It’s a funny thing when your boss gives you a hard time about something they ASKED you to do…

Interesting, isn’t it?

You bet it is!

And it happened again, folks!

Check out what happened in this story from Reddit.

Act like a contractor….Okay!

“A bit of background before I dive into the story.

I am head of my department and when the company wins a project it comes to me for project review with current workload & timeframe it is required  If I can’t fit it in then we send it out for a contractor to do.

We are bought out by a multinational company after being locally owned so as with all these situations more and more scrutiny is now on budgets and meeting budgets thanks to the bean counters.

To help comply with this I am now told that I will be involved in job tendering so that if we win the work the budget should reflect our in house hourly rate and allotted time I have worked out it should take.

Only problem with this is that the tenderers also go out to contractors to get pricing also as a “check” is what they are telling me.

They got some orders from up high.

Fast forward to a meeting with my boss and he basically tell’s me to run my department like a contractor and if I can’t meet the time or allotted budget for the job to then pass it off to the contractor that has priced it as such regardless of what is happening in house so that we don’t blow the budget and have to explain why to the bean counters.

Sure enough as months go by I don’t get as involved in this pricing process as no one comes to me and the contractors pricing is what I am told I have to make work, which in some cases isn’t too far off internal pricing I would think so I push my team and we get it done.

Then one day the estimator comes to me with 2 jobs that he submitted pricing for and asks me if I can check the prices they used for my departments work. I have a look and the combined price of the 2 jobs is less then what I believe one job should cost to do.

They were honest about it.

Basically tell him whoever the person that priced that must have been smoking some good stuff that day and don’t come to me if we win it because I can’t make it work and you are stuck with that contractor.

About a month later our internal workload is slowing right down to the point a few team members are booking time to “training” (this is just a code we book time to up-skill or basically if we have nothing to do work wise we use as a filler when it comes to internal clean up or whatever so it just doesn’t blow up budgets for unrelated items).

I go to my boss asking for more work basically as we don’t have much going on and I don’t want him coming to me asking why so much training time is happening. His response is “we have these 2 new jobs we have won just finalizing the contract and will pass them down for you to review”.

Okay great I think this will keep us busy for a short while.

Uh oh…

Couple days pass and I see the job’s come through and start looking at them, this is when I realize they were the jobs that had stupid budgets and I could not make work at all without a big lecture at the end on how budgets were blown.

So I pass on them like I was told and let that be that. Couple days later we have our management meeting and I inform the room we are pretty quiet so if anyone has any work let me know and I could see what we could do, to this my boss pipes up and goes hey I just gave you 2 good job’s what happened to those, you should be on them.

Well…

To this I say “Well you told me to look at jobs and if I couldn’t make the budgets work to act like a contractor and pass on them…..So I did just that as the budgets were ridiculous”.

He went quiet and that was that, so my team kept throwing hours into “training” until something came along which we could make work.

He worked out pretty fast that a blown budget was better then throwing money into training hours as that came straight out of the company pocket and he had would have to explain to his higher up’s why our department had a lot of training hours and not much productive hours.”

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

This person chimed in.

Another reader spoke up.

And this Reddit user shared their thoughts.

Hey, just following orders, boss!

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.