I was offered a job at ABC Corporation doing PC support as a temporary employee. I decided to take the job -- relocating 1,500 miles to do so. When I arrived on site, I found out that my hiring manager had been demoted to a PC support technician. I met with the Director of IT, who assured me that my temporary position was safe. Within another few weeks, there was a major outage with cc:Mail, and it was that support person's last week with the company. I assisted with getting cc:Mail operational by staying there approximately 72 hours straight and from time to time, the cc:Mail support person would stop by to see how I was doing.
After cc:Mail was back up and operational, the director of IT was very impressed and appointed me to support cc:Mail, with which I had no previous experience prior to the latest incident. Within another month, the primary VMS support person left the company. Because I had prior experience, I took on that position as a permanent employee and attempted to ensure that cc:Mail support would be a temporary assignment until a replacement could be hired. In the meantime, a new IT manager, Joe, was hired.
Every so often, I would ask Joe about the cc:Mail support replacement but he would always tell me the company was still evaluating the situation. A year went by and still no replacement, so I just accepted that I would have to do the work of both support jobs. With all of this turmoil, I kept my eyes open for positions at other companies, but my search was a half-hearted one -- I still had a decent paying job, after all.
When the IT director decided to move to another position within the parent company, the director of finance hired Bob, a guy with a like-minded management mindset. The director of finance informed IT that each employee would be expected to work a minimum of 60 hours per week. I'll admit that news didn't sit well with me and I rarely stayed past 5:00, but I always made sure that anything that couldn't wait until the next day was completed.
Joe gave most of the IT department, including me, "Needs Improvement" on their reviews. (By the way, this was the first and only negative performance rating that I ever faced in my 20-year IT career.) Joe started writing up employees for any mistakes, even first-time occurrences. After two of these write-ups, the Network/VMS secondary support person left the company -- he knew that after a third, they could fire him. You guessed it -- they didn't replace him, either.
Eventually, I made a mistake and was written up for an event related to another cc:Mail failure. I now started to actively seek other employment.
The new director of IT learned that I wasn't willing to put in mandated extra hours so he decided to test my dedication. Bob informed me that he needed to see me by the end of the day. I continually checked his availability but on every occasion, I was told he was too busy. I kept checking back until almost 6:00 p.m. and decided to leave and see him the next day. I got my ear chewed off the next morning, and Bob proceeded to play the same game that day and evening, finally seeeing me at about 7:30 p.m. Bob told me that he just wanted to see whether I'd stay late because Joe had told him otherwise. Within a week of that incident, I was fortunate enough to land another job. It was nice to say goodbye.
A few months later, I contacted some ABC Corporation former co-workers and learned that the company didn't fill my position, either. The one or two guys left had to absorb my responsibilities, too.
I'm not sure if there is a moral to this story, but if you see everyone around you disappearing, you might want to buff up that resume...