Nate
So there’s this story an employee shared on Reddit about a time they pulled off the ultimate “malicious compliance” move at their job and it’s the best one I’ve read in while.
The employee tells the tale of a compliance officer working for a company that helped customers manage their finances. The company was poorly managed, and the compliance officer had to develop his own tools to do his job.
One of these tools was a program he created called Hendrix, which allowed him to track his work and automate reporting. However, when his manager decided to roll out the program to all staff without his permission, things took a turn for the worse, leading to a confrontation that could have ended up in court.
Here’s how it all went down:
In the late 1990s, a person worked for a company that helped retail store customers manage their finances.
The person’s job was to ensure that staff followed the rules, which were extensive, as mistakes could impact the customers’ credit scores, result in defaults, and even end up in court.
The company was poorly managed, with little in the way of policy or process framework.
Consequently, the person had to develop a basic programming system, named “Hendrix,” to track their compliance work, automate reporting, and streamline their tasks.
The person was proud of their system, which played a five-second instrumental version of “Little Wing” when it started.
However, their manager decided to roll out the program to all staff without asking for changes first.
Despite warning their manager about the issues, the program was deployed anyway, and the manager received recognition for introducing the tool.
The person, who had not been mentioned, continued to use their original system.
Two weeks later, the manager discovered that the person had been recording how long they had been working on certain tasks within the program.
The manager, who thought that the person was falsifying timekeeping, gave them a written warning.
The individual claimed the records were solely for personal use and not intended for pay or work rate calculations. Moreover, the manager discovered the records in a shared server file, accessible only by the two of them.
Despite being granted permission to seek legal counsel from HR, the person declined, citing that their parents, including an employment lawyer, were practicing lawyers.
After this revelation, the manager attempted to roll back the warning and suggested that the person be more careful with timekeeping in the future.
However, the employee was still angry because the program had been rolled out to all staff against their wishes.
When the company claimed that the program was their intellectual property, the person explained that they had written it on their own time, at home, and had received special dispensation to install it on a single work computer.
On top of that, the program was plugging into the official government rule set, not the corporate intranet one.
In the end, the company could have faced legal trouble and so the person agreed to allow them to use the program beyond their computer.
However, they demanded that the company pay a license fee for anything beyond that.
Here’s what some readers had to say:
