This happened about 10 years ago. In my job, we have ‘slots’ that we occupy for our given speciality, so my ‘slot’ is Engineer. Well I had just gotten my Master of Science in Systems Engineering, and my work had Team Leader System Engineering positions that had to be filled. Seemed perfect for me, the only caveat was I had to bring my ‘slot’ with me, which means when I left my current group, they would be down a ‘slot’ and couldn’t immediately backfill my position until the got approval for another ‘slot’.

So I send my resume over, talk to my immediate supervisor, who was supportive and on board, but I also had to talk to his boss, the manager over the group. He says he would love to support me in my career and my moving up and asked me to describe the job. I did, including telling him I would need to bring my ‘slot’ with me. Well, his attitude immediately changes and he said no in a very gruff way and told me to get out of his office.

I stop there a minute, and still trying to be optimistic about it, I asked if that because my work and skills would be hard to replace and that is why he is acting that way, and that I would be glad to help train a replacement and maybe even do a part time split between the two teams until my replacement was up to speed.

He looked at me, sighed, and said it had nothing to do with me, he could care less if I left, my work wasn’t that stellar, he just didn’t want to lose a ‘slot’. That really broke my confidence as an engineer and frankly as a person to have this guy just dismiss me and reduce me down to just having physical body on his team. I ended up quitting a few months later. I wish I had some sort of karma follow for that, but I was replaced within a few days. Thank god my bosses boss didn’t lose his slot though 🙄

softly … don’t

I did my part.

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