could’ve spent the next 2 years sitting in the office doing not much. To those who haven’t worked in an environment like this, free means moderation. He could’ve taken a bag from each kitchen and never got caught.
I was going to say higher up in IT (aka anything that is not T1/T2) it’s completely understandable to not take support calls. But then I read it again and noticed the „hired a help desk tech“ That’s outrageous lmao Edit: Grammar Edit 2: Chill guys. Anybody takes calls from everybody and aims to help out - just human interaction basics. I still don’t think it is a good idea to promote cutting the Helpdesk-Line and calling somebody else.
IT manager here - fired a person within 30 minutes of learning they looked up confidential HR information on a protected drive, then tried to use that information to get an raise. Abuse your sysadmin privileges, do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight to unemployed.
We hired a new guy for our 8pm to 8am NOC Unix admin position. I worked the 8am to 8pm shift, so we would hand off any info during the shift change. The new guy claimed to have 8 years of experience as a Unix admin at Walmart. Fast forward to his first day after training. I stayed late to walk him through his first ticket to ensure he knew how to handle it properly. The ticket was to add NFS mounts to `/etc/fstab` and mount them with the proper permissions. What I thought would be a 10-minute task turned into an hour-long tutorial on NFS, mounts, permissions, and more. It became clear that he had lied on his resume and was just trying to get his foot in the door. I didn't mind training someone who was green, but the real issue was that he had lied about everything. I decided to test his knowledge: "So you use VIM, right?" I asked. His response: "Oh yeah, all the time." I continued, "So you know the joke, how do you exit VIM?" He laughed and said, "Haha, oh yeah, that's funny." Then I asked, "So how do you exit VIM?" He threw out some random suggestions. The next day, I reached out to my manager and informed him that the new hire had zero experience and was a liability. My manager replied, "But he passed the test and had 8 years of experience." That night, a quick Google search revealed that the guy had two felonies, a handful of other charges, and was out on bail. I sent my manager the mugshots from his arrest and a newspaper article about him mugging people using a Craigslist Apple phone scam. Needless to say, he wasn't there that night for the shift change.