rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance Dumb Manager Destroys the ENTIRE Company

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

0:00 Intro 0:09 Knowledge 3:16 All fired 7:28 Other jobs 10:38 Nicer chair 12:45 WFH 14:13 Literally Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Chris Hadfield, astronaut and citizen of planet Earth. Join me on a journey into the systems that power the world. No politics, just real conversations with real people shaping the future of energy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to R-slash Malicious Compliance, where stupid management deletes their entire company. Our next credit post is from annual antics. A former employer has decided to shoot themselves in the foot with a bazooka. I thought that I'd share it here so that you can laugh at them too.

In a nutshell, the business built its own in-house software, which is designed to cover all aspects of the business. Invoicing, tracking stock, creating reports, semi-automating direct debit billing, and virtually everything else. A thousand different tasks. As such, the business ended up with three IT departments. One was more hardware issues and basic IT issues. There was the medium IT department who could fix small issues within specific sub-areas of the software, and the legacy team who worked on the rawest base level of the software and have kept it functioning for over 20 years. In an effort to cut costs, the senior management

decided that the legacy team were no longer required, as the company was creating a whole new software anyway, and they'd be ditching the old one within a year or so. In doing so, the company also insisted that the large office that team occupied was completely emptied. This included several huge filing cabinets of paperwork comprising dozens of core manuals and countless hundreds of up-to-date how-fix documentation pieces as well as earlier superseded documents

that they could refer back to. The legacy team sent an email to the seniors basically saying, Are you sure? To which they eventually received a terse email back specifically stating to destroy all paperwork. They were also ordered to

delete all digital files. to free up a rather substantial amount of space on the shared drive and wipe their computers back to factory settings. So, the documents were all shredded, the digital files were erased totally, and the computers were wiped. The team removed every trace of their existence as ordered, and left for greener pastures. It's been three months, and there was recently a power outage which has broken something in the rebooted system. The company can no longer add items into stock, which means, invoicing won't work. In turn, this means there's no invoices for the system to bill. So it's back to pen, paper, and shared Excel sheets to keep track of stock, manually typing invoices into a

template, and having to manually check every payment received against paper invoices, all of which is resulting in massive amounts of overtime required to keep up with the demand. The company has reached out to the old legacy team. But the legacy team has said that, without the manuals they were ordered to destroy or erase, they're not sure how to fix it. The new system is still at least a year out. You know, normally when you get an email saying, are you sure? You would pause and think, wait a second, am I sure? But when the entire IT team is like, are you double extra sure?

Can I get this in writing that you're sure? I'd be like, no, hold on, wait a second. Maybe I'm an idiot and I'm wrong and let's reevaluate everything. Our next Reddit post is from Superb Raccoon. So I work at a Fortune 500 company, but like everywhere, management comes up with one-size-fits-none metrics. The latest was revealed to us by our manager, who surprisingly is the hero of this story. We've always had the metric that if you fell below 70% of your quota on a quota-eligible role, you risk being put on a performance review plan. It's well known that anyone who gets on that plan is pretty much toast. Either you get fired for failing the plan or you're first on the next layoff list. And usually, they replace you with a newbie fresh out of college in one of the lower two bands.

My particular team is made up of all senior people. Every one of us is in one of the top two skill grades. So we know that we're a target, which is insane, as all of us engage the C-suite at other very large Fortune 500. companies and act as trusted advisors. We cannot be replaced by a new graduate with intern-level performance. So our intrepid hero, my boss, gets pulled into this two-day seminar. The corporate bigwigs lay out a new policy. All employees have to hit 80% of their quota for the past two years. My manager asks, so let me understand if this year they hit 100% of the quota, but the previous year they only hit 79% of the quota. Then they're in trouble? The HR team

hymns and haws. Well, yes, that's how it would work. My manager asks, I see, and there's no exceptions? The general manager speaks up. That's correct. Everyone must be a top performer. No exceptions. My manager starts gathering his things. He asks, would you mind if I skip the rest of the day? I have a lot of work to do, apparently. The general manager looks at him. Well, no, we have more to cover. What's so urgent? My manager looks at the general manager and maliciously complies with the stated metrics. He says, based on the metrics and the no exceptions rule, I have to prepare my entire team to be put on a performance review plan. No exceptions. I'll need to start hiring replacements for everyone too. The general manager looks confused, attempting to digest this

new information. Most of the other managers stick their hands up. They say, we need to put all of our employees on performance review plans too, and higher replacements. A quick count shows that 80% of the company would be put on a performance review plan. Given the failure rate, that means about 80% of the team would be fired and only 20% would remain. My boss points out that he himself would also be put on a performance review plan, as well as his manager and her manager, all the way up the chain. No exceptions. The meeting wraps up after the discussion dies down, and the general manager says they're not implementing this now, but in a few months. During those two months, there are more online meetings, questions are asked, more data is

pulled from the HR systems, there are more meetings with HR, and at this point, legal is now very interested in this plan of theirs. This culminated in a meeting this past Monday, where the revised plan was revealed. A new exceptions plan had been put in place at the insistence of the legal departments. Basically, the new exceptions plan creates like 10 to 12 different exception categories and turns out every single person in my team now qualifies for one or more of those exceptions. Imagine that. The final fallout is it turns out HR didn't do an analysis of how many people would actually be fired by this plan. Turns out worldwide, 100,000 employees would get fired. Their previous numbers said that only 11% of employees would end up on performance review

plans. Also, legal went ballistic when they saw the plan. Gotta love my boss. He looks out for us often by maliciously complying with stupid requirements. Our next credit post is from Dr. Pillow. I spent a few years of this company. The pay there is not as competitive. competitive and we all got a measly 2 to 3% raises each year. Nothing close to inflation levels. I had been in a starter position and was still studying on the side. So I agreed with my boss already a couple of years ago that I would get a promotion once I graduated. Well, last September I graduated and I asked for my promotion. I had looked over the worker union salary statistics and the median would be around an 18% bump for me. I didn't expect to get that much because besides them being cheap, The economy was bad, and they had just downsized like 15% of the staff in July. Luckily, I'd gotten myself into a strong position of being one of the only ones left with some unique skills, so I survived the downsizing. Anyhow, I show my boss a copy of the statistics and ask for the median.

My boss scoffs and proceeds to fight as hard as he can to justify low-balling me. He says several things baffling to me, not limited to, damn you're rich bro regarding my salary no dude i'm really struggling in this economy if i give you more you'll just spend more it's not your concern what i do with my well-deserved money no one at that level makes that much here and the statistics must be wrong i later went around the office to find colleagues at that level the first co-worker i asked earns exactly what i asked for he brought up some concerns about my communication petty things like me not replying to a colleague's email for three days. Three days, by the way, during which I was off-site to give a course somewhere. But my favorite thing he said was, you can go look for other jobs to see how much others are offering. You'll see it's not going to be any better. He lingered on my salary adjustment until December, negotiating with HR, and then finally offered me 11%, which is around what I actually expected. But there's a catch. Next year, I wouldn't get the usual 2 to 3% salary adjustment like

everybody else. What the hell? All right, deal. You see, I'd take in his advice, or rather called his bluff, and was already getting quite far in other job interviews. Come January, I land an offer from the top company in our field, think Google or Apple, offering me what would have been a 35% bump. I hit my boss with the news, and he promptly panics. He says they want me to stay. They need me. My performance and development have been great, but they can't match that offer because not even top management makes that much. I obviously didn't believe him, but I said, I understand it's not fair that I earn more than everyone else. Just do your best. He runs to the top boss's office, and somehow, within 30 minutes, they magically found the budget for a 30% raise.

Perfect. Now I had leverage to negotiate an even better offer from my new job. After all, I'd already made up my mind to leave long ago. Our next Reddit post is from King of Mooks. A while back, my wife and I were buying our house after a few years of renting. There was a delay in the new house being ready, so we moved in with my mother for a few weeks. During that time, I stashed some stuff at work, including bringing my chair, a very nice Herman Miller Aaron that I'd got in second hand.

The chairs at the office were old, standard and serviceable, but not exactly nice. After a few days, I noticed that my chair would be in the conference room every morning. No problem, I just wheeled it back to my desk. I was working 8 to 4 to avoid traffic, so I was usually the first one in. The CEO of about 120 people would usually not arrive until about noon and take later meetings when most of the staff were away. After a few days, the chair kept ending up at his desk. He'd shoot me a dirty look every morning, but that was about it.

After a few more days of this back and forth, the CEO's assistant, who was a lovely person who I felt immense pity for, approached me and told me that the CEO didn't think it was appropriate that I had a nicer chair than him. People would think that my desk belonged to the CEO, and it was stressing her out having to basically fight for it every day on his behalf. I told her I understood completely and would stop fighting over it. I took the chair out of the office that lunchtime and reclaimed a normal office chair.

The next day, she came over and asked where the chair was. I said with an incredibly straight base that I thought since it wasn't appropriate, I just took it to my car. She had a super stunned look, but just kind of ran off. Since I was almost always first in, I always got parking near the building, and pretty much everyone got to walk past my car on the way, into the office and see my chair in the back for a few weeks. However, given the CEO's cowardly nature, I never got approached about it again. To this day, I'm a hundred percent certain they thought

I was just going to give in and let him have my chair. Instead, I got the joy of telling everyone the honest truth about why my chair was in the car for weeks. Our next Reddit post is from Windogrid. I'm currently in my malicious compliance phase at work right now. I got ripped a new one last week. I got ripped a one last week because I needed to work from home in order to get some urgent stuff done for a conference I needed to attend the following week. I was explicitly told that I could not work from home without approval, and I was told that I signed a policy about it. I responded that my job requires me to work from home all the time, to which they replied, you sign the policy. So now, after I leave the office, I turn off my work-issued cell phone and never look at it on the weekends. I'm a

salaried employee, but I'm not going to beg my employer to allow me to work from home. This weekend, I got a call on my personal cell from one of the other managers about approving some billing rates that were due. I told her that I wasn't allowed to work from home, and I'll get to it on Monday whenever I have the opportunity. Everything will be late, but I signed the policy. It literally would have cost them nothing to just let them do my job. I already get paid a fixed rate. But if they want to play stupid games, they can win stupid prizes. As someone who works from home and my editor works from home, I can tell you that companies that don't want you to work from home are full of BS. Coming into the office does nothing for nobody. I'm like 99% sure that the only reason why

anyone works in the office anymore is because it makes managers look better. Our next Reddit post is from Candlegleam. A couple years ago, I joined a small but tight-knit church community. Everyone was pretty relaxed. People came in jeans, dresses, even t-shirt sometimes, especially at use services. No one was disrespectful, just comfortable. I usually wore long skirts or dress pants and nice tops. Nothing flashy and definitely nothing revealing. But apparently that wasn't churchy enough for one particular elder, an older woman. After service one day, she pulled me aside and said, with that sweet fake smile, sweetheart, I just wanted to encourage you. you'd dress a bit more appropriately. We should always look our best for the Lord. I was confused.

I asked what exactly was inappropriate about my outfits, a long navy skirt, a tucked in blouse, and flats. She said, it's not bad, but you know, not quite holy attire. Maybe think about what you'd wear if Jesus was sitting in the front row. The next Sunday, I showed up in my most over-the-top church outfit. Full floor-length choir robe, white gloves, a wide-brimmed hat with a fake bird and a little veil. Bible in hand. Stockings, low heels, and pearls. I looked like I was either about to preach, get baptized, or travel back in time to 1954. People stared. One usher asked if I was part of the clergy now. Someone whispered, is she in a play? And bless her heart, the elder gave me a stunned little nod when I sat close to her and said,

You look very reverent today. Thank you. I figured this is how Jesus would want me to show up. Next week, I was back to my usual outfit. Never got a comment again. That was our slash malicious compliance. And if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.