Software Developers Volunteered Their Free Time To Handle After-Hours Emergencies, But When A New Executive Forced Them Back To The Office, They Stopped Going The Extra Mile
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If there’s one thing that can really make or break a team’s dynamic, it’s getting a new boss. Honestly, it can be really polarising. If the old boss was awful and made employees’ lives miserable, then they are likely keen to get started on good footing with their new manager, and any positive changes will likely be accepted in the hope that this manager will actually listen to them and make meaningful change. But if you are a manager who is replacing a beloved employee, beware. Your employees might not take too kindly to you changing things that were already working well.
The problem in this story comes from a new executive who seemed to have tasked himself with improving productivity and, as a result, implementing strategies of presenteeism. But the trouble was, this software company was running perfectly smoothly, with the developers and engineers working on a hybrid basis and being uncommonly generous with their time outside of their working hours too. But you bet that changed when the new executive started messing with their processes.
Read on to find out what happened.
New CTO: “If you’re not at your desk, it’s not work.” We stopped working the second we weren’t at our desks
I work for a mid-size B2B software company, and we’ve been hybrid since forever.
The unspoken deal was simple: a couple days in office, and if something broke at 9pm or a client panicked on a Saturday, someone fixed it from home. Unpaid, but nobody minded. Goodwill.
But then a new CTO arrives from a much more rigid company. Second all-hands, he kills the flexible days: 9-5, in office, no exceptions.
Asked about after-hours emergencies, he says, paraphrasing only slightly,”If you’re not at your desk, actively working, I don’t consider it work. I don’t care what you’d have done from your couch at 9pm.”
Let’s see how these workers responded to this.
Someone half-jokes,”So nothing outside 9-5 at the desk counts?” Him, dead serious: “Exactly. Glad we’re aligned.”
We were aligned. So we complied fully, literally.
Slack got muted at 5:00 sharp. Nobody checked email after leaving. Someone pinged on-call at 6pm about a broken integration and got silence until 9am the next day.
Then, one Friday, a deploy went out at 4:52pm, minutes before the freeze – a configuration value missed one customer segment.
Uh-oh. Read on to find out what happened next.
Under the old system, someone would’ve caught it from their phone by 5:30pm. Under the new one: the alert fired at 5:06pm. Nobody was at their desk, and per the CTO himself, that meant nobody was working. So nobody looked.
It ran the whole weekend. Our biggest client had a fully broken dashboard for 61 hours. By Monday at 9am there were 200+ support tickets, a furious VP of Sales, and a client using the word “churn” a lot.
The CTO demanded to know how nobody noticed for two and a half days.
Our team lead, completely deadpan, pulled up his exact quote from the all-hands: “if you’re not at your desk, actively working, I don’t consider it work.”
And the CTO finally saw the error of his ways.
Nobody was at their desk all weekend. By his own definition, nobody was working. Nothing to notice.
I’ve never heard a room go that quiet.
We got a real on-call rotation within the week actual comp time, not vibes. Hybrid quietly came back a month later as a “pilot.” Nobody’s said “if you’re not at your desk” out loud since.
Turns out a lot of “not real work” had been holding the place together for free.
Yikes! This CTO really learned his lesson.
As the saying goes, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and let’s be real, this new CTO took something functioning perfectly well and broke it with just one sentence.
Good on the workers for complying.
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Let’s see what the Reddit community had to say about this.
This person couldn’t believe the company didn’t have on-call already.
While others thought that at least they benefited by being paid for working outside of hours.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a craft store customer who refuses to take no for an answer when it comes to wrapping his purchases for gifts.
Meanwhile, this Redditor thought this was a problem with scheduling as much as anything.
Honestly, deploying last thing on a Friday was always going to be a terrible idea. But it was made even worse by the fact that the new CTO basically made it so that none of the employees would be willing to work even a minute outside of those contracted 9-5 hours. And sure, it worked out well in the long-run, with the employees actually being paid for the extra work they’re doing (because yes, even if work is being done from home, it’s still work) but it could even have cost them a big client.
This is the danger of new managers and executives coming into a company and trying to fix things that they don’t even understand yet. Sure, changes are an important part of brining in new executives. And in the first months of work, you can expect that new executives will make some kind of tangible changes, if nothing else but to show that they’re doing their job. But you can’t just mess with things that are working and keeping employees happy – not if you want things to function well, that is.
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