You can say all you want, but not all the folks at HQ necessarily understand or know what they’re doing. And, sure, you can play devil’s advocate and say that they still have to get credit for growing a successful business and yada yada yada, but that would be all fine and dandy if it weren’t wasting anybody else’s time.
When you do get into the wasting everyone’s time territory—like sending your guy to learn the ropes about the processes of the company you just bought and expecting them to suddenly become a guru without considering that it might, maybe sorta kinda, require more than a week to learn it all—then you’re gonna have a bad time.
So why not have some fun with that, right?
More Info: Reddit
When you have a sudden realization that HQ is trying to get you replaced, it's only natural to respond with malicious compliance
Image credits: Thirdman (not the actual image)
This time around, though, it happened in the form of cramming a year's worth of training into a week. You can guess how it all went
Image credits: u/Edymnion
Image credits: olia danilevich(not the actual image)
The liaison turned out to be a pretty cool guy, but no real change actually happened as a result of this training for years. And it wasn't really a replacement plan in the end, when you think about it
A Redditor by the nickname of u/Edymnion, with whom Bored Panda got in touch, recently shared a tale of malicious compliance from about 15 years ago. The story goes that OP used to work (still does, but they used to too) at a computer programming company that had just recently been bought up by a national company.
Once things calmed down, HQ sent a “liaison” to the office to learn the ropes because [insert corporate talk about building bridges and whatnot], but in reality it was an extremely thinly veiled attempt to replace them. Nobody was happy, but being unhappy is also the perfect breeding ground for some good ol’ fashioned mischief that ain’t gonna hurt anyone. Probably.
The thing that the liaison (nor HQ for that matter) didn’t know was that it takes a computer science degree and roughly 12 months of hybrid boot-camp to actually start proper work. This fella right here had a week.
Needless to say, it didn’t go well, though OP did admit that the liaison did try his darnedest. It didn’t help that he had absolute zero coding experience, but he was keen on it. And his demands were satisfied all the same.
“Rage quit, no [he didn’t]. Give up, yes [he did]. An actual programmer would at least have been able to report back the complexity of the situation, I doubt he managed to give anything that would have been particularly coherent,” elaborated OP.
“Even if he recorded everything we said, a non-programmer couldn’t have done anything with it. Watching one episode of Bob Ross isn’t going to turn you into a renaissance painter.”
Image credits: Sora Shimazaki (not the actual image)
So, without getting too nerdy, the guy was told that nearly nobody ever has to do anything based on a template, so things are more often than not coded from scratch because it’s just easier. And each time you gotta have about 1,500 lines of code, which realistically can take months to achieve, and that’s if you know what you’re doing.
Anywho, OP maliciously complied with the given context and crammed a year’s worth of knowledge into just one week. Surprisingly, it did end up being somewhat of a building bridges outcome as the liaison promised to put in a good word for them, but he did still spill the tea and said the new management was really out to replace them.
Well, fast forward to now, 15 years later, OP’s still on payroll there. It took 5 years for the “inevitable revolving door of upper management” to make that easy-to-use change they always seemed to want a reality, but there are now more people managing the whole operation than there were before.
OP noted that the system that replaced the old one isn’t as capable, and so HQ kinda sorta screwed themselves over on that one, but it scales better, so there’s that.
The post on Reddit drew quite a crowd, garnering nearly 10,000 upvotes (with a 97% positivity rating), and engaged a number of people to write comments. So, all in all, folks approved of the malicious compliance, whether it was for the technique, the style, or the grace of it all.
OP spent quite a bit of time responding to the various comments, providing context along the way. Context like who their “I’d rather fix it myself” guy was, what the problem with automating their solutions was, and how the whole one year of training was actually based on a national requirement that would otherwise mean loads of trouble for OP’s company if something was to go wrong, among other things.
You can check out the post in its full glorious context here. But before you do that, why don’t you check our other malicious compliance posts, like this one, or this one. Or this one? And if you can’t be bothered to do that, why not leave your thoughts about anything you’ve read here today in the comment section below!
All in all, folks online loved the story, with OP taking a very active role in providing more context
Image credits: Sora Shimazaki (not the actual image)
