If you had set work hours, would you be willing to be a little flexible and stay late from time to time, or would you insist on starting and ending your work day right on time?

In this story, the employees took the first approach until an annoying manager got strict about the rules.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Want strict work hours? Ok, can do.

I used to work in a mid-sized company in the engineering department.

One of the managers started to get upset because if he walked around at exactly 8:30 (our start time) everyone was not in their seats.

He felt that engineers were being too lax with their time.

The edict went out that all engineers had to be in their seats exactly at start time.

He refused to comply.

I told my boss that I was not planning on complying because I was a salaried professional and expected to be treated as such and that if they didn’t trust me to put in an honest week’s work then they should fire me instead of micro-manage me.

The older (and much wiser) engineers took a different approach.

They all showed up 5 minutes early to make sure they were in their seats at 8:30, but also set an alarm for 5pm and would literally drop everything they were doing exactly at 5pm and leave the building.

They literally would not work a second past 5pm.

Is the manager having a meeting that was supposed to end at 5 but is running a little late? No, at 5pm a series of alarms would go off and everyone would stand up in the middle of the meeting to leave.

Does operations need technical support at 4:55? They have exactly 5 minutes on the phone with the engineer before he will have to get off the phone.

Is someone trying to discuss a work-related issue at 8:28? Better wait a couple minutes because no one in the engineering department is answering work-related questions for another 2 minutes.

Needless to say the policy didn’t last very long.

He’s right that the employees who decided to comply really were wiser. Sometimes complying with a silly policy is the perfect way to get it changed.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

An engineer weighs in.

Another person shares their observation of engineers.

Refusing to let employees work from home ended up being expensive for this company.

A software engineer shares their experience.

Setting strict work hours can really backfire.

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.