Imagine working for a company where the higher ups get really upset if the project you’re working on goes over budget. Would you cut corners to stay within budget, pass on jobs that you knew would be impossible to complete within the budget, or go overbudget?

In this story, one employee is in this situation, and his boss tells him to pass on jobs where he wouldn’t be able to stay within the budget.

That ends up backfiring,

Keep reading for all the details.

Act like a contractor….Okay!

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.

His boss gave him a new directive.

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 buy 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. 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.

Work has really slowed down.

About a month later our internal work load 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 upskill 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 job 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 finalising the contract and will pass them down for you to review”.

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

He decided to comply with his boss’s order.

Couple days pass and I see the job’s come through and start looking at them. This is when I realise they were the job’s 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.

His boss finally understood the problem.

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.

I was worried some of the employees were going to be laid off due to lack of work. I’m glad it worked out that the boss realized they needed work even if it meant they went over budget.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person has a question.

Another person points out the difference between bean counters and OP’s boss.

Here’s a good question about contractors.

This is all too often the case.

Bean counters don’t always get it right.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.