June 3, 2025 at 10:35 pm

An Arrogant New MBA Grad Is In Charge, But When He Threw A Project Way Out Of Budget, The Rest Of Them Put A Stop To It

by Ashley Ashbee

A railroad in the countryside

Pexels/Reddit

There is a super common phenomenon in this story: the person put in charge of the project and the workers has no idea what he is doing, but is unflappably arrogant.

See how these workers dealt with their boss.

Don’t want to pay 4 guys to not work for 6 hours? OK, you can pay 30 guys to not work for 6 hours.

I am a manager for a North American railroad and a lot of our work involves different crafts of employees.

Different crafts have different unions and different work rules.

The managers of the other crafts and I work together well to get done what we need to get done, especially when some of the work needs to get done at night.

They have to follow policies that don’t make a whole lot of sense.

The track guys can have a crew assigned to nights, while the signal guys can’t.

Even better, the signal guys who work overnight have to be let go after 12 hours, and if it’s now their regular shift because they came in last night, they get paid the rest of the day to go home and sleep.

Track guys have all three shifts, but we only have a day shift and an evening shift, but no night shift, because the big hats don’t want to hire enough people to do it.

The company has decided that paying guys to go home 2 hours early on a Thursday, come in and work overtime all night at 10pm, and go home at 10am, getting another 4 hours pay to go home and sleep is the ending of all that is good and pure in the universe, and will eventually lead to the collapse of capitalism, the nation, and indeed the universe itself.

So they decide that the second shift guys have to stay 4 extra hours, and the first shift guys have to come in 4 hours early.

I point out that I can’t force employees to work overtime; not all employees are qualified on the same things, etc.

What follows is a familiar story of academic arrogance.

All of it falls on deaf ears, because the freckle-faced college kid has somehow gotten to a position where he’s in charge of the estimates wants to complain about those 24 hours a night.

So, after having gone on the meeting record for all of it, I get out of the kids way.

I decide that if my boss isn’t going to have my back, I’m not going to stop this inevitable disaster.

So, the first night, the job grinds to a halt like clockwork at 1am, the second crew shows up at about 4:15, and they get to work.

The track folks pack it in, because by the time anything gets dismantled, there won’t be enough time to get anything done and put it all back together to start moving trains by 7.

Second night, the shift change was a little smoother, so they got out there at 3:45. Managed to get a little work done before packing up.

Third and fourth night it rained REALLY hard, so the drive back to the shop and out to the job site took extra time.

No work done after the new crew showed up at 4:30.

Bright and early Monday morning we show up at our morning meeting to find that the track guys got about 30% of the work done that they’d planned for the week and at this pace would finish a 6-week job more than 15 weeks behind and over budget by more than 300%.

But it’s no use…

Mr. MBA proceeds to launch into his carefully-rehearsed speech about Key Metrics, Percent Spent vs Percent Complete, and all sorts of other nonsense.

Then he decides to start in on me.

I held up the meeting minutes from the previous week, told him in no uncertain terms that he had asked, in fact demanded, that we have a full shift change in the middle of the track department’s work.

I looked across the table at him, and asked him if he wanted to revise that position.

Completely unwilling to let this lowly engineer tell him what to do, he said no, and I was supposed to somehow magically make the shift change FASTER.

Next 3 weeks were the same story.

They’ve now been out there for a month, and have managed to accomplish just shy of a week and a half of work.

Mr. MBA shows up on the site one night, just in time to watch my night guys walk off, watch the track guys shut down the machines and gather outside to smoke, hang out, and generally carouse, because they know they now have 3 hours to screw off, and be paid for it.

My guys had called me when Mr. MBA showed up, so I get out of bed and get to the job site just in time to see this guy in his shiny fresh-from-the-package safety gear screaming at the top of his lungs to the guys to get back in their equipment and “get the & back to work!”

Finally, some hope!

They all refuse. Mr. MBA has been throwing a little too much weight around and nothing makes union employees stick together better or faster than putting the screws to a manager who really needs it.

“Well, Mr. MBA, I’m sure you’re not suggesting that these qualified employees violate Rule XXX, which clearly states that they shall not, under any circumstances, run that equipment through a switch that the signal department hasn’t checked, would you?” I said.

“That would be a serious violation, and could get him a 30-day suspension without pay,” I continued. “If you were to suggest that he do that, you wouldn’t have a union card in your pocket and he would have 30 witnesses that saw you give him that directive. So you wouldn’t be suggesting that, would you?”

He turned three shades of purple, stomped back to his little white company sedan, and drove away.

He held on to his asinine mid-shift shift change for another 2 weeks until he couldn’t hide the massive production delays from his boss anymore, and suddenly he wasn’t in charge of the estimates anymore.

The total cost of his little venture? Just over $940,000 over the course of 6 weeks.

But, he did manage to save $700 a night on those off hours that he didn’t have to pay for.

Here is what folks are talking about.

It’s common in many industries!

Screenshot 2025 05 22 at 11.26.33 AM An Arrogant New MBA Grad Is In Charge, But When He Threw A Project Way Out Of Budget, The Rest Of Them Put A Stop To It

Unfortunately a lot of academics have no concept of the real world.

Screenshot 2025 05 22 at 11.26.47 AM An Arrogant New MBA Grad Is In Charge, But When He Threw A Project Way Out Of Budget, The Rest Of Them Put A Stop To It

Good to know, but I’m not surprised.

Screenshot 2025 05 22 at 11.27.09 AM An Arrogant New MBA Grad Is In Charge, But When He Threw A Project Way Out Of Budget, The Rest Of Them Put A Stop To It

How sad.

Screenshot 2025 05 22 at 11.28.00 AM An Arrogant New MBA Grad Is In Charge, But When He Threw A Project Way Out Of Budget, The Rest Of Them Put A Stop To It

I bet. So much can go wrong!

Screenshot 2025 05 22 at 11.28.53 AM An Arrogant New MBA Grad Is In Charge, But When He Threw A Project Way Out Of Budget, The Rest Of Them Put A Stop To It

They won’t miss Mr. MBA!

Hopefully he learned something for next time.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.