u/dvillin

Fake names because this just happened.

So my job recent switched over to a new inventory system. We were given 3 or 4 all hands video sessions showing us how this thing is supposed to work. No mockup of the program. No siloed version of the actual software for us to play around with. Just a couple of video sessions with someone else trying to figure out how it works.

As you can imagine, the roll out has been a disaster. The software doesn't have any of the original functionality of the original software. Important functions that used to be front and center are now hidden two or three layers deep into menus. The important functions we can find don't work correctly. To top it off, the old software has been mostly disabled. We can kind of still use it, but most of the inventory location functions can't be used any more. So we can get our items in, but we can't put them into a state where they can be redirected elsewhere and be reused. So when we get new or used stuff in, we can only deploy it in the same way it was used before the system changed. If we need to send it to another location, or change it from an owned item to a loaned one, we can't do it. As you can imagine, this has royally pissed us off. Since it is obvious that the software developers never bothered to test this piece of crap with the people who would actually be using it.

So then we come to yesterday.

Yesterday we had another all hands, nationwide, employee meeting. It was going well. We got the usual stuff about expectations for our jobs and new initiatives that will be coming up. Then the VP opens the mic for questions. We had the usual kind of questions about upcoming holidays and such. Then Darren from wherever, raises his hand and asks about why this buggy program was rolled out the way it was. The VP hems and haws about how the problems they are having are unexpected and how the worst ones should be fixed in two weeks, with the rest being fixed over the next month or so.

That was when Darren chose violence. Darren laid into the VP, on this meeting, in front of several hundred other people. He asked if the developers had bothered to test the program. Did they get any end users to actually use the program. Did the developers even bother to check the history of this new shiney. He says that he did 5 minutes of google searching and saw other companies had these exact same problems with this software and what they had to do to get it to work properly. He asked if there were any plans to purchase the fixes these other companies made. He asked if they were going to re-enable the old program so we could actually do our work.

He laid into the VP for 10 solid minutes. My other coworkers and I put the call on loud speaker and got up from our desks and started cheering Darren on. He broke the VP down and basically got him to admit that the reason why it hadn't been fixed yet is because the company didn't want to spend the money to get the fixes from other companies, but wanted to develop their own in-house. Which is all fine and good, except that we manage the inventory for a multi-billion dollar world wide corporation. He's trying to save $100k for a contract worth $100M. WTF is wrong with you.

After the meeting was over, we looked up Darren. Apparently he's worked for this company for 20 years and is near retirement. So unless he is retiring in the next week or so, I have a feeling he is going to be forceably retired next week. So raise one for Darren. The hero we all needed.