Some managers just don’t know how to get out of their own way.

They think they know what’s best for their workers, but a lot of these folks are downright clueless!

Take a look at this story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page and learn about this worker showed his managers the error of their ways.

Don’t want to pay me overtime? I don’t think that will work the way you think it will.

“Many years ago I worked for a large multinational Software/Hardware/Consulting place that you will have heard of, we’ll call them $employer.

On this particular assignment I was a a small cog in a 300+ person project to run many of the IT systems of a major telecoms company. My particular responsibility was Application Support for the customer care area.

This covered an internal web-app that the client’s help desk used to look up customer details, do upgrades, refunds, address changes etc, as well as the public FAQ website and the email ticketing system used to communicate with their customers.

Most of this software was written by the ~15 person development team that sat a few short steps away from my desk, who were largely great to work with.

I joined just as the first very small release went live, and with each new release they added more features and more help desk people.

So at the start, there were two of us supporting this app, with the idea that as more releases and features were added and the workload increased, they would add more people to the team to help out.

Workload increases.

It was getting VERY busy.

So after a few months we’ve had the first two software releases, the number of users is ramping up and we are having more and more tickets to deal with.

At this point though, the other guy on the team whispered in a few manager’s ears and got transferred to one of the other work streams, but no one thought to replace him with anyone else.

So now it was just me doing all the support by myself, which had the inevitable consequence of wait times for tickets going up.

As an example, I had a very nice lady from one of the other support teams come over and politely ask me when I might get a chance to look at the ticket she has raised.

The conversation went something like this:

PoliteLady: Hi there, I have a question about a ticket assigned to you.

UraniumSnail: Sure, what’s the ticket number?

PoliteLady: 123456. We need you to implement it before we can add <some feature>. Do you think you can look at it in the next few days?

UraniumSnail: <looks up ticket> Ah, it’s a Sev3.

(“Sev” meaning “Severity”, where Sev1 is a system outage, Sev2 is Urgent but not critical, Sev3 is basically the default and Sev4 is “Nice to have”)

I then do some math in my head, thinking of all the other things higher priority than a Sev3 and reply:

It wasn’t gonna be quick…

UraniumSnail: 4 weeks.

PoliteLady: <slightly stunned blank look>

UraniumSnail: That’s if there are no Sev1 outages for the next month and no-one raises any more Sev2’s. Oh and we are averaging 3 Sev1’s per week right now.

PoliteLady: Oh. Is there anyone else I can talk to?

UraniumSnail: No sorry, it’s just me, that’s why it will take 4 weeks.

PoliteLady: <wanders off>

The reality, of course, is that I would never get to look at a Sev3, which I think she realized.

On call rotation

Since there were public facing elements to the system, we also had an on-call rotation in case of out of hours problems. There was a shared support phone, which I think was a Nokia 3310 – whose ringtone still gives me PTSD when I hear it.

The rotation consisted of me and the guy who left for the other team, as he still wanted to pull in some extra cash. You see for all it’s failings $employer actually had a really good overtime setup, which included the on-call time.

They had a routine.

We’d alternate each week, starting on Monday evening and then being on call for all the time we were not in the office until the following Monday. So if I was in the office for 8 hours, then I’d be on call for 16, then work for 8, back on call for 16 etc. So doing a ~40 hour week I’d be on call for about 128 hours.

We’d get paid 1/4 of our hourly rate for being on call, but then there’s a bonus multiplier depending on if its a regular work night, weekend or bank holiday.

And they were stacking cash!

So I was basically doubling my salary thanks to the on-call gravy train.

I mean, the 2 am call outs were not much fun, especially when you have to work for 5 hours to get the system back up again, then come back in the next day to deal with the fallout, but the money was good and I was young.

I wasn’t really doing much overtime other than the on call and call-outs, as when you are repeatedly called out in the middle of the night you don’t much feel like going the extra mile the rest of the time.

But they were still really slammed with work.

I was doing enough that we very rarely had an outage during the day, but didn’t have time to do anything proactive or think about long term improvements, I could only just keep my head above water.

I think the number of Sev2’s was actually increasing over time, and dealing with a Sev3 was only a dream.

I’d occasionally have a meeting with one of the three Service Managers I reported to, who’d moan a little about the number of old open tickets, but I’d just ask them what my priority should be and they’d concede I was doing the right thing.

And yes, I reported to three Managers, which worked about as well as you’d expect, but that’s for another time.

I arrive to work one day and I’m stopped by one of the support people from another team:

SupportPerson: Have you seen the announcement?

UraniumSnail: What announcement?

SupportPerson: Check your email.

Uh oh…

This happens at least three times before I’ve even got to my desk. I’m now intrigued and slightly fearful about what I might find.

Has the project been canned? Are we going to get the project away day that has been rumored for months? My laptop has never taken so long to boot up, but when it does the news is not good.

Overtime payments are over.

Starting in two months time, all overtime will be compensated by Time Off In Lieu (TOIL). Yeah that acronym is apt.

This was not cool…

No more doubling of my salary, no more nice holidays, no more… wait a sec. I’ve just reached the bit where they explain how the amount of TOIL is calculated from the amount of overtime.

That can’t be right. I go to the spreadsheet I use to track my hours and start making some edits based on the email. Edits complete, I start trying out some numbers. Well, well, what do we have here. A plan is forming.

The Compliance.

They had an idea…

For the next month, I do just a little bit of overtime each day. Sometimes an hour, sometimes more. If we have a bad week for Sev1’s and call-outs, then I don’t do as much, but if we have a quiet week then I’m staying after hours every night.

A week or two into my new regime I have a meeting with a Service Manager, and they are now a bit happier as the ticket queue has actually gone down for the first time in ages.

I say nothing about the TOIL, and as the meeting is ending they are actually surprised I didn’t bring it up, as they have been getting an earful from all the other support people.

I play it down, and say that I haven’t really thought about it yet but I’m sure it’ll be fine. The meeting ends with them thanking me about taking it so calmly. I just smile.

After working like this for a month, it’s now time for phase 2 of the plan. I book a meeting with one of the Service Managers, and bring my laptop with the overtime spreadsheet.

The meeting goes something like this:

UraniumSnail: I have some concerns about the upcoming TOIL change.

ServiceManager: <suddenly bored> Do you? What are they?

UraniumSnail: Well I track my hours in this spreadsheet so that it’s easier to submit my overtime payments, and I thought I’d update it to support the new TOIL process.

ServiceManager: <slightly suspicious> Ok…

UraniumSnail: Well if you look at my hours for the past month, and look at the weeks when I’m on call, then the amount of Time Off that the project will owe me is calculated as this much <points to cell>

ServiceManager: Right…? What’s the problem?

UraniumSnail: Do you not see the issue? For this week where I’m on call, I’m owed 41 hours of time off, but I’m only contracted to work 37 hours per week.

ServiceManager: <puzzled frown> What does that mean?

UraniumSnail: It means that for any week that I’m on call I’d have to take the entire next week off work, paid for by the project. No work would get done on my work stream. No tickets would be completed, no Change Requests and no root cause analyses will be done. We’d only be able to do half the number of tickets that we currently do, and that’s already pretty low.

ServiceManager: Erm…

UraniumSnail: Not only that, but the extra few hours over my contracted hours will gradually add up, so that at some point I won’t even be able to be on call for the full week.

ServiceManager: <fully awake now> Take me through the math again.

This was a surprise to their manager.

Yes, you see for the previous month I’d been making sure that I’d done just enough overtime clearing down tickets that the amount of TOIL I would be owed under the new system would be more than my contracted hours.

The Service Managers couldn’t complain about the extra hours as they wanted the ticket queue to go down, and the Project Managers couldn’t complain as this was their idea in the first place. The Service Manager said to “leave it with him” and the meeting ended.

The aftermath.

Two weeks later an email came out from Management saying that the TOIL change was being “postponed”. I’d like to think that it was all my doing, but it may have also been the fact that many of the support people were talking about getting their names off the various on-call rotations, as it wasn’t really worth doing just for time off.

Management couldn’t just make the TOIL rates worse either, as they were mandated by the company, so they didn’t really have a choice but to back off once they were shown the numbers.

It all worked out for them!

As for my work stream, the Service Managers seemed to get the hint as within a few months the team had grown from just me to 4 of us.

I finally had the time to do preventative maintenance, as well as spending more time talking with the Development team.

This eventually allowed me to move to a role that was 50/50 support and development, which started me on the path to being a full time software developer.

The on-call gravy train chugged along for another couple of years, until the whole company watered it down from 1/4 to 1/10th of the hours. The project never switched to TOIL.”

Check out what people had to say on Reddit.

This person had a lot to say.

Another reader shared their thoughts.

This Reddit user was impressed.

Another person spoke up.

And this individual had a lot to say.

Now, this is some impressive malicious compliance!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.