Feeling a little lost

A year ago this week our largest customer at work was bought out by a huge conglomerate. At that time, we were all afraid of losing our jobs, fortunately only 6 of us were let go at that time.

Since then, we have continued to sub contract with the large conglomerate. Up until about two months ago, things were running fairly well and at that time we were informed that our subcontract work was diminishing and that we would be done at the end of the year. In my case it's happening at the end of this month.
I am working on a new and exciting project which I have been ramping up on, but I am really going to miss my "old thing"

I have been with "Exchange" since it's inception over three years ago. This has been my baby, I have written scripts, tested it and worked with three other product groups to make sure everything runs seamlessly. Now it's being ripped away.
I understand the conglomerates reasoning for this, it saves money and they would rather pay their own people instead of higher contract rates. BUT no one at the conglomerate knows how Exchange works - in their words - it's a black box.

In the beginning of this project when there would be problems with data "exchanging" between two databases, it was "an Exchange issue." In most of the cases, we have proven that it was a problem in either the subscribing or publishing databases. Finding these problems made the other systems better.

The thing about Exchange is that it's a delicate program. One little change in code by someone clueless about how it works and the whole thing comes falling down. It really is a beautiful machine. I know it sounds corny to talk about it this way, but this has been my life for a long time and I feel like I am losing a loved one.

We have been talking around the office about what a cluster fuck this move has been on the part of the conglomerate. They have no one in place that knows this product, or the VFIN product for that matter. The people they are "promoting" to QA have never tested before and only one has an accounting background. The two developers put on Exchange don't even have it installed on their machines yet - this with less than two weeks till turnover time.

One of these QA people has been working product support for a while. I really like this person, but his retention is bad. He and I have had the same conversation at least 20 times regarding a certain problem - and he still has to call me to "jog" his memory. I really would hate to see him try and do level 3 support with customers if he can't remember after two years what an object reference error mean.

We all seem to think that the employees taking over for us at the conglomerate are going to fuck up and we'll be hired to clean up the mess. In my opinion this is wishful thinking. Yes, they are going to have a very hard time getting up to speed and they will probably fall on their face, but this conglomerate has made it clear they do not want us working on their standard product.

Since all this has happened, I have been moved to the custom team and I am working on projects unrelated to the conglomerate. However, most of our custom work is with the conglomerates customer. This is fine and dandy, but what if the conglomerate decides to stop selling this particular product set - where does this leave us? Not in very good shape. This is all we know for the most part and I think we are keeping all our eggs in one big basket. If that basket falls over, those eggs break and our company may fall apart.

I trust management in the company that this won't happen, but you never know.
The new QA person that I was talking to today is a little pissed at the conglomerate because they aren't having us train them on the way things are done. This person felt that we should be taking the time to ramp them up and show them how things are done. This non-training was done for a couple reasons: one, yes we were paid to perform a function and we excelled at it. BUT they did not pay for the expertise behind it. In my companies opinion, why should we give them more than what they paid for. They don't want us anymore, that means our intellectual property is just that - OURS.

My company also feels that if the conglomerate feels the pain, then they will want us back. Yes, this may be the case and as I said before this may be wishful thinking, but if they want us back why not buy us. This would make perfect sense, but who am I to say.

I just feel like a big baby over this thing. All I want to do is dump on them and I'm sure it's starting to get on peoples nerves. I just need to shut up and do my job.