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When it comes to technical support, not all tickets are created equal. Some can be fixed in just seconds, and others will take days of research.

What would you do if you were always the guy who was assigned the most difficult and time-consuming tasks, but then a new manager came in and only saw that you weren’t working as many tickets as he was?

That is what happened to the guy in this story, so when the new manager threatened him with a performance write-up, he adjusted his work to complete easy tasks that he could do fast. After completing tons of simple work in the first few days, upper management noticed that the hard tasks weren’t getting fixed at all, so they came in and promoted him, allowing him to go back to working just the hard tasks.

I love this story since it actually has upper management that knows how to fix problems. That is rare in the real world. Read through the full story below and see what you think of it.

You want me to complete more tasks? Not a problem, boss.

This happened a couple years ago. I have a job in entertainment software.

Not everyone is cut out for leadership.

The company I work for is pretty large, but the specific team I’m on is pretty small. I am not the team lead.

I have worked here for many years and have been offered the position of team lead several times, but keep turning it down because I hate telling people what to do and don’t want to go to more meetings.

Having something you specialize in can be very rewarding.

I happen to have a more technical background than the other people on my team, and I developed a reputation as the guy you turn to when you need to solve the really big complicated problems.

The project managers know this and assign tasks accordingly. In fact, they pretty much only bother assigning individual tasks to me. The rest of the tasks for my team go in a bucket for my teammates, including the team lead, to assign to themselves as they see fit.

If he is happy with the arrangement, that is really all that matters.

I can grab from the bucket too, but it’s generally assumed that I’ll prioritize the stuff that’s assigned to me. There are far more tasks that take a few minutes than ones that take a few days, but most of the ones on the deep end of that scale are mine.

This arrangement is the PM’s call, it’s out of the lead’s hands. It’s come up a few times that maybe I should be organized differently than the rest of the team for this reason, but I’ve never really followed up on that because I enjoy my job the way it is just fine. I’m a “head down, take care of my work, mind my own business” kind of guy.

Apparently, this department doesn’t pay attention to the expected time to completion.

Task assignment is handled by some janky software. Each task has an expected time to completion, but the minimum time is 1 day. The majority of the tasks in my team’s bucket take less than an hour for most people.

Because of this, the time budget for the tasks in the task bucket is pretty bloated. The time budget for the tasks assigned specifically to me is less bloated, because most of my tasks are large enough to have more than 1 day assigned to them.

Hopefully, his management team recognizes that his work is good.

I still accomplish much more than one day of task per day on average, because I’m very good at my job. Everyone just knows to ignore the software’s estimate for my team in general; it’s more a list of stuff for us to do and less a measure of our productivity.

A month and a half before the story takes place, the team lost its lead. I was asked, again if I wanted to be the lead, which I, again, declined. Another member of the team who I’ll call Bill was promoted to the position.

New managers often feel like they have to assert their dominance. It usually backfires.

Bill is not the most technical guy, which is fine. But he’s also kind of insecure about the fact that he has little to say in what I’m working on despite being my lead on paper. I don’t really care who the team lead is since most of my assignments come straight from the PMs anyway.

In the month after Bill became lead, I completed 20 tasks, which was much more than a month’s work according to the task management software. After that, I had a 2-week vacation that I had scheduled almost a year in advance.

Does he really think that this guy isn’t working hard?

First thing Monday morning when I got back, Bill called me into a 1-on-1. He started off by expressing that the task management software does a bad job of telling us how on-schedule we are. I agreed.

Then he pulled up a spreadsheet he made where he listed every individual task assigned to our team since he became lead. Which seems redundant, since the task management software already has that, but his had two key differences: there was no time listed for each task, and it kept a running tally of the number of tasks completed by each team member at the top.

Why doesn’t Bill understand that this work is much more complex?

Bill points to the 150 tasks on his own tally, and the 20 on mine. He says he understands I’ve just gotten back from vacation and have only worked on these tasks for a month compared to his month and a half, but I’ve gotta get those numbers up.

I tried to explain that the type of tasks that I get tend to take longer. I even pointed out some of the specific tasks that were assigned to me, and asked if he wanted to help with those if we finished all of the small tasks early.

As a new manager, he is failing.

No, he admitted, he wouldn’t know where to start with those. But look, he said, he completed 150 days of tasks and the expected time to completion had only gone UP, since more tasks had come in.

We’re not gonna run out of small tasks, especially if I’m not pulling my weight. I need to do at least 3 tasks a day or I’d get put on a PIP.

Why am I not surprised that he is taking all the easiest tasks?

It was at that point that I start actually looking at the tasks that he’d completed. And my first thought is, “You’ve had a month and a half and you’ve ONLY done 150 of these? These are 5-minute jobs.”

What’s more, the other members of the team are around the 70-120 range, but they have more tasks that seem like they’d take a few hours to complete. Even worse, if you list the tasks alphabetically, like the bucket does, you can see that he’s taken groups of small ones from the list and skipped any of the larger ones.

Two can play at this game.

It’s almost like Bill has been grabbing the easiest, fastest tasks from the bucket, and then claiming that means he’s more productive. Well, if Bill wants to claim that success is measured in how many tasks like this someone can do, he shouldn’t have brought these rookie numbers.

So here’s where the malicious compliance begins.

Immediately after the meeting, I scroll to a random spot in Bill’s spreadsheet.

Honestly, batching similar problems together is a smart way to handle it. Even if he weren’t doing it for revenge.

There’s a bunch of tasks clustered together that I can knock out in the same script file. After burning through those, I jump down the list to knock out another cluster of tasks that I know I can solve in a similar way to the first ones.

Next on the list are some that are literally the same thing in different scenarios, which I plow through. I keep making my way down the list, and by EoD, I’ve done 95 tasks.

People will certainly notice this type of thing.

The next day is similar, but I hit a cluster that are a little more involved, and only manage to finish 65. Still, that’s a little better than the 3 per day Bill asked for. Of course, I’ve meticulously assigned all of these to myself and marked them done on both Bill’s and the task manager’s spreadsheets.

I don’t know what happened behind the scenes. I know Bill has a regular meeting with the PMs on Wednesday mornings. I know the PMs do pay attention to the task manager and checkins, so they probably took note of the fact that I just knocked half a year off the projection in 2 days.

Wow, the company is actually going to recognize his work and pay him for it.

I don’t know if they asked Bill why he was wasting my time with this stuff. I don’t know if they pointed out that, when he asked me to do the same kind of job he did, I did it over 20 times faster than him.

All I know is, after that meeting, Bill messaged me to go back to doing things the way I was doing them. A couple days later, the head of the department in charge of our team (AKA Bill’s boss) sent me a message saying from now on, he’ll be my lead instead of Bill, and I’ll be doing the same job as before except with more pay and “senior” in front of my title.

I was not expecting such a great ending from this story. It is nice to see that the company finally realized that he was providing a lot of value and that they should pay him for it.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

Bill didn’t know what he was doing.

This is so true, but so many managers fail to realize it.

I suppose this is one way to look at it.

Bill deserves a big thank you.

Sadly, this seems to happen to almost all managers, eventually.

His manager’s incompetence was the best thing that could happen to his career. Of course, at many companies, there wouldn’t have been someone in upper management to make the smart decision. Instead, he would have had to keep working the easy tickets and leave bigger problems to sit.

Just because someone is not interested in management does not mean they are an idiot. And just because someone wants to get into management does not make them competent.