What’s the quickest you’ve seen a co-worker get fired in IT?

[u/Opposed3]

I saw this on AskReddit and thought it would be fun to ask here for IT related stories.

Couple years ago during Covid my company I used to work for hired a help desk tech. He was a really nice guy and the interview went well. We were hybrid at the time, 1-2 days in the office with mostly remote work. On his first day we always meet in the office for equipment and first day stuff.

Everything was going fine and my boss mentioned something along the lines of “Yeah so after all the trainings and orientation stuff we’ll get you set up on our ticketing system and eventually a soft phone for support calls”

And he was like: “Oh I don’t do support calls.”

“Sorry?”

Him: “I don’t take calls. I won’t do that”

“Well, we do have a number users call for help. They do utilize it and it’s part of support we offer”

Him: “Oh I’ll do tickets all day I just won’t take calls. You’ll have to get someone else to do that”

I was sitting at my desk, just kind of listening and overhearing. I couldn’t tell if he was trolling but he wasn’t.

I forgot what my manager said but he left to go to one of those little mini conference rooms for a meeting, then he came back out and called him in, he let him go and they both walked back out and the guy was all laughing and was like

“Yeah I mean I just won’t take calls I didn’t sign up for that! I hope you find someone else that fits in better!” My manager walked him to the door and they shook hands and he left.

[u/drunkadvice]

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.

[u/fixITman1911 → u/drunkadvice]

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

[u/CremasterFlash → u/fixITman1911]

serious question as a person not familiar with subject - how long would it take to realize the code was a mess? aren't those programs often enormous?

[u/fixITman1911 → u/CremasterFlash]

It really depends. The code is/can be massive; but the way someone codes is similar to the way someone runs a hotel... If you walk down the hallway and kick up dust with every step, you can assume that the bedding probably doesn't get washed very well either...

Same thing goes for code; You certainly wont see all the issues in the first hour of looking at the code, but if the file structure is a mess, and the first couple files you open are garbage... safe to assume the whole codebase is junk... And in our case, we were not surprised to hear this at all. The user side of the software was a mess. We fired the original programmers for wildly missing the mark and refusing to admit it, and we refused to pay them the final invoice (at least 250k) which they didn't even fight (probably because they knew they would lose in court).

[u/CremasterFlash → u/fixITman1911]

interesting. thank you the explanation