Employee’s new boss wants to swap his earned department head role with a coworker’s, calling it a “fair chance” that feels a lot like a demotion – FAIL Blog

New management walking in and treating years of proven competence like an unverified rumor is one of the most reliable tragedy setups in office life. 

And this boss walked in like a general contractor who didn’t build the house but immediately wants to inspect the wiring. 

Trial periods with nothing to actually test are their own genre of nonsense. It’s the workplace equivalent of a cooking competition where the ingredient is air. Someone gets handed the keys for a stretch, nothing happens because there was nothing to happen, and somehow that counts as meaningful data. Real evaluations involve stakes. This is more like judging a lifeguard by having them watch an empty pool.

Then there’s the magic trick of a “temporary” arrangement with zero end date. Anyone who’s had a houseguest overstay a weekend knows how this works. Nothing says permanent quite like the word “indeterminate,” which is corporate for “we’ll figure out how to make this stick.”

The best part is getting told to just come up with a better system yourself, as if the person being quietly nudged out the door is also supposed to be running HR’s strategy meetings on the side. 

Altogether, this is less a growth opportunity and more a slow-motion game of musical chairs where someone keeps insisting the music never stopped.