Some managers love control more than common sense.

One engineer at a vehicle testing facility soon found their precious overtime under attack by their new manager.

But the manager’s meddling ended up setting off a chain reaction that would cost her the company’s productivity and her own reputation.

Read on for the full story!

Remove incentive for overtime? Guess we’ll operate normal office hours.

So after leaving university I was an engineer in a vehicle testing lab.

This engineer explains more about what they do.

My lab was a vehicle dynamometer which could be driven by a robot — robotic legs operating the car pedals so the car drives and stops.

The robot keeps driving up to set speeds and stopping over and over and over.

So we put “miles” on components and confirm they’re OK.

The job can be quite demanding.

So, policy when running robot driving is that I need to carry out a safety checklist of items every 24 hours of running.

This takes about 20 minutes.

If I don’t stop the system, it times out and brings everything to a stop automatically.

Luckily, up to this point, they were compensated for any extra time spent.

Company at the time had a minimum 3-hour overtime logging policy — if you’re asked to come in on a weekend you log 3 hours’ pay OT as soon as you’re in the door.

This worked well for me and IMO the company.

I get 3 hours OT each day, the company gets 48 hours of progress.

That is, until a new boss got in the way.

This was a long-running policy and everyone was happy.

I inherited a new manager and she HATED this.

Thought I was stealing from the company and should only get paid for each minute I was on site.

This manager did everything in her power to strip away this benefit.

After a month or two she convinced the directors to remove this policy for me if I wasn’t working 3 hours.

So the engineer decided to hit back.

Don’t know how but she then found it “disappointing” that I wouldn’t drive 30 minutes each way for 20 minutes of overtime on Saturday or Sundays.

At the time I was paid £11.44 per hour (Saturday being 1.5x and Sunday 2x).

So no, I’m not giving up 2 hours on Saturday for £10.

It’s ok though, I’ll leave it running on Friday night and kick it off on Monday 👍.

Customers definitely took notice of the change.

I left without them ever reinstating it, but always sent the many annoyed customers in her direction when being quizzed on why we lost two days of running over the weekend.

At the time the facility hours were rated at ~£1000 per day in value add when running.

Her little power move backfired harder than she expected.

What did Reddit think?

This commenter had a very similar experience.

Some new managers are like a bull in a china shop, just destroying everything in their wake.

Managers seem to think their bright ideas will improve the company, but they often end up doing the exact opposite.

When all was said and done, this manager learned the long way that micromanaging rarely pays off.

She wanted control, but all she earned was constant complaints.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.