It is annoying when a new boss comes in and wants to conquer the world! And by that I mean change things that really shouldn’t be changed!

Imagine being in this situation and knowing the new boss is making a big mistake with these changes. Would you tell him, or would you comply and let it backfire?

In this story, one IT employee shares how he and his coworkers showed their new boss why the new policies were a bad idea.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

The Case of the Hourly IT Workers

I worked in IT at a large, non-technical company.

As is normal in I.T., there were crises, patches and new software installs where it was all hands on deck for 16 hours, and other times when everything was humming along and there was not a lot of work to do.

Old Boss understood this well.

When we had to work late into the evening, he was fine with us coming in late the next day, leaving early, or even if a couple people didn’t come in at all as long as we rotated who got to stay home so that there was some coverage.

A new boss changed everything.

We were all salaried exempt but, overall, the hours were fair despite the occasional very very long days.

New boss comes in from a non-IT background and sees this system and decides everyone will be hourly and, worse, work set hours.

If we were 10 minutes late, we had to use 10 minutes of PTO or be docked pay for the time, rather than just staying 10 minutes late.

He also declared there would be ZERO overtime.

This is not a good system.

This worked for about a week.

It was slow and the people who would normally leave an hour early had to just sit at their desks and wait to clock out.

Then the first major system issue happened where the email server crashed.

We all punched out at 5 and went home. System stayed down until the following morning.

The big boss noticed.

Well, big boss comes down and wants to know why it took so long to bring the email system back and how it hurt the business.

New boss mumbles something about no staffing in the evening.

Big boss says it’s never been a problem before.

New boss tells us, from that point on, when something breaks we stay to fix it.

Overtime starts piling up.

Finally the cherry on top!

Big boss asks about budget.

Several of us on the team decide to be brave and tell big boss what’s going on and ask if things could just return to the way they were.

Shortly after, an email is sent out saying new boss “has decided to leave to take on another opportunity,” i.e. was fired and that the I.T. dept was returning to salary exempt.

GEEZ! That sounds exhausting!

The new boss never should’ve changed anything.

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This person knows how to translate emails.

That’s right! This user knows the new boss only wants everything to be his way!

This user knows how new bosses function!

This user knows that someone who’s already on the team would understand the system better!

This user loves these happy endings!

The new boss got what he deserved!

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.