My boss said that I can only do work between the hours of 9 to 5. Okay, q malicious compliance. So I was working it for a mid size software developing firm. My team had been very exact working to complete a project and not exactly working for the exact hours we were sitting or glued to our desk. Our projects were delivered on time, our clients were very happy and our team morale was very high. That was until we got our brand new project manager. Let’s call him Dave.
Sidave came from a place with a very different work life strategy. He came from a corporate background, and he had a brand new idea of how we were going to work properly in the workplace, which basically meant he was going to micro manage everything. This meant that he started to schedule unnecessary meetings daily. He would absolutely demand that we fill out all the way our hourly logs, and he would assure that everybody sticks to a strict 9 to 5 schedule with as minimal amount of breaks is humanly possible.
This man was on a tirade that we ain’t never seen before. One day during one of his infamous effective sea crackdowns, he sent down a brand new email that said that all coding needs to be done specifically during work hours. He wanted to ensure collaboration and supervision of all the coding that could be done. This was absolutely ridiculous because creative work like coding often desires and definitely needs time at home. We need flexible hours so that we can continuously be productive. But Dave was adamant and completely stuck to his ways because he wrote at the very end of the email, if you think you can find a loophole, think again, because if you don’t want to work your hours, we’re going to find somebody else that will at that point. Okay, Dave, challenge accepted. I decided to comply maliciously. I coded strictly between 9 a. M. And 5 p. M, not a minute earlier and not a second later. If I encountered a bug that was in the middle of a complex piece of code, so be it. At five PM, no matter what, I am out of here. They got to the point where my coworkers started to follow my lead like school kids.
The results were predictable. Projects began to fail left and right. Things that used to take a couple of weeks dragged on months and months. Things that used to be done in a afternoon took a couple of days. It was, wow, our workflow was severely disturbed and the whole company felt the shake of this one change. Dave ended up noticing, and of course, he had an answer for upper management. He said the sudden drop of productivity is due to lack of commitment, which he knew was a result of the dissatisfaction of all the people that worked there. And the dissatisfaction came from the new policy that he put in.
So what Dave decided to do was 4:30 one afternoon, he decided to have a meeting. In that meeting, Dave spent 30 minutes shifting blame from one person to another person. And then when it got to 5:00, I don’t know what happened cuz I logged off. I was sold by my coworker that everybody logged off as well. And Dave, the very next day at 9 a. M. Started back to try to communicate with us again about what was going on and our dissatisfaction, and we listened. And then that whole day we were behind and cold because Dave had us in a meeting room talking to us about stuff we didn’t need to be talked about.
Later on that day, Dave had another meeting at 4:30 where again, he would shift blame from one person to another person and then try to make himself seem like an amazing leader. And at 5:00, again, we all walked away and left.
At that point, I think Dave really got into his head about his absurd policy about working strictly between this hour. And guess what he did? Uplifted the policy and made it so that we could code and do other types of work from at home and inside of the office.
If you like videos just like these, I make malicious compliance videos almost every single day. So you can come back to my page to look at my complete playlist of malicious compliance. My name is Jonathan Moss and my favorite story to read is complete completion malicious compliance videos. So if you’re like me and you wanna see more, come back over. I hope you have a great day and I’ll see you later. Bye ya.