Some workplaces can be a real nuisance only because the boss wouldn’t let go off the bad employees!

This firm suffered with a similar problem.

Find out how these incompetent employees made some irreversible mistakes!

Won’t let us handle our own downloads? No problem!

I worked for a small e-comm company that had an odd dynamic between the CEO and the head of tech.

There was a messy divorce between the two and the CEO and CTO and the CEO hired a new director of Tech who hired another guy as his head of BI and DE.

Initially they seemed fine and they talked about all their plans about how they were going to fix all the old code that did make the systems and website slow and potentially crash.

But as time went on, we all learned that these guys were literally just talk.

These new guys were pretty INCOMPETENT!

They couldn’t deliver anything they promised, were very arrogant and took to taking 2-3 hour lunches at the bar and getting drunk.

But because they were after the CEO and because he hated the old CTO, he kept forgiving them, in spite of frequent protesting from the other teams in the company.

One day everything seemed to go awful.

I lead the DS/Analytics team at that time and had a report that pulled in internal stats as well as API calls to google and adobe.

Things kept going downhill.

Our live reporting showed that our conversion rate had fallen off and a quick check with the members of tech that were old hires of the old CTO and very reactive and competent confirmed that the website had suddenly gone down around 9:30am.

We called director and the BI guy but nobody could get ahold of them. They rolled into work much later after the issue had been resolved.

Everyone was mad we could reach them but they claimed to just be heroes that quickly handled the issue which they stated definitively was a DDOS attack that they eventually managed to thwart.

But soon the other tech guys that were there shared data that showed certain metrics were not acting consistently with a DDOS attack.

Things got WORSE!

After some pressure, we learned the head of BI was taking some randos through a tour of the offsite servers, saw a loose cable on the ground, picked it up, and just plugged it into some slot, which created a feedback loop or something that crashed the site.

They had then gone to the bar and when they noticed the calls, they raced back, unplugged the cable and then rebooted the servers, causing everything to work again.

They got ripped to shreds for their awful behavior, even the CEO piled on.

The two weirdos never fully admitted this was the cause, claiming that it was a DDOS attack AND a coincidental and exactly timed feedback on the servers.

They refused to accept their mistake!

This is when they got petty.

Claiming security was bad, they removed everyone’s ability download/upgrade/call any API without them signing off on literally everything.

They hoped this would punish us all and initially we were really upset but the CEO was back to supporting their shenanigans.

That’s when inspiration hit.

Everyone impacted tried to do as many new downloads and updates we could possibly do.

In particular, my team (using primarily R and Python at the time) began to require checks to upgrade every library in our code base, and created several scripts that had no real purpose other than to load lots of libraries, hit API’s and make plots.

The team took it in their hands!

These tech guys didn’t know how to read either language and while they suspected shenanigans, they couldn’t prove it.

It got so bad they would have to spend hours every morning with our team approaching every check with a password entry.

The best came when they went into our code that WAS functional and commented out all API calls.

The scripts failed to run and an important automated report couldn’t be updated, leading to the CEO being unable to update his presentation for the board.

Finally some improvements!

We showed him the commit that the BI guy had made and what he had done without consulting us. The ceo screamed at the guy for 30-40 minutes and was threatening to fire the guy.

The arrogant dude was reduced to tears and was crying and begging to keep his job. They immediately announced a new security patch and let us all download everything.

I got a new gig shortly after but found out the two eventually were fired for incompetence and being drunk on the job.

Things picked up!

One of the awesome original tech guys is now running everything and as near as I know, there haven’t been any major problems since!

Workplaces can get tricky when there’s a lot of politics involved.

Let’s check out what the Reddit community thinks about this story.

This person has a suggestion.

This person loves the malicious compliance here.

This person knows what went wrong.

This person is pretty confused with the story.

This person loves the story!

That’s a successful malicious compliance story.

Exactly why Reddit loves this sub.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.