November 25, 2024 at 10:21 pm

Arrogant Manager Promised Big Rewards For Hard Work, But Went Back On His Word. So When He Dared An Employee To Quite, They Took Him Up On It And His Career Went Down The Tubes

by Matthew Gilligan

The guy in this story from Reddit is called “Dapper Dan,” so you automatically know that he’s probably gonna be a handful…

And boy, did that turn out to be true!

Take a look at what went down in this story of malicious compliance.

Start now!

Dapper Dan fails to think things through.

I graduated uni a few years back and immediately started looking for a job in my chosen field – marketing.

Marketing entry level roles were thin on the ground, so when I found a role which was hybrid of marketing with sales support, I took it.

The company was a medium sized business which specialised in recruitment, contractor hiring and head hunting.

They also subcontracted work for a recruitment technology provider, which matched up perfectly with one of my other passions – technology.

Things were going well!

I absolutely loved the role.

I got to do all parts of the marketing and sales lifecycle, I got to work with suppliers, event organisers, clients, staff all across the company, meet new people and do really exciting things.

I had two managers – the one who managed the sales team and the one who managed marketing.

The marketing manager was a kindred spirit; the sales manager was old school sales.

An arrogant and headstrong late-forties man who lived for making deals and boasting about them.

Shiny shoed, silver-tongued.

I’ll call him Dapper Dan. We were not friends.

For about 18 months, things went swimmingly.

I’d do marketing half the time then divide the rest of the time between sales support and billable work.

Billable was building custom careers / job sites to host the recruitment system front end.

A steep learning curve but with the help of some web dev friends I got pretty familiar with simple site builds.

Being tech-aligned meant I was always looking digital first, bringing the company into the age of social media, SEO / SEM, website optimisation and multi channel marketing.

There was a problem…

Dapper Dan sneered at such things.

He saw digital as a waste of money.

However, we were always able to justify the spend on digital by offsetting the billable website work.

The marketing manager eventually moved on to bigger and better things.

Rather than promote me or hire in a replacement, the company moved the marketing responsibilities to Dapper Dan.

Uh oh…

Dapper Dan’s changes were immediate and far-reaching. He removed the digital budget.

He required that 50% of my time would be sales support, to ‘better enable the sales team.’

He incorporated the billable work with his own team’s revenue.

He rewrote my annual objectives to align purely with sales targets, rather than marketing.

When I voiced my objections, he took me aside for a ‘friendly chat’ and told me if I didn’t like it, I could always leave.

Naturally I went and complained extensively to the departed marketing manager over drinks.

After listening sympathetically for 45 minutes, she held up a hand, said ‘Stop’, and shared some life advice.

‘Each job pays you twice. You get your money now, that’s your wage. You also get experience now, that’s how you get paid in the future. So. Are you still getting paid? Yes? Are you still learning? No? Figure out how to keep learning, or leave.’

It was good advice.

Taking the advice to heart, I busted my behind for the next year.

I worked on digital outside of office hours.

I made friends with the tech provider’s support and dev teams. I went to developer group meetups, attended conferences, studied for and acquired industry qualifications.

I joined the national marketers and digital marketers group.

I dug through blogs, articles, emailed people, took every opportunity to cross skill, upskill, to learn.

And I sat with a smile on my face in the sales meetings as Dapper Dan delegated dumb work to me so his team of sycophants could make the company’s growth figures look spectacular.

Spectacular they were, to the point that the company was acquired, and Dapper Dan betrayed me.

You see, managers have the discretion to assign a pool of shares to high performing staff.

The shares have no real value and can’t be traded, but in the event of a management buy out, they would suddenly have value – and quite a lot of value.

Doh!

Dapper Dan felt it appropriate to reward every SALES person in his team with a generous parcel of shares.

As a SUPPORT person, I would not be the beneficiary of such kindness.

I’d had a verbal agreement with the previous marketing manager that the pool would be shared across the entire team so was pretty shocked to discover I’d been excluded from the pool.

I queried him on it, per the previous agreement, and he said (verbatim) ‘Well, an verbal agreement is only worth the paper it’s written on. You don’t make any sales, you haven’t built the business, you don’t get a cut’.

Wow…

‘If you didn’t like it,’ he reiterated, ‘you’re welcome to leave.’

That is EXACTLY what I decided to do. Except I didn’t tell him.

The way the contract handover works in this instance is that all staff cease employment with company X on one day.

The following day, they commence employment with company Y.

Annual leave is paid out and begins to re-accrue at the new employer.

Other arrangements – salaries, long service leave and length of service – may be transferred to the new employer.

About six weeks before the handover, Dapper Dan passed me my new contract.

I waited a week, came back with some enthusiastic queries on the new benefits, which took him two weeks to follow up.

I quietly registered a domain name and parked it, then spun up a WordPress instance and started building a personal blog.

Three weeks away from drop date, everyone’s frantically running around getting all the deals as close as possible to closing and employment contracts are the last thing on his mind.

I go back to him, I tell him I have a couple more things I need to check out and I’ll email them through to him before I sign it.

I spend a few more nights throwing together a bunch of blog articles relating to Recruitment Technology.

How to articles, that kinda stuff, many of my own installation notes.

A week passes, I fire off a couple of really complex questions around the transfer of benefits.

He obviously forgets about them, then in the week of the handover, catches heat from the HR team about the outstanding contract and pulls me into a meeting room to berate me about not having signed the new contract.

I’ll get to it…

I explain I’m waiting on his feedback on those specific points before I’ll commit, that I don’t want to be disadvantaged moving into the new role, call out the lack of a share option as an example.

Clearly frustrated, he drops the words I’ve been waiting for.

‘If the signed contract is not on my desk on Friday, don’t bother coming into the office Monday.’

He paused for dramatic effect, and reiterated ‘I mean it. You won’t have a job.’

I replied that I completely understand and that I’ll have everything he needs on his desk by close of business Friday.

On Friday afternoon, Dapper Dan leaves the office early to attend his normal ‘client networking’ visits which typically involve long lunches and alcohol.

At 4.45 pm I save the final set of forecasting and reporting to the share drive, send an email to the IT team passing over access to the Marketing lastpass account.

This contains the global database of usernames and passwords for all digital assets (including client sites), an Excel workbook containing my reporting macros and the location of all my documentation.

I’m outta here!

I redirect my phone to Dapper Dan’s desk number, lock my laptop and leave it on his desk along with my ID card.

Over the weekend I push my personal website live and add my contact details to my LinkedIn profile, switching it to ‘Actively Searching’ mode.

I figure my holiday pay will cover me for a couple of weeks of downtime before I have to go diving back into the workforce.

On Monday, I’m enjoying a long walk in the spring sunshine with my dog, who’s incredibly happy that his human has not disappeared down the driveway at 7:20 per normal.

We stop for coffee at a local cafe and my phone begins to ring.

It’s one of the sales drones at old company; I ignore it and thoroughly enjoy the freedom of being able to amble through a park without anywhere to be.

The phone buzzes another eight or ten times by the time I get home.

The stuff has well and truly hit the windmill.

I check my voicemails, ignoring those I know from my previous employer and returning the phone calls of two ex-clients.

I let them know that my contract has ended and to check in with Dapper Dan for work in progress – or contact the technology provider for support requests.

Shortly afterwards I got a call from a bemused contact who works at the technology provider who’s been fielding support calls that I’d normally handle.

He listens with increasing interest as I explained the situation, then tells me he’d call back shortly.

Ten minutes later he’s back with the Head of Product on the line, asking about my lunch preferences.

She arranges to meet me at a nearby Thai place.

Over a delicious red duck curry, she cheerfully describes the wonders of a career as a contractor.

This was all working out!

She also mentions the day rates for highly qualified, industry-certified staff, mentioned that Tech Provider were really struggling to find such staff and gives me the number of a recruiter who may or may not have been on Tech Supplier’s preferred supplier list.

I call the recruiter on the way home.

Meanwhile, my collection of voicemails from Dapper Dan was growing by the hour as he came to grips with the breadth of the problem that he’d generated.

At some point in the late afternoon, HR must’ve clicked to what had happened and I received a polite SMS from the personal number of the regional HR Directory asking if I was available for a quick chat.

I call through and discussed the options presented to me by Dapper Dan on Friday, and that I felt I had no option but to follow his instructions.

They probed for more information and it became apparent they were unaware that Dapper Dan had pulled an ultimatum without first engaging HR.

They then informed me that to benefit from the sale of my shares, I would need to transfer to the new company and remain in their employment for a full year.

When I explained that I had no such share options, there was a full four second silence.

It transpires that this, too, was not adequately communicated to HR.

I mentioned that I’d appreciate it if Dapper Dan could discontinue his voicemails to me as I found them unprofessional and had no intent of recommencing employment under his management.

We ended the call politely, I wished them all the best and regretted the conversation had to happen under such circumstances.

My contract for Tech Provider came through via the PSL agency at 11 pm that evening and was signed and returned the following day.

I was deployed to client site that Wednesday.

Post Departure I met up with one of the old IT team at a conference three months after it all went down. He was ecstatic to fill me in on what had happened.

They got all the dirt.

The first notice anyone got of it was the service desk asking who they should route my LastPass account to and why I’d be passing it around.

One of the techs came up to my floor to find me, then found an empty desk. Asked around for where I’d moved to and no one knew.

That was the first call, from one of the Sales drones trying to locate me.

The tech went to Dapper Dan’s desk and found my laptop with my ID and post-it note taped to it.

He put two and two together, went back downstairs and checked the access logs and realised the last time I’d logged in was Friday.

He then locked my account for security purposes and went to HR to check if there was a leaver form.

HR checks, no leave form AND a great big red cross next to ’employment contract received.’

HR calls Dapper Dan, who’s not in the office.

Dapper Dan says ‘No, the contract should be on my desk, it was on there on Friday, I’m out on the road at the moment, give me till lunch time and I’ll sort it out’.

Obviously thinking that I’m grandstanding. Starts to call me and leave messages then gets progressively agitated as he realises I’m not coming back.

When he gets into the office, he can’t find the contract either so he goes to HR and ‘explains’ what has happened.

He says I have been stonewalling them and it’s cool, he’ll get it sorted, it’s between me and him.

HR says erm, no, this is our thing now, and the HRD sends me the SMS.

Shortly after my phone conversation the HRD walks into a sales meeting and very abruptly pulls Dapper Dan out.

They disappear into a meeting room where it may only be assumed that Dapper Dan was required to spell out exactly what had occurred and address the comments that I had made.

I suspect he came completely clean at that stage.

Dan had it coming…

Dapper Dan was subsequently reamed as only HR and senior management can ream a manager who’s messed up.

He was demoted, decoupled from Marketing, his budget reduced by half and a new, separate Marketing function created.

His team were collectively put under review and forced to carry out their own reporting, tracking and metrics, which lacked the coherence and consistency that I’d been able to deliver.

This reduced the capacity of the team.

A couple of them left and they missed out on some key deals.

In the fallout they completely dropped the ball on the client website builds.

They went to market to try and find a resource who could fulfil these builds, and Dapper Dan was reportedly astounded to discover that experienced technical marketing staff are both hard to find and expensive to recruit.

They were unable to fill the role and the builds were taken back in-house by the tech provider, who now had an experienced resource to deploy (me).

I ended up working on three of these at full utilisation rate, which was paid by the new company.

I’m pretty sure Dapper Dan would’ve seen the funding arrangements for these and would know my day rate – which is substantially higher than his.

Much later as the sales lead, Dapper Dan had to bear the displeasure of his superiors for the full twelve months before he could claim his share payout.

Dan got screwed over!

It would’ve been a really, really bad twelve months for him.

He resigned within two weeks of the anniversary of the purchase, and the company enforced a six month notice period and another 12 month no-compete clause.

Any benefit he would have received from the share payout would have been consumed over that 12 months unless he switched industries or moved cities.

Last time I saw he was on the job market.

As for me? Happily living the life of the contractor.

I get paid for the hours I work and I work the hours I want.

My old marketing manager is now VP of something at a large multinational.

I’ve used her speech several times when giving young, frustrated staff career advice.”

Let’s see what folks had to say on Reddit.

This person spoke up.