Hey, it's your friendly resident bug farmer again, with a conundrum. Anyone who can give me workplace/career advice here is much appreciated.

When I made my first post, one of the questions I was asked was "are the Bugs having a Good Time". At first, I had every inclination to think that at my company, we were making sure that all of our bugs had all of their needs taken care of throughout their development. More recently I found out this was wrong, at least for some of our bugs. A lot of our mealworms are not given enough moist feed around the time that they metamorphose. As a result, when they emerge as beetles, they cannot get moisture anywhere, and they turn to eating any eggs that have been laid, and even developing pupae. Sometimes we get okay survival rates from pupa to beetle, other times it's like a little insect Donner Party times ten thousand. Not good. Lots of unnecessary death and whatever kind of strife bugs experience.

Now, it seems like no one at all in the company knows exactly how much of anything is required for any process. Dry feed? "Just give it roughly two of these crude scoops". Beetles/larvae? "Fill the cup about half full". Root slices (moist feed)? "Grab a handful". The instructions we're given are always "just throw some on there". No measurements, at best only approximations. Kinda like one of those "Intro to ____ Science" classes where you learn the conceptual side of things but nothing about how to quantify what you're doing or make predictions.

At one point several months ago, my supervisor decided he wasn't pleased with the job that I had been doing, consisting of separating larvae from pupae with a screen, collecting any beetles out of the skimmed pupae, and then sorting larvae and pupae and beetles into separate trays so that all our trays are maturing together. Boss said to just let everything go through all the stages, and just pull it when it gets to beetles. But ever since about that time, sales from our mealworm operation have been going down. Like, nosediving. For every $100 of product we used to make, we're now making $20 or less- and all of that $20 is from regularly buying mealworms wholesale from other companies and shipping them in. Needless to say, the department has been operating at a loss for over four months. My boss has been periodically blaming me for the downturn, saying that I just need to "do things his way" and it'll all get better.

So what do I do from there? I started experimenting to try to find out how much the organisms really need to thrive. We'd been giving each trays of beetles (where eggs are laid and new larvae hatch), say, N grams of a mix of our feed ingredients on average; I started giving each tray 2N grams, and when I noticed that still wasn't enough, 3N grams. Did I start with just a few, so that I'd be the only one to notice the effect? NO. My dumbass wanted to SAVE THE WORMS. I thought "I'll go ahead and feed all my assigned racks like this, a couple dozen, it won't be too consequential." WRONG. One rack is about 30 trays, the number of trays I gave the new feeding regimen to was at least 1600, and once the eggs weren't getting eaten, we started getting HUGE amounts of hatchling larvae. Not just record numbers, but records that beat the previous ones by an order of magnitude. Trays that have been fed mostly by my coworkers are pretty barren, but the ones fed mostly by me throughout December are just saturated with worms. Defining the baseline capacity from around the time I was hired as 100%, I estimate we were down to 30% capacity, and now it's bumped up to at least 600%. I'm not exaggerating; 60% of our floor space is just empty, and at this rate we'd be on track to fill up ALL our empty floor space. We've only been collecting the hatchlings out of the racks I fed for 2 days, but half the department already knows that this is the best harvest we've ever gotten. My experiment took maybe 40 hours of labor to do, and it's going to increase revenue by $250,000 at the very least. Over the course of a year this would prospectively generate several million dollars, a noticeable fraction of the company's budget.

:FrogPog: :worm-pog: :beetle-pog: :worm-pog: :comrade-fly:

It's very clear at this point that I know how to manage the department better than my supervisor, who only does 5 hours of supervision of my department per week (it's not the only department he runs), or the lackey he brought over to be "team lead" and deal with most day-to-day stuff. But if either of them find out what's going on, they're going to take credit for what I've discovered, and be able to bring the department back themselves. Right now my boss is probably saying to himself "haha look, it rebounded all on its own, just like I said it would".

I want to prove to the higher-ups that my actions have rescued the department, that I've generated tons of profits for the company, that my supervisor had been running it into the ground and it would be losing money if it weren't for me. Then I want to see if I can negotiate a promotion for myself and a raise for my coworkers. But I've never done anything like this before. I have made a lot of friends in the company, and I think I could get most of my department on board with me, there are only 1 or 2 whom I wouldn't trust not to spill the beans. Upper management is a different issue. This is a workplace with heavily entrenched hierarchies. I'm just a newer guy rocking the boat, but my supervisor is someone they have had a business relationship with for over 10 years; they might just send me packing. Plus it's probably really embarrassing to admit "we don't have any standard operating procedures and we literally cannot count or measure things".

I've already generated one big wave of production. Do I revert back to the old feeding patterns (letting more mealworms die), wait a couple months, watch the production drop back down, and then point to the smoking gun? Or do I just go all in right now and try to push the claim that 4 months of decline was due to my boss, and 1 month of spectacular rebound was due to me? Or should I abandon the whole company, try to get my hands on warehouse space, and go into the same business myself so I can outcompete them in The Market (TM)? And if I can get upper management to the negotiating table, what should I ask for, for myself? Double the wages? An employment contract that's harder to break? Bonuses for hitting targets? Commissions? What do?