It’s never a great experience at work where you’re proud and feel as if you’ve done your best, but your boss belittles your efforts for one reason or another.
Stuff like this is what has employees quietly fading into the background, their ability to care about their job stamped out of them.
OP was plodding along at his job when he finally had the opportunity to show what he could do.
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.
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.
He took it seriously and threw himself into the project.
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!
Only to have his boss come back and tell him it stunk.
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.
OP gave up and just turned in the boss’s watered down version – even though he knew there would be ramifications in the near future.
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. 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.
Not his circus or monkeys anymore.
You can see where this is going. It added a massive amount of computer to the nightly processing, delaying the finish of the daily processing. 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.
If the nightly processing could not be completed in time, not my problem.
Nowadays, we would call this “Quiet Quit”.
Is Reddit outraged on his behalf? Let’s find out!
The top comment says they’re sorry OP didn’t get to use his skills.
They say there’s no use talking if no one is listening.
Some people have found workarounds for this type of situation.
There’s even a word for it.
You always want to CYA.
This is just depressing.
And people wonder why kids don’t want to work anymore.
If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.