Apparently,this company was hit by a perfect storm of layoffs and document procedures. I say “perfect storm” because this kind of thing can’t be common, right? Right?
Thanks for this - I’m going to pass it on to some folks at work.
Sounds like a Goverment operation to me.
Welcome to my career.
This is my favorite part.
Wrong. Wrong.
In my anecdotal sample size of the one* company I worked at for 12 years, it is more common than you might think.
*Well, that “one” company was technically five companies in the time that I worked there.
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Company A went in Chapter 11 and reorganized into Company B.
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Company B was bought and merged with Company C.
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Company C was bought and merged with Company D, who immediately spun off the original Company A into Company E.
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Company E then merged with and became a division of Company F.
As you can imagine, between all the layoffs, relocations, and general attrition, A LOT of institutional knowledge fell by the wayside until Company F was left with a division that was a shell of its former self. Such was the disarray, that it became necessary to essentially rebuild the company/division and its systems from the ground up. Company F found itself with not much more than a brand name and a few increasingly frustrated customers.
This is the point in the story where my pink slip mercifully arrived, and I ran out of there glad to be free of that madness. I did feel a bit sorry for them though, because after the previous round of layoffs that I had survived, there were several critical and undocumented things that weren’t really part of my job description, but I was the only one left that knew how to do them.
I followed their goings on at fuckedcompany.com for a little while, but now even fuckedcompany.com is fucked! From what I’ve been able to glean, my previous employer is still scraping by, servicing the same very few customers’ accounts who are basically stuck with them for reasons I can’t elaborate on without possibly giving away the company’s identity.
Ahh, the dotcom days, what a long strange trip that was!
It happens.
Every time an organization goes through a cycle of layoffs, it loses some of its institutional memory.
I wish people wouldn’t think of this kind of thing as a “government” problem; any large company or organization will have the same symptoms. It’s a result of organizational extent being much greater than what individual humans can handle, and the resulting difficulty of internal communication across space and time.
Where I worked, I thought for years that there should have been an official museum and archive showcasing all of the old products, especially ones that had been discontinued… and right next to it an official “unofficial” archive to record the informal “folk” methods and information that sprang up among the workers as they did things.
It sort of happened with a display in the lobby, but that wasn’t quite the same.
P.S. The (not so) funny thing is that I still own stock in that company. But with the several rounds of significant dilution that took place, it’s all probably worth less than $1 … in Zimbabwe currency.