A few years ago I worked for a top fortune 500 company, they didnt tell me in the interview that I was being hired to take over for someone who was retiring. I found that out on my first day on the job. Bob was a great guy, he had been with the company for 20 years as a consultant, if there was ever a good example of abusing contracting over hiring someone full time it was Bob.
The thing about Bob was they he was brought in 20 years ago to implement their core financial system, he specialized in this system. I asked him one day why did you never go full time ? He said “they offered but to pay me what i am worth they would have had to make me a manager which they didnt want to do. They could never let an expert be a manager. But this was ok with me, every year when my contract was up I would complain about not getting hired and I should go elsewhere, to their competitor so they would just offer me more. I had 15 years of big raises until they would not budge last year so I retired and boy were they mad.” I eventually learned he was paid triple what I was (and my rate was good)
So this guy, key to their core system, the CEO and VPs knew who he was, (And believe me, even after 6 months of training I was no replacement) they had a retirement party.
It was a scheduled half hour meeting arranged by a manager, they had this tiny 1″x1″ cake thinking no one would really show up, over 100 did show up except for any other manager including his current manager. So the manager who arranged this was his very first manager when they implemented the system 20 years ago. His speech was 1 minute talking about Bob then 8 minutes talking about how tough the system was to implement, years to get upto full speed blah, blah, blah and yet not really mentioning Bobs role and then a minute or so saying what a great guy Bob is and we will miss you”
They gave him a $20 gift certificate and his goodbye speech was “thanks for the wonderful words and gift mr manager this really shows your generosity, it's been great everyone, thanks”
The manager looked at his watch and said, “ok, everyone, meetings over, back to work”. and actually whispered to Bob, “dont bill us for this half-hour”
I took over this job, it was a decent enough job but this whole thing with the way they treated him was depressing. I couldn't shake it because I was not that young, Bob was way more competent than I ever was (and not just in this system) and how would they treat me in 20 years if I was still around. They did play games with me in terms of my pay and the one renewal I did.
I left that job about 6 months later.
P.S. Bob was fairly young (60 I guess) his mortgage on his house and cottage was paid off, he sold his house and bought a massive ranch near his daughter in a southern state. And a year or two after i left they started a transition to a new system,they had problems so they called up Bob to consult 1/2 day a week remote for a year and double his crazy rate.