Just doing my job, boss!

Sometimes when you have a job and things go sideways, all you can do is smile, agree, and do what your superiors say, even if you know it’s not a very good idea.

A worker shared their story on Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page and talked about what happened when they simply did as they were told.

Software developer did what I was told.

“I worked at a pipeline company that supported hundreds of clients.

Part of the mission was gathering information from internal sources and create client specific reports which were required to be available at the start of their business day by web.

They were called on to make a design change.

Once, when the site’s team lead was on vacation, the off-site manager asked me to provide a design change which included providing downloadable PDF reports as well as several other changes. Up to this point, this company had not been utilizing my software engineering skills, I was just maintaining their existing software product as a programmer.

And they were excited about this opportunity!

I was excited to show them what I was truly capable of producing. I put in over 60 hours that week researching the requirements, the customer usage patterns, hardware resources required, development plan, including staged implementation. All that’s needed for creating a great design document. And it was a great design document!

But not everyone was happy with the design…

When the site team-lead returned from vacation, he went ballistic claiming that the design was trash and totally useless. He then sketched out a plan that poorly covered about 25% of the requirements and which didn’t consider hardware usage and availability. My current guess is that he felt threatened by my abilities.

But I was told to implement team lead’s plan as he documented it. So, I did what I was told. While my research indicated that less than 5% of the clients bothered to review the daily reports unless they were tracking down a specific problem.

They had a plan in mind…

Time to create each report was 10-20 seconds. So, part of my plan was to create the customer’s PDF report files as requested during the business day when the computer workload was lite. And once they downloaded the PDF, delete that PDF from disk.

The team-lead’s replacement design required the PDFs to be created for all clients every night. He also failed to add the cleanup process, leaving the PDF files on disk.

They knew this was going to create a logjam of sorts.

You can see where this is going. It added a massive amount to the nightly processing, delaying the finish of the daily processing.

But they were only following orders!

And it took a couple of months to fill up the hard drive. But the team lead said my design was trash and I should do what I was told. I never offered any solutions to that company again. I just did what I was told. When the hard drive fills up, not my problem.

I think there’s a term for that…

If the nightly processing could not be completed in time, not my problem. Nowadays, we would call this “Quiet Quitting”.”

Check out how folks reacted on Reddit.

This person said they did the right thing.

Another individual talked about why they did things a certain way.

This Reddit user changed the way they did things at work.

Another person had a similar story.

And this individual said that at least they got good experience out of this job.

Quiet quitting is all the rage!

And this was a job well done!