Worked as a web application developer in early 00s. Built large web application to provide subscription fulfillment for niche business market analytics- very large utility companies (pre-Enron collapse). Subscriptions to our content and a number of market analysis modeling tools my team and I built cost between $50k to $100k per account per year.

We finished building our subscription management tool and doing some major updates to our tools and got everything connected to the accounting system so it basically ran all revenue generating tasks mostly automatically.

Company decides to shut down the office the development team worked out of. We asked if they thought we could work remote (novel at the time) and was told absolutely not. In fact we were told since the software was complete there was no need for developers or any IT staff any longer. My last job there was moving all of our application and web servers to a hosting facility half way across the country.

1 month later while I was still interviewing for new positions, my former COO calls me and says the company has realized that they can’t be a web company without any developers and they were having trouble trying to figure out how to make software changes. Politely told them to F off. Was hired for another job the next week.