If you work at a company that allows overtime, and if you work overtime on a regular basis, you may start to count on that overtime as part of your regular pay. If that overtime went away, it might be hard to pay your bills.

What would you do if you were in that situation and a new boss eliminated overtime? Would you keep working there anyway, try to get the boss to change his mind, or look for another job?

In this story, one employee was in this situation, and he looked for another job. Leaving his old company for a better job was probably somewhat satisfying, but what happened several years later is what really made his day!

Let’s read all about it.

Screw with my overtime? Lose a tech.

Years ago I worked at a materials and logistics company. Pay wasn’t great, but I had all the overtime I wanted so I was content with my pay.

One day the old plant manager left and the number two guy at the plant was promoted.

Number two guy was kind of a jerk, and one of his first changes was, and I quote, “all of this overtime is eating into my quarterly bonus. From now on, no overtime is allowed unless I personally approve it”.

This guy clearly didn’t care about things being done well. He only cared about his bonus.

With a single memo I lost a full 8 hours of weekly overtime for equipment maintenance.

Of course, this was going to cause machines to fail more often, but more importantly that was eight hours of time and a half that was pulled out of my paycheck to improve his bonus, and he was openly gloating about the “cost savings”.

(He also implemented a “the second the shift ends, everything stops, just walk away from any uncompleted tasks” policy, which meant that I had lost an additional 10 hours per week, and meant that equipment was never put away so the next shift would spend the first 20 minutes of their shift looking for things, but he didn’t care because, personal bonus.)

He decided enough was enough.

So I put in my two weeks and prepared to move on.

Funny thing was that a couple of days later I was approached by a boss other than the plant manager who asked if I would be willing to stay if they gave me the overtime back, but I had already found a better job with better pay even without overtime so I said no.

This is so ironic!

Flash forward about three years, and I was hiring for a tech at my new company.

A resume crosses my desk from a guy who had been hired at my old company about six weeks after I had left. My replacement at the old company was unknowingly applying to work for me!

In the middle of a skilled worker shortage with, as the 150 crap resumes in my inbox demonstrated, not a high availability of good candidates.

Straight to the top of the pile you go!

He felt vindicated!

I don’t know how long it took the old plant to hire somebody else.

Their pay wasn’t great (I was offering something like 35% more) and the labor force wasn’t exactly flooded with quality people.

They will never know that I poached away one of their guys, but it was a pretty sweet feeling.

I love that he was able to hire someone who replaced him at his last job, meaning that the company would have to start the job search all over again.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who got promoted, then realized they set her replacement up to fail.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

The second in command doesn’t really seem to care even if this is the case since it’s probably a different budget than the budget for his bonus.

Yes, this is the boss’s reasoning.

This is true.

Another person defines poaching.

Even if he didn’t exactly poach the employee, he felt satisfied hiring the employee since he knew it would directly and negatively impact the company he used to work for.

I’m glad OP went on to quickly and easily find a better job. It’s also nice of him to help out an employee who was in a similar situation, the employee who replaced him.

It is quite ironic that the person who replaced him ended up applying at the same company he works for. I wonder if he’ll ever tell him why he hired him.