When a manager is working in a complex environment, they will often want to make policies that will apply to everything to try to keep things simple.

What would you do if your manager told you to reject every request that came in with the wrong paperwork with no exceptions?

That is the position the developer in this story was in, so he rejected a request from the CTO, who then promptly chewed out the manager, forcing him to change the policy.

Check it out.

You want me to reject everything? OK

Around 2008 I worked for a big multinational consulting company, setting up a development center in my country.

This center was meant to be “specialized developers, than can create code way faster than do-it-all kind of devs, for cheaper, on an offshore country”.

Consultants have their place.

The reality was, like in all consulting companies, very different (except for the “for cheaper…” part, that was true).

The team consisted of a truckload of recent graduates or university students who were given a 2-3 week course on a technology, plus a couple team leaders and probably around one overworked senior dev per team.

Oh, and a PMO/QA department. PMO means, for those who don’t know, Project Management Office.

The PMO had to make sure that those plans for a coffee machine ended up with a coffee machine being delivered instead of a coffee mug.

Or that if the customer asked for a Porsche 911, it ends with a car, not a bike with a Porsche 911 sticker on the side (examples that everyone can understand, the company actually dealt with software).

This seems like an important job.

I was part that PMO/QA department.

When I say part it means me and another experienced guy handled everything PMO, and a QA senior and a QA junior handled all the testing plans of all the teams.

So 4 people to do PMO and QA for around 80-100 devs, split between 14-16 teams.

To make things BETTER (worse) the top brass decided to certify the dev center with ISO practices, which meant that PMO work grew quite a bit and we had to be on top of everything much much more since we needed to have everything perfect for the appraisal. The head of the dev center was ELJEFE.

He was a Spanish villainous lad who had a knack for firing, underpaying people and generally cutting expenses to the minimum.

HR is supposed to be for the company.

He decided that a HR department was too much for the company, so he scrapped the dev center’s one and had one IN ANOTHER COUNTRY handle everything, he scrapped aptitude and attitude tests and he conducted interviews himself.

That’s why the devs were the most random collection of let’s just say curious human beings available for cheap in the market (including the narcolepsy albino goth metal guy, the former bodyguard, the guy that did parkour during the weekends and wasn’t able to use his hands to type on a keyboard every Monday, and so many more characters that would render The Office as a pretty normal workplace environment).

ELJEFE calls me and the other PMO guy and says “listen, the quality of requirements coming to the dev center is really lacking. ISO will fail us if they see what we accept.

Draft a standard template and a guide on how requirements should be sent to us and I will forward it to all our customers.

From now on, every single requirement that enters the center has to be evaluated and can be rejected if they don’t met standards.”

Will they really reject things from the CEO?

What ELJEFE doesn’t remember, is that we’re developing an internal app for the whole company, and requirements are being sent, via email, on a word document that has unconnected phrases and thoughts, directly from the CEO and CTO of the whole multinational company, that the dev team has to make sense of.

So I say “Everything? are you sure? Because…”

Before I can even muster another word, ELJEFE burst into flames and says “Am I speaking Chinese or what? Everything is everything! Do your job and don’t bother me with this anymore!”

“Roger that” and we left, sent a quick meeting notes email to ELJEFE, drafted the template and guide according to ISO requirements, sent it to ELJEFE and carried on with our work.

I bet the CTO is going to be livid.

Next week, update on requirements directly from the CTO.

I don’t even bother opening the document, I hit reply and copy paste the established message “Requisite rejected. Not compliant with established standards.”

Literally 30 seconds after replying, the telephone rings: “THIS IS CTO, WHO GAVE YOU POWER TO REJECT A REQUISITE FROM ME? DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”

At least the CTO will know where to direct his outrage.

Me: “Hi CTO, yes, I know who you are, ELJEFE told us that we have to reject every single thing that’s not ISO compliant, no matter where it comes from. I have the notes from the meeting, I tried to tell him that we were doing things slightly different on your project, he said that EVERYTHING had to be done by the book, so I have to reject your request, I can forward you the template you have to complete again if you want…”

Not even answering, CTO finishes the call and I can hear ELJEFE’s phone ringing. All I could hear from our desk is ELJEFE saying “yes… yes… no, I understand… but… I know… yes… please no… won’t happen again… I will tell them… yes… sorry about that… thank you”.

And ELJEFE comes out of the office, white as a ghost, slowly walks towards our desk and says “guys, the internal app project is excluded from the ISO scope, so we don’t have to be strict with it.”

He was just force fed a big piece of humble pie. Hopefully he’ll actually listen to his team going forward.

Let’s see what the people in the comments say about this.

They will never admit they were wrong.

The policy wasn’t bad, just to broad.

He totally should have said this.

Sad but true.

This commenter loved the story.

Sometimes following dumb directions can be so satisfying.

It’s gotta be done.

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.