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Admin
After all these years of reading this site (since about 2009), I'm finally frist!
Admin
IDK If I'd have accepted the offer to stay. On one hand, promotion to Director with appropriate salary and basically free reign. On the other, place you don't like and who knows if they wouldn't try to screw you over later on. But that has to be better than doing freelance consulting for mom-and-pop shops who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Admin
We're all different, of course. I think that one of her (now-former) coworkers expressed it best: “Go looking for the problems you want to have.” My last programming job had become so toxic that I can't imagine anything that would have kept me in that shop. So I retired and later started working in a bakery, and there I found the problems I wanted to have. Mostly. :-)
Admin
TL;DR: After quitting a toxic tech-support job following the death of his mentor Aggie, the narrator is unexpectedly offered a Director role leading a new Change Management team by HR head Leila. The job would let him reform the company, recruit his departing friends, receive better pay and benefits, and take bereavement leave—but he turns it down because staying would betray his desire to build something better outside the company.
He, Megan, Reynaldo, and later Sanjay instead launch an equal-ownership, no-hierarchy freelance cooperative called RD IT Solutions (“rubber duck”). Despite financial uncertainty and a steep learning curve, remote work and mutual support make them happier, healthier, and free from the dread of corporate life. Their first client comes via a former coworker nicknamed “Dracula,” but the project immediately becomes absurd when the client asks them to fax website source code so her nephew can “type it into the Internet”—then complains when he pastes it into Facebook.
Admin
Epilog: their first client doesn't listen to suggested fixes (post Facebook) but does post a flaming zero-star review on GlassDoor
Admin
You mean "her". Wrong pronoun.
It's not exactly hard to get right.
Addendum 2026-08-11 06:17: That's how I want to see our anonymous IT hero. she/her. It makes the story much better.
Admin
There are 3 of them
Admin
Sounds like something Nik Suresh would recommend in his blog (https://ludic.mataroa.blog/) or on his interview on Pivot-to-AI (https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/31/nik-suresh-ludicity-on-surviving-corporate-ai-psychosis/)
Admin
ObiWayneKenobi wrote "mom-and-pop shops who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground".
That's a bit harsh, don't you think? Some mom and pop shops know the difference between a burro and a burrow.
Admin
That's not accurate, though. All the way back in the first story, Megan's boss refers to the narrator as "Mr".
Admin
Story contains versions of the "So-called Dracula" line from two different drafts. Suggest deleting one of them.