malicious compliance

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IT employee gets reprimanded over not taking his lunch on time, so he complies during a critical outage that turned down the network in which he can't really do anything: 'Boss is standing at my desk when I get back today.'

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Employee contacts his manager because of an important incident, boss forbids everyone from contacting her in her free time, but also requests things from employees in their free time: 'She will have to come in on her days off if she wants to talk to me'

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Boss demands IT tech take their lunch at only 12-1 PM when they skip it to handle a critical error, predictably, they clock out when the next emergency occurs at that time: 'He insisted I must take my 30-minute lunch from 12-1 as per company policy'

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IT Helpdesk manager emails demanding staff arrive 15 minutes early to login and be ready to take calls "1 second before" their shift, staff comply and hang up on customers the second their shift ends: 'Sorry to interrupt you, my shift is over. Goodbye'

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Call center operator obliged to start 15 minutes before his shift to load the company's archaic software, told to work until 4:00 PM on the dot, he complies, ending a call right at the end of his shift: 'I am following expectations and written directions'

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Server does exactly what the chef tells him, even though he knows it causes problems, just to prove he was right all along. When confronted, he just said: ‘He told me the other day that I was not supposed to touch anything because that was not my job.’

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Employee is told by boss to stop being chatty and friendly, she complies, rumors about her being in a bad state of mind start to rise: 'The following week, the director called me into her office and asked what was wrong".

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Chef thinks he is teaching the kitchen "Runner" a lesson over a kitchen intrusion, but he's the one who learns one thanks to the Runner's malicious compliance: 'Don't want me to do the work? Ok, then do it yourself'

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Employee gets punished for being great at his job, so he decides to stop trying at all: 'Even though I performed my duties better than the others in my department, I was effectively punished for being so good.'

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Boss argues with employee because he is paying attention to how much he's getting paid, boss said that he was stealing confidential information: 'She accused me of stealing confidential information.'

When one mistake catapults extreme measures. Oftentimes, after we make a mistake, it’s very difficult to prove to somebody who’s in charge of us that we won't make that same mistake again. That’s where malicious compliance comes in handy. I struggle with the use of the word ‘malicious’ for it, even though, of course, I understand what that word is trying to evoke, but I think that maliciousness is not malicious at all; in fact, I think it’s civil, graceful, and assertive.

Manager demands to proofread every email that employee sends, and he maliciously complies, causing problematic delays for the company: ‘We suddenly got loads of follow up requests, responding to which of course needs approval from the manager’

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These are the type of stories we're likely to hear more often from now on: employees performing heroic tasks in defense of human beings in the fight against bots. It's not that the bots are mean, bots don't have intentions, it's that they are sometimes created only for optimising companies' expenses and needs, and not for helping us, their confused and tired customers.

Employee is forced to talk to customer service bot instead of a person and ends up developing another bot to run up the company’s AI bill: 'Maybe they'll provide customer service now, instead of foisting the responsibility on a chatbot.'

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Manager refuses to spend $50 on external software, insisting engineer waste company resources developing a platform in-house: 'This project was costing the company roughly $4,000 in billing hours'

All around the world, employees struggle with this type of manager, the one obsessed with everyone looking servile and energetic, who will stop at nothing to achieve the desired look. The part that not every manager considers is that to become servile and energetic, employees need to be at least a little comfortable and, hopefully, unconcerned about knee pain.

Manager obsessed with "professional appearance" says cashiers look "lazy" if they’re sitting down and bans chairs completely during shifts. ‘Within like 2 weeks, the front end became a disaster.’

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Automation has proved itself to be an amazing cutting-edge tool, and knowing how to automate tasks on a computer is currently the holy grail of useful skills, but we are, at the same time, only beginning to see its downsides. For example, the Redditor who shared this story could potentially extinguish the job of an entire department if he shared his hack, so he wouldn’t only have to deal with the loss of his own job but also with the responsibility of getting all his teammates laid off.

Employee finishes his ‘real’ work by 10 in the morning and spends the rest of his day pretending to be busy, leading him to debate whether or to come clean to his boss: ‘I automated 3 hours of my daily work. Now I spend that time pretending to be busy'

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New-hire fast food worker told to stand in one place and not move, they comply, standing still and not helping customers for more than 30 minutes: 'I’m sorry, I would get that for you but I’m not allowed'