It’s never, EVER a good idea to dismiss advice and guidance from people who have worked somewhere for a long time.

In fact, I’d venture to say that it’s a horrible idea.

But you know how people can be…

Check out what happened in this story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page.

New company ignores the old hands, expensive disasters ensue.

“This happened a few decades ago, at a plant complex involved in national defense work. The existing contractor decided to leave when the contract expired, and a new company came in.

Things were about to change…

Of course, NewCompany’s managers came in with the attitude “This place is a mess, we’re going to run it our way, which is the only way.”

Needless to say, this attitude did not sit well with many of the long-term employees – they knew their stuff quite well, especially the site-specific knowledge needed to keep the plant running.

One of the things NewCompany wanted to change early on were the standard operating procedures plant-wide, because the written procedures inherited from OldCompany did not comply with the style used by NewCompany.

This was gonna be a mess.

To this end, they brought in a bunch of technical writers to rewrite the procedures “the right way” – however, none of them had any knowledge of the specifics regarding the procedures they were rewriting, and had no access to the areas the procedures applied to, as they didn’t have any security clearances (took 9+ months to get them at the time).

One of the most important procedures which was rewritten covered power outages in a production building handling some really hazardous stuff which required gloveboxes, controlled air circulation patterns, massive HVAC air filtration, etc.

When NewCompany’s tech writers finished the procedure, they handed it off to the building engineers, all of whom had at least 20 years’ experience, and scheduled a test of the system, simulating a power loss & bringing the emergency generators online to power the building.

The old-timers looked the new revised procedure over and noticed some glaring errors; they notified their bosses at NewCompany, only to be told that the procedure was fine as written and their input was unnecessary.

They tried to warn them…

When the test was run, it got to a point where the building engineers asked again “Are you sure you want to do this?” and were told to comply with the new procedure to the letter.

They did as they were told, and shortly afterwards there were some nasty sounds from the generators, a few scary electrical arcs, and the generators became a few ton’s worth of scrap metal.

NewCompany management was livid, looking everywhere for someone to blame.

Not finding anyone, they decided that it was some sort of subtle sabotage on the part of the building engineers. For the retest after the backup power system was rebuilt (at a cost of a million dollars or so), they decided to post a NewCompany manager at the elbow of every employee involved in the test, to ensure that the procedure was followed exactly to the letter.

The building engineers again expressed their misgivings but complied with their orders, as they had been given dire threats about what would happen to them if they deviated in any way from the procedure.

Yikes…

Despite the micro-management, the test had exactly the same outcome as the first one – dramatic arcs, bad noises, fried equipment, and another million $ outlay to fix everything.

The post-mortem on the second test established that the procedure had indeed been followed exactly with no divergence from it anywhere; faced with this, NewCompany managers finally went back to the building engineers (whom they’d been blaming for the failures) to solicit their input…

It seems that the core problem was what they’d tried to tell NewCompany managers at the outset – a critical step was omitted, one which specified that both generators had to have their output in phase with each other prior to bringing them on-line! (Connecting a pair of multi-kilovolt 3-phase backup generators out of phase is guaranteed to be be an expensive light show!)

Well, what do you know?

The procedure was quietly rewritten with the input of the building engineers, and the third test went flawlessly.

NewCompany had all sorts of problems there due to their attitude – they chased out the experienced people who knew the “what, why, how, and when” of the plant and ended up begging many to come back as independent contractors, who charged some exorbitant hourly rates…”

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

This person shared a story.

Another individual weighed in.

This reader spoke up.

Another Reddit user was impressed.

They learned the hard way that it pays to listen to employees who know what they’re doing!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.