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    New manager targets respected senior technical specialist and threatens him with a PIP, completes more tasks in 2 days than the boss did in 6 weeks before management intervenes: 'I did it over 20 times faster than him'

    Have you ever dreamed of showing your boss up in a 1-on-1? This technical specialist got that chance.

    Synopsis:

    A technical specialist used malicious compliance to expose a manager's shallow understanding of productivity metrics:

    There's an inherent problem in workplaces with tracking "performance" purely by what looks good on a spreadsheet. KPIs and targets seldom tell the entire story.

    You end up with staff who look less good on paper but are keeping the entire house of cards from collapsing, while others are doing the bare minimum and just checking boxes as quickly as possible. The ones who check off 50 of the easiest, tiniest tasks will look great on paper, while those doing the heavy lifting of more complex projects might appear slow by comparison.

    Of course, if you are the former, at some point, you might have to come to terms with the cold, hard truth that all that extra work isn't getting you anywhere and might actually be hurting you when push comes to shove. Everyone up the chain wants nothing but to see "number go up," and if whatever you're doing won't look good on your boss's slide in the company presentation, you might soon find yourself up a creek and without a paddle.

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    • It's unfortunate, though, because over time, employees will learn that visibility matters just as much as value, and everybody will be busy looking over their shoulder and making sure that they can connect themselves to “number go up” at the detriment of the business. Companies say that they value expertise and problem-solving, but really at the end of the day it's all about that spreadsheet, that slide show, and what sticks in your mind as the truth, even if it couldn't be farther from it.

      I think that this is why businesses tend to stagnate and slough off over time; ironically, by trying to become more effective, they start to become less effective.

      This senior technical specialist worked at a large entertainment software company, where he was adept at solving difficult problems and handling the most difficult assignments. He repeatedly declined leadership roles and continued working independently, and a coworker, “Bill”, accepted the team lead role instead. Of course, if you're ever in a situation where you are now managing someone who was first in line for and has declined your very job, you know how nerve-racking that can be. The person who has turned down the role can prove very difficult to manage. But there are ways to go about it and ways not to and “Bill” handled it in the worst way possible, becoming egotistical and petty. He tried to threaten the technical specialist with a PIP because his numbers were low on paper. This led to the technical specialist responding by doing everything he could to optimize his numbers but at the detriment to the business, leading to him being given a special promotion to a technical role that outranked Bill's.

    • 01
      Cheezburger Image 10629954048
      via Getty Images

      Image is representative, not actual subjects.

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    • 02

      You want me to complete more tasks? Not a problem, boss.

      This happened a couple years ago. I have a job in entertainment software. The company I work for is pretty large, but the specific team I'm on is pretty small. I am not the team lead. I have worked here for many years and have been offered the position of team lead several times, but keep turning it down because I hate telling people what to do and don't want to go to more meetings.
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 03
      I happen to have a more technical background than the other people on my team, and I developed a reputation as the guy you turn to when you need to solve the really big complicated problems. The project managers know this and assign tasks accordingly. In fact, they pretty much only bother assigning individual tasks to me. The rest of the tasks for my
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 04
      team go in a bucket for my teammates, including the team lead, to assign to themselves as they see fit. I can grab from the bucket too, but it's generally assumed that I'll prioritize the stuff that's assigned to me. There are far more tasks that take a few minutes than ones that take a few days, but most of the ones on the deep end of that scale are mine.
      via WillemJamesHuff
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    • 05
      This arrangement is the PM's call, it's out of the lead's hands. It's come up a few times that maybe I should be organized differently than the rest of the team for this reason, but I've never really followed up on that because I enjoy my job the way it is just fine. I'm a "head down, take care of my sh, mind my own business" kind of guy.
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 06
      ANY ㅁ 지 MORE. DO
      via Carl Heyerdahl

      Image is representative, not actual subjects.

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    • 07
      less bloated, because most of my tasks are large enough to have more than 1 day assigned to them. I still accomplish much more than one day of task per day on average, because I'm very good at my job. Everyone just knows to ignore the software's estimate for my team in general; it's more a list of stuff for us to do and less a measure of our productivity.
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 08
      Task assignment is handled by some janky software. Each task has an expected time to completion, but the minimum time is 1 day. The majority of the tasks in my team's bucket take less than an hour for most people. Because of this, the time budget for the tasks in the task bucket is pretty bloated. The time budget for the tasks assigned specifically to me is
      via WillemJamesHuff
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    • 09
      A month and a half before the story takes place, the team lost its lead. I was asked, again, if I wanted to be the lead, which I, again, declined. Another member of the team who I'll call Bill was promoted to the position. Bill is not the most technical guy, which is fine. But he's also kind of insecure about the fact that he has little to say in what I'm working on despite being my lead on paper. I don't really care who the team lead is since most of my assignments come straight from the PMs an
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 10
      In the month after Bill became lead, I completed 20 tasks, which was much more than a month's work according to the task management software. After that, I had a 2-week vacation that I had scheduled almost a year in advance.
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 11
      First thing Monday morning when I got back, Bill called me into a 1-on-1. He started off by expressing that the task management software does a bad job of telling us how on-schedule we are. I agreed. Then he pulled up a spreadsheet he made where he listed every individual task assigned to our team since he became lead. Which seems redundant, since the task management software already has that, but his had two key differences: there was no time listed for each task, and it kept a running tally of
      via WillemJamesHuff
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    • 12
      Bill points to the 150 tasks on his own tally, and the 20 on mine. He says he understands I've just gotten back from vacation and have only worked on these tasks for a month compared to his month and a half, but I've gotta get those numbers up.
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 13

      I tried to explain that the type of tasks that I get tend to take longer. I even pointed out some of the specific tasks that were assigned to me

      Cheezburger Image 10629954304
      via Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦

      Image is representative, not actual subjects.

    • 14
      I tried to explain that the type of tasks that I get tend to take longer. I even pointed out some of the specific tasks that were assigned to me, and asked if he wanted to help with those if we finished all of the small tasks early. No, he admitted, he wouldn't know where to start with those. But look, he said, he completed 150 days of tasks and the expected time to completion had only gone UP, since more tasks had come in. We're not gonna run out of small tasks, especially if I'm not pulling my
      via WillemJamesHuff
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    • 15
      It was at that point that I start actually looking at the tasks that he'd completed. And my first thought is, "You've had a month and a half and you've ONLY done 150 of these? These are 5-minute jobs." What's more, the other members of the team are around the 70-120 range, but they have more tasks that seem like they'd take a few hours to complete. Even worse, if you list the tasks alphabetically, like the bucket does, you can see that he's taken groups of small ones from the list and skipped
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 16
      any of the larger ones. It's almost like Bill has been grabbing the easiest, fastest tasks from the bucket, and then claiming that means he's more productive. Well, if Bill wants to claim that success is measured in how many tasks like this someone can do, he shouldn't have brought these rookie numbers. So here's where the malicious compliance begins.
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 17
      Immediately after the meeting, I scroll to a random spot in Bill's spreadsheet. There's a bunch of tasks clustered together that I can. knock out in the same script file. After burning through those, I jump down the list to knock out another cluster of tasks that I know I can solve in a similar way to the first ones. Next on
      via WillemJamesHuff
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    • 18
      the list are some that are literally the same thing in different scenarios, which I plow through. I keep making my way down the list, and by EOD, I've done 95 tasks. The next day is similar, but I hit a cluster that are a little more involved, and only manage to finish 65. Still, that's a little better than the 3 per day Bill asked for. Of course, I've meticulously assigned all of these to myself and marked them done on both Bill's and the task manager's spreadsheets.
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 19
      I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I know Bill has a regular meeting with the PMs on Wednesday mornings. I know the PMs do pay attention to the task manager and checkins, so they probably took note of the fact that I just knocked half a year off the projection in 2 days. I don't know if they asked Bill why he was wasting my time with this stuff. I don't know if they pointed out that, when he asked me to do the same kind of job he did, I did it over 20 times faster than him.
      via WillemJamesHuff
    • 20
      All I know is, after that meeting, Bill messaged me to go back to doing things the way I was doing them. A couple days later, the head of the department in charge of our team (AKA Bill's boss) sent me a message saying from now on, he'll be my lead instead of Bill, and I'll be doing the same job as before except with more pay and "senior" in front of my title.
      via WillemJamesHuff
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    • 21
      So TL;DR: I specialize in doing a small number of big tasks, the new lead does a big number of small tasks and claims I'm not pulling my weight, I do more small tasks in 2 days than he did in 6 weeks, I get promoted out from under him.
      via WillemJamesHuff

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