Micromanagers…this one’s for you…

And hopefully, it’ll make you pause and think before you decide to make peoples’ jobs more difficult than they need to be.

Are y’all ready for this?

Let’s get started!

You want to micromanage 30 people? Sir yes Sir!

“My girlfriend was having issues with her micromanaging boss and made me remember this orchestrated malicious compliance we did back around 2003-04 when I was working for a consulting company.

They were down in the basement…

The client we were working for was a bank that had us working from the -2 basement, which consisted on a warehouse full with ATM replacements parts and another retrofitted warehouse with desks for us.

You can imagine the type, flickering neon lights, ventilation columns, only thing resembling a window was a poster of a window the consulting company hung up on one wall.

Cellphones weren’t that common then, Internet was kinda on but everything was blocked because of the bank’s firewall.

We had to access google via IP address.

Working there was hard, only distraction was having a talk around the watercooler and going upstairs to get a coffee.

We were like 30 people, split into 2 big teams doing COBOL and 1 smaller one doing web, dotnet and whatever else somebody asked the manager to deliver.

I was part of the smaller one.

They had a system.

The client asked us to track how long it took to finish each task. This was handled by each of the 3 team leaders, and people had a little bit of leeway on how to report hours spent.

So, each team member would tell team leader whenever a task was finished and how long it took.

It worked pretty well because team leaders were chill and the guys were serious and didn’t slack much.

The manager (let’s call him MICROMANAGER, since he was all about micromanaging but also because he was short) calls me (I was kinda jack of all trades back then) and my team leader (TL as in Team Leader but also, he was tall as hell, so TOO LONG) one day.

He says “look guys, I have a feeling we are not working hard enough, I need to be able to report the exact amount of time we spend on each task to the client.

I want you to have some kind of software so people can input the time they spend on each thing”.

Well…

TL tries to explain that the current system in place works rather well and there’s no need to change the status quo, that the numbers were accurate and such.

MICROMANAGER says that it’s not enough, that people are wasting time and he wants accurate tracking.

I was like 22-23 at that time, first job, but TL had a knack for malicious compliance.

If you say so!

So he designed the system.

It consisted on a little traffic light in the taskbar, red meant you were assigned, yellow meant a temporary stop, green meant unassigned.

In order to change from one color to the other, a popup appeared and you had to input the reason for the change.

Then we created a web page that summarized and presented the data anonymously.

It also had an export button so MICROMANAGER could check and use it to report himself, faster than how the team leaders were doing it (at least, that was MICROMANAGER’s idea).

We installed this in every computer, and showed how it worked to MICROMANAGER, he was happy and told us to explain the system to the team in order to start the trial run of the idea right away.

Here’s the deal…

So we did, TL gathered every single team member, and told them that MICROMANAGER wanted an EXACT tracking of each one. He repeated time and time again the word EXACT.

Like probably 50 times in 5 minutes. He also said that the next day would be a trial run for the software.

So, 30 team members understood right away and complied. In an EXACT way.

Here’s an example on some of the things I remember (I might remember some of this ones a little embellished, it’s been a while) as highlights from the report (with time added up) after the trial day:

Arrival – taking coat off, no hanger available, tried to hang it on top of other coat, both fell. 5 minutes.

Cough attack, had to get a glass of water. 5 minutes.

Joke, morale booster. 2 minutes.

Lost track of thought, realized I was looking at the poster of a window instead of a window. 3 minutes.

Gone to the toilet. (this was like 400 minutes or so, 30 people, 2 times in the day or so).

Discussing last night’s football match. 50 minutes.

Air too cold, had to ask maintenance to up the temp. 4 minutes.

Somebody asked temp to up the temp, now everybody is sweating, had to ask them to lower temp. 2 minutes.

Inputting change of state in traffic light app. (Something like 2 hours in total)

And the list kept going and going and going. The real data was also there, but it was practically unusable. Before leaving the office, TL called his team and we had a really good laugh reading the list.

The next day, when we arrived, MICROMANAGER called TL, told him something and TL asked me to uninstall the traffic light app from every computer.”

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Down with micromanagers!

Yuck!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.