They Replaced Paper Timesheets With Digital Clocks—Until She Clocked In From Her Desk
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Would you prefer to work at a company where you clock in and clock out so your hours are always tracked accurately, or would you prefer to work for a company where hours aren’t really tracked at all?
In this story, one employee’s company changed from not tracking hours to tracking hours, and she was pretty annoyed by the change. However, she decided if they were going to track her hours, she was going to make sure she earned overtime.
Keep reading to find out how she did it.
“We don’t pay extra time if it’s under 15minutes” – Okay, I can make it work
I was a software engineer for a company and out of nowhere they implemented an eletronic control on our work time.
Before that we would work extra on good faith, if I had to do 2 more hours one day, the next day I could get in 2 hours later without a problem.
In the new system I had to clock in at 8am (if I didn’t it would consider I was late and “lose” the entire first hour) and clock out at 5pm. With 1 hour lunch break.
Overtime pay isn’t optional.
Work laws here in Brazil are different from the ones in the US.
If the company tracks your work time, they HAVE to pay you extra time on anything over 40hours/week.
Sometimes I would get in a bit earlier like 8:50 or something and leave at 5:10pm.
At the end of the first month I was surprised my extra hours were 0 ( on the previous system I wouldn’t care, but they were the ones that decided to track this) .
She discovered a workaround.
I decided to do some digging on how the tracking software worked and found out that anything less than 15 minutes per check in was completely ignored (99% sure that was against the law but I could work with that).
From that day on guess who arrived 16 minutes earlier everyday. Came back from lunch 16 minutes earlier ( if I was done and had nothing else to do ) and left 16 minutes later.
At the end of the second month management called me in to explain why I had over 3 times more extra hours than most of the other workers.
She turned it around on them.
I just told them to check their system, I’m not the one keeping track of that anymore.
To my surprise they actually did pay everything that was owned ( I could sue and easily win) and DID NOT change how the system worked.
I kept doing that for another 3 months before changing jobs to a remote one.
That was clever and a good way to take advantage of an annoying new system. If she really wanted to get even, she could’ve shared what she was doing with her coworkers so they could do it too.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person likes how it worked out.
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Another person shares a story about their brother.
One person votes for letting systems fail.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who found a way around his company’s denial of company time to study for his Commercial Driver’s License.
Employers clearly don’t think their employees are very smart.
Maybe the problem is that the employers aren’t all that smart. They haven’t figured out the workaround to their shiny new cost saving system yet, so they definitely don’t expect their employees to crack the code.
That was a great way to work the system!
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