An ex-coworker asked me to do a 3-month contracting stint at his company where he was the head of IT. The task was to "clean up the environment" because the servers were crashing often and performance was poor.
I quickly found the source of the crashes: misconfigured ethernet switch MAC address limits applied to VMware ESXi. I also cleansed the environment by finding the one working server in each cluster and then cloning it out to replace the faulty ones. These were all "pets" on life support, and I tried to make them more like identical "cattle".
I went back a year later and half of the IT support team was gone. I asked what happened and the answer was: me.
Apparently after I fixed up the platform the number of support requests plummeted, and a bunch of the helpdesk staff were made redundant.
I'm so torn about stuff like this. On one hand, yeah, it absolutely sucks that people lost their job based on a thing you did. But on the other hand, their jobs existed only because things were broken that didn't need to be. Essentially, bullshit jobs: it sorta feels related to the trope of someone going around a neighborhood breaking people's windows to drum up business for the local window-installation company, without the nefarious bits.
I feel similarly about the rise of automation. At a global/society level, I think it's great that there are jobs humans don't have to do anymore. That leaves more people to be able to pursue "higher" things. But the reality is that some people who had jobs now don't, and might be suffering financial insecurity because of that. Our society should be helping people retrain, and keep them on their feet financially while they do so, but many places just don't have a good enough safety net for that, let alone specific programs for retraining when jobs become unnecessary.
The worst part is that the helpdesk staff were nice. More than a decade later I can't remember anything else about them, except that they were all lovely people.
I'm sure they got new jobs and whatnot, but I still feel bad about the whole thing.
Intellectually, I agree with you that bullshit jobs ought to be eliminated, but I suspect that this process will continue to be morally a gray area until we have something like universal basic income.
I quickly found the source of the crashes: misconfigured ethernet switch MAC address limits applied to VMware ESXi. I also cleansed the environment by finding the one working server in each cluster and then cloning it out to replace the faulty ones. These were all "pets" on life support, and I tried to make them more like identical "cattle".
I went back a year later and half of the IT support team was gone. I asked what happened and the answer was: me.
Apparently after I fixed up the platform the number of support requests plummeted, and a bunch of the helpdesk staff were made redundant.
Oops.