rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance I Obeyed My Dumb Boss, Which Cost Him $2,000,000!

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

r/Maliciouscompliance OP has a blue collar job laying pipe at a large corporation. His white collar boss gets pissed off at OP because OP dared to enter the white collar worker building to retrieve some important blueprints. His boss bans OP from the building forever, which means that none of the workers have the blueprints to lay any of the pipes. The workers have nothing to do for a month, which results in a staggering $2,000,000 in wasted labor costs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to R-Slash, a podcast where I read the best post from a cross-reddit. Today's subreddit is R-Slash malicious compliance, where OP listens to his boss and costs the company $2 million. Our next reddit post is from T-toxie. I was working on a construction job as a pipe welder for a company that's currently building nuclear reactors for the US Navy. And the way this company was set up, it had two distinct classes of employees. The craft employees are the ones who actually do the work. Everyone including laborers, machine operators, pipefitters, and welders. This will become important later.

The second class of employees are staff employees, so salary employees, supervisors, engineers, welding inspectors, section superintendents, etc. Our crew worked great for a few months until our supervisor got a better offer somewhere else and quit one day, leaving our leading hand to try to manage the crew of 80 people on his own. Getting another supervisor anytime soon was not going to happen, and we all got on really well, so we just did what we did to keep things going. One of the jobs the supervisor would normally do is pull up all the drawings we needed. The drawings would tell us the exact shape, specification, and location of each pipe. And with our crew as big as ours, we might need 5200 drawings each day.

The thing is, the supervisor had access to the company's internet system with a company laptop and a printer. Us lowly craft employees didn't have that. What we did have was access to the literal library of physical drawings in the main office. I'd spent years and old power stations going through old physical drawings, and I knew how to manually search through millions of pages to get the exact drawings we needed. So, that became my job for the first week or so without a supervisor. My boss would give me a list of drawings to pick out on photocopy and I would go get it done.

It would take me like 2-3 hours every morning and then I would go do my usual welding until the section piping manager saw me in the office one day. He said, Who are you? I'm OP. You're not staff, you're one of the welders. This office is for staff only. Go back to your section. You got it boss.

So I did. And on my way back, I told my leading hand that the office was for staff only. You see, my leading hand was very quick and he caught on immediately. So he called up the piping section manager and confirmed that the office was off limits to the craft employees, which included my leading hand. We both knew that we were at least five weeks out from getting a new supervisor, so neither of us went to the office to get drawings. Our entire crew of 80 people, all of whom were making $3,500 per week before taxes, did zero productive work for the next seven weeks because the offices

for staff only. Oh my god, what is the math,960,000. So just a hair shy of $2,000,000 wasted just because this guy didn't want to rub shoulders with the little worker bees. Alright, so down in the comments people are asking, how on earth is it possible that 80 people could not be productive for 7 weeks? And this story that OP shares shed some light on that. The best part was that it took until the quarterly review where they look at how many meters of pipe was installed per week for anyone to notice that something was off. And their response was to fire the supervisor who would quit 7 weeks prior. Our next redditage from Drama Guy.

This is the story of how I got hired at an old job that I had a few years ago. The technical manager who ultimately became my boss was a great guy and was the one who embarked on a course of malicious compliance to get what he wanted. It happened like this. The company was small about 20 people and it was run by a CEO who knew about the company's industry, but didn't know anything about technology. What the CEO knew was that she had a team of five developers and one technical manager, and that the company's code was written in a programming language called C-Sharp.

One day, the CEO's favorite member of the development team quid, whom she regarded as her foremost expert on C-Sharp. To the technical manager, this was an enormous opportunity. He had four other developers who knew C-Sharp, but what he was missing was an expert in database design and administration. The company processed a huge volume of data, and he knew enough about databases to know that their database was a mess. The same data had to be recorded in multiple places and was always getting out of sync. Operations that should have taken a few seconds would and stayed run for minutes.

He didn't want to replace the departed employee with another developer. He wanted a database expert, but the CEO wouldn't hear of it, so cue malicious compliance. Somehow he got the description of the person that he actually wanted to hire to the hands of a recruiter who found me. I had over 10 years of experience in database development at that point, but I'd never touched a line of C-sharp code in my life. The technical manager had a skills assessment that he was giving to all candidates for the job, which was 100% database-related questions.

There was this huge bold face warning at the top of the assignment, which I found extremely odd. It read, These questions are extremely difficult. It's unlikely you'll be able to answer them all. You may not be able to answer any. Don't feel any pressure to attempt questions you find too difficult, as these results are not related to the position.

I was told that I had 20 minutes to work on the assessment, but I finished in about 3 minutes. The questions were actually really easy, so I walked back to the technical manager's office to ask if I was missing something, and what this was all about. He gave me a shhhhhh gesture and motioned me back to the conference room. Then he explained. His office was right next to the CEO's office, so he couldn't talk in there. The warning was something that he'd been forced

to put on the test after a recruiter who apparently had been just as confused as I was, called the CEO to ask, why are we asking database-related questions for a C-sharp position? My boss had to play it off to the CEO and said, well, wouldn't it be good to know if we happen to find a C-Sharp developer who's also comfortable with databases too? And from there,

he and I talked for about 30 minutes about databases and C-Sharp never came up. The job sounded really interesting and it would be a chance for me to make an enormous positive difference. At the end of the conversation he said, okay, you're perfect. I'm gonna recommend you for the position, but first you have to talk to the CEO. Remember when you talked to her that you're a C sharp expert? Got it? I was worried, but I thought, worst case, I get caught and I don't get the job.

Best case, I can really help this company. So, into the CEO's office I went. After an exchange of pleasantries, she said, So, what would you say is your number one technical strength? I made a thoughtful face and said, Well, it's hard to say, but I have skills in a lot of different areas, but if I had to pick one, I'd probably say C sharp. Her face lit up.

Oh, fantastic, she said. That's exactly what we're looking for. We talked for a few more minutes about salary requirements and start dates, and at the end she offered me the job. That night I stopped on the way home and bought a book about C-Sharp. I think it was literally called something like, Learn C-Sharp in 14 days. By the time I started two weeks later, I knew just enough C-sharp to do my job. As the technical manager said, there was an enormous amount of database redesign to do.

So doing programming in C-sharp was maybe 15% of my time. I was able to get those database jobs down for minutes to seconds like they should have been, and the CEO was so impressed that she never even questioned my background. I continued to learn C-sharp on the job, and no one ever found out that I hadn't been a C-Sharp expert all along. Our next reddit post is from Goldie Mat. I used to work for a company based in London, but with regular travel all around the country. We had very long hours, and we were required to be on site when work began at 7.30am, but you could be hundreds of miles away.

We were allowed to rent a hotel room, but we had to get approval from a senior manager, who usually only agreed through gritted teeth. Because of the difficult expenses policy and the wrath of the senior manager who approved of these expenses, more on this guy soon. I used to get up early and commute all around the country, often driving 2-3 hours in the car at a time. Usually, I would have to stop somewhere to fuel up and grab a coffee and breakfast because I would often leave the house before it was palatable to eat breakfast. I was young and conscientious, so I would buy my own breakfast, but buy a coffee separately

and keep the receipt for expenses. Usually, I'd spend five bucks on breakfast and three on coffee. Our expense policy allowed me to expense the coffee and the breakfast, but I was too conscientious to do that. Anyway, after a month of this I submit my expense claim. My immediate manager approved this without batting an eyelid because he could see the addresses on the receipts and the timestamps. So once my manager approved it, the expenses would go to the senior manager to approve it as well. They clearly had major trust issues and this was seriously backwards. One morning, early at the head office, the senior manager comes into my office and tells me to follow him. I follow him to his office, where he explains to me that the company

isn't here to buy you effing coffees. Long story short, he told me that I had to stop playing fast and lose with the expense policy, I wasn't, and to just follow the rules. Here's the malicious compliance. After speaking to HR, they said they had a policy about work-related driving, which meant that all the early starts and late finishes had to stop immediately because it was breaching policy and the law. So the next time I had to be on-site at 7.30am for a client that was 2-3 hours away, I had to stay in a hotel the night before. And in that case, a three-course meal and breakfast were both in line with our expense policy. This continued for

about a month because you can only submit expenses for payment in the last week before payday. My expenses went from 100 pounds a month to 1000 pounds a month. I submitted my expenses, my manager approved, and it was sent to the senior manager. I got a phone call to come to headquarters the next day for a talk with the senior manager in HR. The following day, I get an absolute roasting from the senior manager. What the F did I tell you? Who do you think you are?

When he let me get a word in, I explained that I was traveling in line with company policy, health and safety legislation, while also following the expense policy to the letter. HR backed me up, and there was nothing you could do. Needless to say, the policy was changed some months later. I felt much better because I was well-rested, fed, and actually being paid for the hours that I worked. Our next reddit posted from Jersey Guy. This happened to me a few years ago.

I was owed a significant sum of money by the company that handles my doctor's billing. My doctor worked at a large healthcare system that outsourced billing to this company. For months and months, I tried by email and phoned to get my money back, but during each contact, I was treated rudely or ignored. They would either say that they were still working on it, or they would act like I'd never requested the money in the first place, and I would have to start the whole process over. It was maddening.

One day, after receiving another rude email from this company, I decided to leave a yell review on my doctor's page. I essentially said that while the doctor and her staff were helpful and professional, the billing company they used was a trotious and it made the entire experience not worth it. Lo and behold, the very next day, I got a call from the CEO of the billing company. He asked what the problem was and I explained. He said, okay, I'll make sure the money gets sent ASAP. Could you please take the review down? Apparently, he was getting angry calls from my doctor and he seemed pretty pressured to get it taken down. I respond that I will only take my review down after I get my money back. He gladly accepts

my offer, and a week later there's my check in the mail. Here's the thing though. I never specified when I would take the review down after I got my money. So, I waited a week. I got some calls in text from the CEO. I ignored them. I waited another week. I respond that I'm having technical problems logging into Yelp, but I should have it resolved soon. After about six months of him reaching out and me being as unhelpful as possible, I finally took it down. The next time I returned to that doctor's office,

it was a whole new building system. I'm not sure if my review made a difference, but it was sweet malicious compliance regardless. Okay, OP, so I'm not sure if my review made a difference, but it was sweet, malicious compliance regardless. Okay, OP, so I'm also a business owner, and I use other services like YouTube platform obviously, anchor my podcasting platform, Patreon, I have an editor, so on and so forth. So I've got all these other systems

that I rely on to make my business function. And for me, like, the thing that makes me money, the thing that, like, my job runs on, the fuel of my business is the content. So that's what I want to focus my energy on. I just want to get in front of my computer, read right up post, do funny voices, and make YouTube videos.

That's what I try to focus on. So if I have to spend time, effort, energy, trying to manage these other things that don't make me money, like troubleshooting YouTube, troubleshooting anchor, troubleshooting Patreon, that is super frustrating to me because even though I have to spend the time and effort to get those issues fixed, it doesn't actually help me make more money, it doesn't help me grow my business. And so like, let's suppose that Patreon suddenly became a really sucky company. And all the people who subscribed to me on Patreon started getting just tons and tons of

spam emails every day. And that pissed them off because they don't want spam emails, so then they come to my YouTube videos and they start down voting, giving like thumbs down on my YouTube videos. That would be extra bad, because in addition to this not being my problem, it's wasting my time to fix it and I gotta apologize to my fans and it's actually affecting my business by making my content get reviewed worse in the algorithm.

So that's effectively what the doctor is experiencing here. She's hiring a company to do a thing and they're not doing it. And as a consequence of them not doing their job well, her business is suffering. And she can't focus on the actual part of her business that makes money, which is seeing patients because she has to deal with negative reviews and this complicated billing system. So I completely 100% understand where this doctor is coming from. If my Patreon became super

toxic and it was pissing off my fans and they started like thumbs downing all of my videos, then I would instantly drop my Patreon because it is not worth it. I would find some other provider that would do their job without the headache because I just don't want to deal with troubleshooting Patreon. I want to make YouTube videos, you know. So just to give you some perspective, O.P. yes, I think that in actuality, your review did make a difference because based on what I know about being a business owner and YouTuber, if I were in that doctor's shoes, I would have been really pissed off. You think a doctor goes to frickin' medical school for eight years

so she can grapple with a billing company and get bad yell reviews because the people that she's paying to do work aren't doing their job and her company's getting her view bombed? No, no, no, no, no, no. They got dropped like a bad habit OP. Trust me. And while we're talking about Patreon, if you want to help support my content, you can go over to Patreon. So whenever I publish a video on YouTube, there's a chance that video will get demonetized. And if it gets demonetized, I don't want to publish it because that means I spent all this time making this video and I'm gonna make zero bucksetized. And if it gets demonetized, I want to publish it because that means I've spent all this time making this video and I'm going to make zero bucks

off it. And that's kind of a waste of time. So instead of publishing those zero dollar videos on YouTube, I published them on Patreon. So if you want to see those videos that YouTube considers too hot and spicy for their algorithm, then join me on Patreon and you can unlock those videos. Or if you're listening on my podcast and I have those same episodes available in your podcast, all you have to do is sponsor my podcast. It's like five bucks a month on both Patreon and on anchor. So please support me and you get extra content. So it's kind of a win-win for everybody. 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.

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.