While I can both relate and empathize with the story here- the initial "crisis" seems forced and arbitrary. Once a company becomes sufficiently large to mandate a promotion process like the one described in this story, the management would probably know that there is no "immediate" changes that can be made unless they want to bypass those processes. Further, if it took 6 days to change a line of code to meet everyone's standards and satisfy requirements, imagine how long it would take to push through a layoff. :)