'We played chicken and won': Startup employees rise up against CEO's new office hours

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Apr 17, 2024 3:00 PM EDT

The new CEO of a startup had a brilliant idea: why not make every employee work from 9 AM to 6 PM with no exceptions? 

There are benefits to working hourly and for working salaried. With hourly jobs, you better make sure you're on time, down to the second. Lots of retail or restaurant jobs depend on their workers being there on the dot, and there are consequences for clocking in too late or too early. But the good side to that is that when you clock out, you're done. Many places literally won't let you do a single thing while clocked out. 

Salaried positions on the other hand have their benefits and their drawbacks, and your happiness as an employee will depend on how cool your boss is. Maybe you have the type of boss who doesn't mind how long you work, so long as all your emails get sent and all your clients are smiling. Others take advantage of it: they'll want you to work late all the time or start early a few days per week, and you can't really say no. 

This boss doesn't seem to have much appreciation for the hard work his employees do. Instead of having pride in their jobs and solving problems as they came up, the employees were pushed to work a solid 9 hour day, no exceptions. Well, they found a way to push back! Check out u/deqb's story below. Then, sneak a peek at some perilous pickup trucks and messed up Mustangs that probably shouldn't be driving anywhere. 

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  • 01
    12 11 '[He] told the CEO that obviously the lazy employees were taking advantage' 6
    via Abdul A on Unsplash
  • 02
    "It's not 9am yet" M I worked for a small startup for the first few years of my career. My boss (CEO) seemed to be still grasping object permanence, as he had a hard time wrapping his head around people working when he could not physically see them doing so. But he was getting better over time.
    via u/deqb
  • 03
    Business hours were 9-6. But all of our work could be done from home and we had an office in Australia that some people communicated directly with, and tight release schedules sometimes meant long nights followed by late starts. So the informal policy tended to be as long as you were in the office by 10 and not leaving before 5, you didn't need to explain yourself,
    via u/deqb
  • 04
    and anything beyond that was fine as long as you gave someone a heads up, especially if you were managed by the CEO who was too busy to pay close attention to people's exact arrivals and departures and frequently away from the office himself speaking at various events.
    via u/deqb
  • 05
    Enter our new VP, a 30- something milquetoast MBA type. Unlike the CEO, he was not too busy to pay attention to arrivals and departures, and told the CEO that obviously the lazy employees were taking advantage.
    via u/deqb
  • 06
    The CEO who again was sort of inclined this direction himself, sends out an email one Friday saying that from this point forward, people needed to be in the office every day by 9 and they needed permission from their manager to leave before 6.
    via u/deqb
  • 07
    Everyone was I, but there was no real sense of long-term concern, this wasn't the first arbitrary rule that had been handed down in this fashion, and it tended to be easiest to play along for a week or two until the CEO had moved onto the next thing and then just ignore the rule.
    via u/deqb
  • 08
    But the next Monday when I showed up at 8:50, two of my coworkers were sitting on the stairs to the unoccupied next floor, just talking and playing candy crush. "What are you doing?" "it's not 9am yet." I sat down with them and soon someone else arrived and the same conversation played out. At 8:59, we all got up and walked into the office.
    via u/deqb
  • 09
    On Tuesday, there were half a dozen people on the stairs (including leadership) chatting and texting and whatever. And when the VP arrived, people would just make hard eye contact while he squirmed. Meanwhile, myself and a few other people just said screw it and arrived after 9am anyway, looking the VP straight in the eye as we walked in. A few people who were a little
    via u/deqb
  • 10
    more conflict averse stopped for coffee across the street and just so happen to arrive at like 9:02. Including people who normally preferred to start at 7am.
    via u/deqb
  • 11
    All of this meant that rather than being about half-full, the office was virtually empty until 9am. It also tended to clear out at exactly 6pm. Several people including myself simply stopped responding to anything outside work hours. On Tuesday morning, one of my favorite coworkers also made a show of announcing to her contacts in the Australia office that she could now only meet between 10pm and 7am their time. Calamity ensued.
    via u/deqb
  • 12
    The funny thing is that we never really talked about it before or during, it just sort of happened naturally.
    via u/deqb
  • 13
    The CEO (who had been barely at the office on monday/tuesday) finally showed up early on Wednesday, asked why everyone was outside, and we told him. He opened his mouth to protest that no that wasn't what he meant, realized what was happening, and made a strategic retreat.
    via u/deqb
  • 14
    The policy was formally retracted two days later, we never discussed it again, and it was the beginning of a very messy fall from grace for the VP. TI;DR: We played chicken and won.
    via u/deqb
  • 15
    Bumbledragoness Woah! I adore reading about how this came back to bite them in the BADLY. I find it so strange when people in charge get more concerned about the clock hours employees work than, you know, being able to complete tasks within adequate time
    via u/Bumbledragoness
  • 16
    t_a_c_s I really would like to hear about that vp's messy fall from grace
    via u/t_a_c_s
  • 17
    gymgal19 Lol I never understood why managers feel they have to dictate peoples schedules. Were all adults, as long as the work gets done, does it matter what time of day it's done at? (Within reason of course)
    via u/gymgal19
  • 18
    Fiend2None Another tale demonstrating why micromanglement needs to be gotten rid of. But part of that is why no company should hire so many VPs and other upper manglement types. Most of them end up with too little to do, so they micromanage their underlings.
    via u/Fiend2None
  • 19
    LupercaniusAB This happened to my buddy who was working as a sys admin at a startup about 15 years ago. He would be an on-call guy, and frequently had calls at 2 or 3 in the morning. The office manager insisted that ALL EMPLOYEES had to be "in the office" at 8am. So he would come into the office at 8, after working from, say,
    via u/LupercaniusAB
  • 20
    1-4 am, and drag one of the bean bag chairs from the break room into the reception area, lie down and go to sleep. The office manager was not appreciative.
    via u/LupercaniusAB
  • 21
    JJisTheDarkOne I used to work in a workshop building busses. Times were 7:30am till 4:00 pm with an hour for lunch. People would rock up and start earlier sometimes and laxly finish after 4 if they were in the mode and busy doing something.
    via u/JJisTheDarkOne
  • 22
    Then the boss decided to add a punch in system and a loudspeaker buzzer that went off at 7:30 and 4 pm respectively. Everyone was Soon enough people would clock in at 7:30 on the dot THEN make their way over to organise and work. 4:00 coming around? People would stop working 10 or 15
    via u/JJisTheDarkOne
  • 23
    mins BEFORE 4:00 to tidy up and put tools back in the store, punch out the second that buzzer went and peel out the driveway. We also argued about morning tea, which was 15 mins, but his reply was that "I only need to give you 7 and a 1/2 mins, but I let you have 15". We didn't even try to calculate after that because it wasn't worth it.
    via u/JJisTheDarkOne
  • 24
    If you're going to count hours, then people are going to work to the dot, and we had people tag teaming alternate Fridays because "If we don't use our sick days then it's wasted". People went from work pride to not giving a
    via u/JJisTheDarkOne

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