Employee Maliciously Complies with Boss' Insane Productivity Expectations

Author image for Mel Dawn
Mel Dawn
Aug 26, 2022 8:00 AM EDT

As American cities begin to open up their offices, many workers are lamenting the fact that they'll no longer be able to work from home. While some people undoubtedly benefit from having a dedicated physical work zone, others are quite capable of managing their own productivity. But I suppose if managers had no one to manage, their jobs would become obsolete. 

Redditor u/ythafuckigetsuspend was pretty annoyed when their employer revoked the option to work from home after they appeared to go 'idle' in the work chat too often. Even despite the fact that the KPI data suggested they were a better worker at home, management decided that being AFK for too long proved otherwise. And so, the disgruntled redditor complied…maliciously. Keep scrolling to read about OP's delightfully clever method for appearing active in the chat for eight hours straight. Many responders in the thread had similar tricks. Make sure your boss doesn't see this! 
 

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  • 01
    Font - r/MaliciousCompliance + Join u/ythafuckigetsuspend · 9h 1 2 1 1 9 23 a 14 S 24 17 You can't continue working from home because you go idle in chat too often M
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  • 02
    Font - As part of the plan to return to office post covid, my company has done a lot of re-designating of who can permanently work from home, who can hybrid, etc. I really wanted to work from home full time. I hate the office with a burning passion - it's distracting, it's a long commute, there's no benefit to being there, so on and so forth. l'd just rather be at home.
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  • 03
    Font - Well when we thought May was going to be go back to office time they started giving out the new designations. I got designated as in office full time. It made no sense to me. I work on a team of 8 people and each of us is in a different office somewhere in the country. I've literally never been to an in person meeting or needed to do in person work in 3 years at this company. Every single other person on my team got designated to work from home. So I brought it up with my boss and asked t
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  • 04
    Font - Basically we have a company wide IM system that shows you as available, idle, or in a meeting. If you don't touch your keyboard for 5 minutes you show as idle. So they've decided to use this as a measure for who is working and who isn't. The thing is, like many people in many types of jobs I don't have shit to do for a full 8 hours every single day. The amount of work I have to do on a typical day takes 3-5 hours of actual attention. There simply isn't something to do ALL the time. My per
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  • 05
    Font - So I wrote a 6 line powershell script that virtually inputs the period key every 4 minutes that starts running every day at 8am and stops at 5pm. So now I literally never go idle. I do the same amount of work and still read books, watch tv, and play video games on the side. But I have a shiny green check next to my name all day.
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  • 06
    Font - Because of covid complications they eventually said no going back until after labor day. I just had a meeting with my boss and he said over this time they've noticed I go idle a lot less than I used to so they're changing my designation to work from home, all because of a little icon in some software. This concludes my TED talk on why low to middle level managers are the dumbest, most useless do-nothing positions in all of corporate America
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  • 07
    Font - EDIT: I do not need to be told to buy a mouse jiggler for the 30th time. I'm aware of what they are. This cost me no money and achieves the same thing. Why would I pay to achieve an effect I've already achieved for free? EDIT 2: A lot of people are understandably asking for the script: $dummyshell = New-Object -com "Wscript.shell" $dummyshell.sendkeys(".") That's the backbone of the whole thing. There's different ways to implement it with for loops or scheduled tasks or whatever, that par
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  • 08
    Font - To all the people commenting that l'm a shitty employee and obviously trying to insult me over it: I wish I could make you feel just how little I care. To all the people implying a work day isn't valid if you aren't at 100% capacity from 8 - 5, keep it up, you truly are an ideal employee...to them. Enjoy the taste of leather, bootlickers 4 32.0k 2.6k 1, Share
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    Font - gringaellie · 8h I saw a video of someone with an oscillating desk fan. they zip tied the mouse wire to the fan cage and allowed the fan to pull the mouse forwards and backwards whilst they were AFK. G Reply Vote Oo_II_00 • 8h Similarly l've seen people place their mouse over an analog watch (with second hand), triggering the motion. + Vote dingman58 · 5h That's brilliant 4 Vote
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    Font - coak3333 • 9h Caffeine is the program I use, it hits f13 every 2 seconds G Reply Vote 3 IronicDeadPan • 8h Same! Stay caffeinated friend. |+ Vote StaredAtEclipseAMA · 3h Tbh I would steer clear of applications that affect idle status. Most companies can have IT remotely scan your machine for these apps and you are pretty much screwed. My choice of idle is the old tape over the spacebar :) 4 Vote ...
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    Font - morgan423 · 7h 2 1 Award I think reading about the fact that your company actively and objectively tracks your KPIS and metrics, but instead decided to measure your productivity by your interaction with a chat program made my brain hurt a little. Like I just got punched in the face with a little fist made of pure corporate stupidity. G Reply 1 Vote
    via r/MaliciousCompliance
  • 12
    Font - tris_majestis · 4h Yup. A lot of what I do is review paperwork. I still get pinged once in a while if my status is idle. Like yeah l'm idle on the computer because l'm doing other work that does not involve running reports which only need to be done weekly anyway. I have nothing I need to do on the computer for 75% of my day. So now I just hit tab or ctrl once in a while and that seems to keep them happy. + Vote
    via r/MaliciousCompliance
  • 13
    Product - Mictlancayocoatl • 3h Also, their boss is just checking the chat program the entire time for who's idle or what? That's ridiculous. Vote angwilwileth • 3h Sounds like the boss doesn't have enough to do. Vote Kayoh44 · 3h Gotta make themselves relevant somehow. + Vote
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    Font - lameusername11 · 8h When I was working from home l'd pull up a blank word doc and set something heavy on the zero key on my keyboard. Never went idle. My job however would put you out of compliance if you didn't do something every 30 seconds. My boss could never figure out why my adherence was better than everyone else's lol G Reply Vote Zaramesh • 6h 30 seconds? Jesus Christ, that's absolutely absurd. |+ Vote 3 CornDoggyStyle · 5h Idling would be unavoidable without cheating the system.
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  • 15
    Font - Snoo61755 • 4h That being said, it's probably a good thing that all these businesses are at least 20 years behind on anti-cheating measures. We have auto-clickers, idling scripts, and bots we've been using and refining over decades, and some places haven't even figured out online gaming exists, let alone that the tools used to cheat them can be applied elsewhere. + Vote
    via r/MaliciousCompliance
  • 16
    Font - Misaka9982· 8h Ours doesn't kick in if we have a powerpoint slideshow running. So you can just start a slide show, minimise it and get on with work at your own pace. G Reply Vote + JROCKPSU • 6h 1 Award It will show you as "Presenting" all day long, might not matter for some but some people's bosses might eventually be curious about to whom and why you're presenting PowerPoint for 8-10 hours a day. Vote spiritriser · 6h Just have a work related power point with reference info on it. "Yeah
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  • 17
    Facial expression - JustMeLurkingAround- · 8h Saw someone elses comment a while ago that playing some random shit on Spotify on mute the whole day does the trick for them. 6 1 Vote +
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  • 18
    Font - FOLOFFAL • 7h I often hit dictate on word and just leave a podcast playing on my speakers. I get to spend an hour chilling while word happily types up every word the podcast says. G Reply Vote RealAstroTimeYT • 4h That is genius 6 4 Vote Billyooo · 4h This is by far my favorite. Brilliant, clever, and incredibly easy to do. Vote 3
    via r/MaliciousCompliance

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work from home work stories job malicious compliance bosses work life hacks slack corporate employee managers reddit thread Reddit
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