rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance Dumb Manager Fires HIMSELF

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

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Welcome to r slash malicious compliance, where a stupid manager gets himself fired. Our next reddit post is from Competition Extreme. I own a managed service provider firm which provides cloud computing services to clients. Business is good enough to pay my employees a respectable wage while offering them a good work-life balance. I haven't had to lay off a single employee yet. I hired a senior IT technician as a middle manager. Let's call him Harry.

Harry seems to have gone off the rails about AI. He started micromanaging our coworkers to an unacceptable extent and he's kept on pestering me to investigate how I could use chat gbt and other AI technologies to reduce employee costs. Frankly, this rubbed me the wrong way. Harry doesn't have a stake in any of his coworkers losing their jobs, and his constant micromanaging has become an issue.

Also, I looked at chat gbt, and there's simply no way that it could replace any of my technical employees. ChatGPT has no agency, nor can it deal with clients, nor can it see a computer screen to actually troubleshoot things. However, ChatGPT could easily replace a middle manager, assuming that someone else takes on a little bit of additional daily responsibility. You see, ChatGPT has a code interpreter mode, which can do calculations and process spreadsheets. This can decimate the workload of a middle manager, at least an hour firm, allowing their responsibilities to be absorbed by another senior employee, me in this case.

I kept this in mind, and I've been shadowing Harry's job for the past few months. A good employee retired last week. I approached Harry and I told him that I took his suggestions to heart and I've decided to automate his role with AI. I told him that he could accept his redundancy package or be retrained in something else. He chose to be retrained. Unfortunately for Harry, he'll lose the comfy privilege that being a middle manager entails. Fortunately for our coworkers, they'll have an impartial AI making decisions.

Fortunately for me, I won't have to pay for a redundant role. The top comment from Voradaddy, I never thought leopards would eat MY face, says the middle manager who voted for leopards eating people's faces. Our next reddit post is from PowderToastSupreme. I worked as a writer and editor for over a decade, and during that time I had my fair share of bad bosses, like anyone would. But there's one bad boss who completely takes the case.

I worked for a large company that dealt with other companies and subsidiaries, ranging from publishing to fashion to sports to sports, to tech. You name it, they did it. The way our writing department worked was each writer would have specific areas that they would write for, kind of like how journalists have beats that they cover. So if you were assigned to the fashion arm of the company, you wrote or edited everything for that arm. I worked for this company for about a year and a half before a new manager was hired.

She was the second in command of our department. Part of her and our department director's job was to update our internal style guide when necessary. For those who don't know, a style guide is a reference document for how to write things and edit things. Before this woman's tenure as manager, this was done maybe once or twice a year, and the changes were relatively minimal since the style guide was very well established in the company, and it had been in place for a number of years.

After she came on, it was being updated at least once a week, if not multiple times a week. It legitimately became an obsession for her. Aside from the general annoyance of keeping up with it, it didn't take long for me and my coworkers to reach the conclusion that our new manager didn't have the faintest idea what she was doing. Each new version had more and more glaring errors. At first we all just ignored these changes, giving her the benefit of the doubt and hoping, albeit naively, that these new directives were mistakes. That was until people started getting reprimanded for not following the style guide.

I was the first person to get a one-to-one closed-door talk. One of the departments that I wrote for was sports, and she had seen that I hadn't been following the new rule of how I was supposed to refer to the men's and women's teams that I covered. Truthfully, I had intentionally ignored it, hoping that it was just a mistake. To my horror, however, it appeared that my new writing manager didn't understand basic grammar. You see, the changes she implemented removed the apostrophe from men's and women's in like men's basketball.

Her rationale was that the men in men's basketball didn't own the team, therefore it shouldn't be possessive. Apparently, her understanding of the English language didn't evolve past grade school explanations. I was honestly pretty dumbfounded at first, but once I got over the initial shock that the second in command of our department didn't realize men's wasn't a word, I tried bleakly to explain that men is already plural, and that a possessive S doesn't always denote direct ownership. For example, men's bathroom. She stared blankly at me for a few seconds, and for the briefest of moments, I thought that maybe I was seeing

the cogs in her head turn. However, she doubled down. Realizing that the fight was lost, I told her that I would implement the changes going forward. Now, here's where the malicious compliance comes in. We worked for and with some very high profile companies, and mistakes were not tolerated for things that were outward facing. Realizing that her idiocy could cost me my job, I made a simple request. Could you please email me the exact style guide rule that you're referencing and how exactly you'd like me to implement it with examples of where I messed up? She looked at me like I was stupid for not understanding what was being asked of me, but she still wrote it all down in an email for me.

I also made sure that any further style changes were referenced in an email, and specifically asked that if there were any further changes, to please cite how I'd done it in the past along with how she would like me to do it in the future from now on. Sure enough, within about six months of this, I was fired. And at my exit interview, I handed HR a folder containing every written communication regarding the style change, along with quite a bit of evidence that my manager was passing off her projects to other members of the department and changing people's work behind their backs. She was fired three months after me, along with our department director three months after that. Turns out, my little folder sparked a full investigation by HR, and after interviewing

other coworkers in the department, they realized that she had done all of this just so that she would have grounds to fire people she didn't like. Hai just happened to be first on the chopping block. And the projects that she was passing off to other people, she was taking credit for what they were doing to make herself look good. And those changes she was making to other people's work, HR realized that she was changing things to explicitly make them look bad. You gotta love software that tracks changes, time stamps, and lists the user who made the changes. On top of all this, they also discovered that she had, at best, exaggerated and, at worst,

fabricated large swaths of her resume. By the time that she was fired, I had already found another job in a different department of the same company. It was a good gig, and my new manager wasn't a complete grunt. Eventually, I moved on from that company. But if anything, my time there taught me a very valuable lesson. Document, document, and document some more. Man, you would think that if someone is doing something scummy, and the person they're doing something scummy to says, sure, I'd be happy to do that, but could I get it in an email? You'd be like, hmm, maybe, maybe

I shouldn't do this because this is a really obvious paper trail that shows how scummy I'm being, but no, I guess scumminess and stupidity go hand in hand. Our next Reddit post is from the Big Kahuna. So there I was, working at a mid-sized IT firm as a software developer. My team has always been pretty laid back, focusing on results rather than the exact hours that were glued to our desks. Our projects were delivered on time, our clients were happy, and our team morale was high. That is, until we got a new project manager, Dave.

Dave was fresh from a highly regimented corporate background and had ideas about proper workplace management, which basically meant micromanaging everything. He scheduled unnecessary daily status meetings, demanded that we fill out hourly work logs, and insisted that everyone strictly adhere to 9-5 office hours with minimal breaks. One day, during one of his infamous efficiency crackdowns, he sent out an email with a new policy that all coding must be done strictly within office hours to ensure collaboration and supervision. This was ridiculous because creative work like coding often requires flexible hours for maximum productivity. But Dave was adamant and he

ended his email with, If you think you can find a loophole, think again. Follow the rules or we'll find someone who will. Challenge accepted, Dave. I decided to comply, meticulously. I coded strictly between 9am and 5pm. Not a minute earlier, not a second later. If I encountered a bug or if I was in the middle of a complex piece of code, too bad. 5pm means the end, no matter what. My teammates, fed up with being treated like school children, followed my lead. The results were predictable. Projects that usually took a couple of weeks started dragging on. Tasks that we could have completed in a couple of days with a bit of overtime took much longer

because we couldn't capitalize on bursts of late afternoon productivity that we were used to. Our workflow was severely disrupted, and the quality of our work started to deteriorate. Dave noticed, of course. He had to answer to upper management for the sudden drop in productivity and lack of commitment, which he knew was a result of our dissatisfaction with his new policy. When upper management called for an impromptu Zoom meeting with the entire team at 4.30pm to address the ongoing project delays, the entire team logged in to explain our situation. In the meeting, Dave spent half an hour shifting blame and berating individual team members. He didn't

even mention the 9-5 policy that led us to this whole situation. I already know where this is going. As the clock ticked towards 5pm, the tension in the virtual room was palpable, and our team hatched a plan over text. Right on cue, as the clock struck 5pm, one of the employees spoke up. In compliance with Dave's 9-5 rule, we must now log off. Without missing a beat, every single team member clicked leave meeting, leaving a stunned Dave to face the executives alone. This abrupt mass exit highlighted the impracticality of Dave's rigid policy, making it clear to the executives that change was necessary. This incident, quickly dubbed the 5 o'clock Zoom Exodus, led to another meeting, where Dave was publicly admonished and instructed to abolish his strict rules in favor of more

flexibility. And as for me and my team, we made sure to celebrate our little victory with a well-deserved happy hour. After 5pm, of course. This reminds me of those old fashioned public executions where you have one guy stand against a wall and then you have 10 soldiers with a gun and they all start firing at the guy at the exact same time. It was just synchronized slaughter. Our next Reddit post is from Path of Uncertainty.

Many years ago, I worked in a locally run store that sold a bit of everything. I was the low paid teenager who carried heavy things to people's vehicles. While working one day, I got called over the radio that a customer needed 12 bags of concrete weighing 80 pounds each. I was expecting to see a pickup truck or something similar backed up to the loading area. Instead, I saw a small Honda Civic waiting for me. Thinking this was a mistake, I asked the driver to relocate momentarily because I had someone coming to pick up multiple bags of concrete. Imagine my surprise when they told me they were the customer I was waiting for. I asked the customer how much they

wanted to take on each trip because I thought that nearly a thousand pounds of concrete might be too much for such a small vehicle to handle safely. The customer became aggravated and insisted they take everything at once. I quickly ran this past the store owner to make sure that I wouldn't be liable for any damages. I ran back, apologized to the customer, and began loading the bags. As I loaded everything up, the customer made several quips about how, the customer is always right, and that I was too young and naive to understand that vehicles are engineered with a margin of safety. It quickly became apparent to me that there was no give left in the suspension.

But at this point, I just stopped questioning things. I couldn't fit all the bags in the trunk, so the customer cleared their back seat and I loaded that up as well. When I left the loading area, I could clearly hear things rubbing together in the car that aren't supposed to rub together. As the car went to exit the parking lot, it passed over the elevation change between the lot and the road. There was a loud POP of something breaking, followed by scraping.

I could see the driver was irate in the car. After a moment they got out, looked around, and then under their car. The guy sheepishly asked for my cell phone because his had died and he needed to make a few phone calls. A short time later, a tow truck came to remove the car, and the guy waited in our lot for nearly an hour until his wife would come pick him up. Hey, gotta give the guy credit, at least he didn't yell at you for it OP. I kind of assumed that's where the story was going.

Down in the comments, we have a similar story from 65Kajak. I used to work for Home Depot. I drove a tractor trailer as a contractor and I delivered materials. Brick, block, shingles, lumber, all that stuff. They also had another contractor who drove a small box truck who delivered the fragile or smaller stuff for them. They wanted me to deliver some custom made complete door assemblies to a house about two hours away.

The doors were already hung on fancy wooden frames with fancy grooved trim. I refused. I told them it needed to go in the box truck. My flatbed was meant for heavy loads, and the ride would be way too rough and probably damage or destroy the doors. They insisted, I refused. Then they called up my bosses and talked to them. I explained the situation to my bosses, and the bosses asked me, is there anything that

could change your mind? I told them that a signed waiver would do it, so that's what they gave me. Well, I transported the doors, and exactly what I said would happen happened. I didn't face any consequences after that, so everything seemed good. About a year later, my employer tried to screw me out of some pay, so I put in my 30-day notice. Once they got the notice, I guess they realized that I was serious, so they tried to fix things to get me to stay, but I was done.

Well, right before my last day, I got a notice from the owner saying that I owed them $20,000 for those doors that I destroyed a year ago. I just laughed and told them, hey, remember that waiver that you signed and sent me a copy of? They said they didn't know anything about a waiver and that we don't have a waiver. You still owe us that money! I said, I'll call you right back. Well, I went ahead and found the waiver and fa still owe us that money. I said, I'll call you right back. Well, I went ahead and found the waiver and faxed it to them. When my old boss answered the phone, I told him to check the fax machine. He came back and said, what is this? I said,

this is the waiver that proves that I'm not liable for those damaged doors. Never heard another word after that, lol. That was r 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.