“It Was All Shredded”: Management Immediately Regrets Ordering Legacy Team To Destroy Documents

While, in theory, senior management is a role that requires a vast array of skills and knowledge, it’s not at all hard to find examples of folks who are given power and who then immediately run their organization into the ground. Everyone makes mistakes, but ignoring what your specialists are saying is just plain incompetent.

A man shared his bit of malicious compliance when a company fired the legacy software team and ordered them to destroy any and all documentation. Despite being told all the risks, management wouldn’t budge. We got in touch with the netizen who made the post to learn more.

Bored Panda got in touch with the man who made the post and he was kind enough to share some more details. Naturally, we wanted to hear if there have been any updates. “Nothing much at this point, as it's all very recent & ongoing. According to my former colleagues, it's just a nightmarish quagmire of paperwork & excel for everyone. Nothing difficult in theory, but tedious & time consuming. On the positive side, they're making some decent overtime pay. The company is apparently "bringing in a specialist consultant shortly" to have a go at fixing it. The rumor mill says it's one of the legacy staff, but nothing concrete yet.”

The story did end up going viral, so we wanted to hear his reaction to its popularity. “Honestly, I didn't expect it, I thought maybe a couple of hundred, as there's always some new posts to get buried under. Reading the comments, it seems a lot of people have either been in this situation where a company erases institutional knowledge with a short-term benefit in mind (in this case, savings on wages) which backfires spectacularly, OR they're in some form of IT themselves & have a fear of this exact scenario,” he shared with Bored Panda.

“I guess between those two categories, I caught a larger amount of people's interest than expected. Probably helps the tale isn't convoluted either, just a straight "Staff gone, and now there's a problem which only they could fix". Easy reading so to speak.” It’s also the sort of topic that is ultimately pretty relatable, unfortunately. Almost everyone has encountered at least one manager who made a truly block-headed decision. Similarly, companies, or at least key decision makers will often not have a solid grasp of who actually does what.

We were also curious to hear his opinion on the various comments and suggestions folks made. “Someone pointed out there's nothing truly malicious which I think is a fair criticism. The Legacy team did ask something like 4 times before they erased themselves, but still, it was more following an insane order exactly, rather than distorting the order in an unexpected way. But that's more me not knowing sub-reddits very well.”

“A few people pointed out affordable data storage costs. Apparently the company felt that even a small spend on data storage was unnecessary. Others asked why the Legacy team aren't all returning as expensive consultants or why they didn't keep a copy for themselves," he shared with Bored Panda.

"I suspect keeping a personal copy would probably be breaking some kind of law, and even more so if using it to enrich themselves. And they probably know it's near hopeless to even try and don't want to be blamed for the failure. Plus of course, all but one have new jobs to be doing (the other decided to just retire early).”