You remember [REDACTED] and how he was put as the lead on the project back at the start of January 2025? He bounced mid-February to another project, and quite literally vanished from anything to do with the work. I always thought it was weird that everyone was so chill about this person dropping a big project with no notice, and seemingly no consequences. Then the layoffs started happening and I got some people added to my team. I didn’t have the budget for them, and at this point I had already told my boss everything that went down and more importantly I documented it. He was busy responding to Trump/Hegseth’s every whim so he didn’t really say anything about it.
Since I was already overrunning, I took on people with the skillsets I needed to do the work that was dropped by the corporate organization, and worked with the other sector leads to consolidate work and what little budget we all had left after the spending freeze that went into effect in March. Not to sound too arrogant, but I know I’m a good people manager. I don’t really enjoy managing people because I’m an introvert and it is hard to do it well, but when I manage people I give it my all. I have had some real shit managers so I know what a decent one looks like and try hard not to be a bad one, or even a mediocre one.
Regardless, I get someone on my team that got cut from the corporate organization because they decided to drop a bunch of work including in my engineering area. So she comes onto my team, and she starts asking questions about what is happening with all the work and the $4.5M that was supposed to go towards this specific work as she is transitioning over to my team.
Corporations are not well run, and it is fascinating to me that humans have achieved so much knowing how things actually work in business world. Naturally, the people who were kicked off the project never had their access to certain things revoked. So this wonderful team member who ended up joining my team started digging since she wasn’t getting answers as ot why she was effectively fired from the project. As cheesy as it might sound every team member has their strengths, and this one played to hers. We will call her Jessica, so we don’t get confused with the story.
Jessica is a program manager, and their job is what it sounds like. She has access to all the information about where the money goes, and because she was supposed to be in this organization, she has access to their “bank statements” if you will. We are now in early May at this point in the story and Jessica asked [REDACTED] about why he left back in mid February. His answer is that he was fed up with the administrative work around the project and he thought he was going to be leading the technical work, not managing the business side of it. He didn’t give details about what that meant, but he implied it was more admin work than a project should have, or a technical lead should be doing.
We thought “that’s weird”, but figured it made sense if you wanted to do engineering and were managing excel spreadsheets instead. I would probably leave the project as well. Then Rachel popped back up. She was trying to get Jessica to speed up her transition so they could stop funding the project entirely. They gave her until the end of May to complete any tasks that had to be wrapped up. Jessica then tells me all about how awful Rachel delivered the news and talked down to her. We are now besties because we both hate Rachel. She then says, this is so suspicious because they are supposed to release funds in June, not try to cut back even more.
So she pulled up the bank statements, and guess what we found!