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

welcome to our slash malicious compliance where op listens to his boss and costs the company two million dollars 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 salaried 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 50 to 100 drawings each day the thing is the supervisor had access to the company's intranet system with a company laptop and a printer a slowly 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 in 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 in photocopy and i would go get it done it would take me like two to three 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 uh 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 office is for staff only oh my god what is the math on this 3 500 per times 80 employees times seven seven weeks times seven weeks oh my god that is one million nine hundred sixty thousand dollars so just a hair shy of two million dollars wasted just because this guy didn't wanna rub shoulders with the little worker bees all right so down in the comments people are asking how on earth is it possible that 80 people could not be productive for seven 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 had quit seven weeks prior our next reddit post is 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 their 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 instead run for minutes he didn't want to replace a 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 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 sh 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 talk 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 redesigned to do so doing programming in c-sharp was maybe 15 of my time i was able to get those database jobs down from 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 matt 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 30 am 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 two to three 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 30 a.m for a client that was two to three 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 a thousand 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 a 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 he 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 post is 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 health care system that outsourced billing to this company for months and months i tried by email and phone 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 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 yelp 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 atrocious 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 and texts 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 billing system 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 write a 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 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've got to apologize to my fans and it's actually affecting my business by making my like 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 like troubleshooting patreon i want to make youtube videos you know so just to give you some perspective op 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 freaking medical school for eight years so she can grapple with a billing company and get bad yelp reviews because the people that she's paying to do work aren't doing their job and her company's getting review 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 to monetize i don't 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 publish 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 um 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 check out my podcast where i publish the exact same episodes also hit that subscribe button because i put out new reddit videos every single day

Channel: rSlash

Views: 357,283

Rating: 4.9179039 out of 5

Keywords: reddit, r/, rslash, r\, sub, subreddit, best of reddit, reddit top posts, top posts, top posts of all times, funniest posts, funny, comedy, funniest reddit posts, funny reddit posts, funny reddit, fails, cringe, maliciouscompliance, malicious, compliance, r/maliciouscompliance

Id: JO2UmT98xSE

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021