New boss enforces 1000 character minimum per task, employee complies by writing gibberish: 'I've noticed that the size of your comments has gone up last month [...] keep it up!'

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Feb 28, 2025 8:00 AM EST

Whatever happened to quality over quantity? Most students learn in school that being overly verbose does not necessarily mean you're answering the question correctly. Being succinct and precise is far more important than prolonging and vamping, yet for whatever reason, many employers seem to feel that the overly performative nature of one's work is how to demonstrate competence.

Adding unnecessary steps to a task at work does not make completing the task any different. Getting the job done should be the goal. Being performative about the effort that it takes should not be the focus, and yet for so many silly workplace environments these days, the latter is what's prioritized. This specific IT department knows that all too well…

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  • 01
    DOLL WEST ROAD DOLL
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    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • We have to hand it to this team member, who refused to embrace the new directive that a minimum of 1000 characters of explanation per completion of a task was necessary. So, he decided to write gibberish and disguise it in white-against-white lettering in small font so no one would notice. That way, the character count was there but the actual content was not. Of course, the new boss only saw the character count and congratulated the team member for doing such a good job. Little did he know, he was writing nonsense and now, he decided to write a novel with those extra characters…

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    My shop has a fair amount of drama lately due to the political climate and my boss having to put up with stupid people questioning why our mechanics speak Spanish around customers.
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    I've been working on IT for around 25-26 years now. Different companies but you see quite a bit of MC on the IT world.
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    Back in 2005-06 I worked for a telephone company, a huge one, that had the typical Jira-like bug reporting tool for one of its most complicated and convoluted softwares.
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    The software was so complex, so legacy, that even the development team in house was afraid to do changes in it. Some updates in the past did backfire
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    spectacularly more than once, so even the tyniest update to that software had to take weeks of analysis before taking place.
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    In that dev team worked 3 of my friends from college. I worked on another one that had an easier life.
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    One of my guys at that team was Bedu. To portrait Bedu accurately, imagine that guy that's always playing innocent pranks, that you never know if he's for real when he's talking
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    because he's always saying the most shocking things just for the LOLs, knows a little bit of magic, uses it to prank, loves futbol (soccer) as well.
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    He used to be good at his job but he's also a quite bit tired of it, procrastinating and, generally, not putting too much effort on it.
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    The fact that he's part of that software dev team doesn't help. It's not a fast-paced environment and people gets bored by the inaction.
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    So, since he's bored, he plays pranks, like connecting a second wireless mouse controller to the PC of a colleague to randomly move the mouse and have him call tech support because his mouse misbehaves but, do
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    absolutely nothing with the mouse when tech support comes. The guy behing the target of the prank ended up calling tech support 4 times before being told what was going on.
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    The team once a week also books a windowless meeting room for an hour, so 3 of them can take a nap while the 4th one guards against someone finding out. Who's the guard rotates each week.
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    The requests for update Bedu gets are almost always something in this style: "This report indicates that X value is 25, when it should be 27, please fix". Each
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    request typically comes from a different area, but each area sends a couple of requests probably once a month.
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    But Bedu knows that the algorithm doing that calculation is extremely complex, reports are "baked" on a monthly basis on batch processes that can take hours, testing this is extremely
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    painful also, so he updates the end value on the report, where it was 25, now is 27, easy peasy, see you next month. He gets probably like 10-15 of these requests per day.
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    Bedu updates the bug tool ticket stating, on the comment field, something like "End value verified and corrected" and moves on.
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    New boss comes to that dev team from another team on the company. He's well known around the company as being quite... dense. He instantly clashes with the team. He thinks
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    Cheezburger Image 10473478400
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    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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    quantity equals quality and loves to look into numbers. He comes from the database world so he's constantly using queries to gather information.
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    He also thinks that each ticket solved is because the underlying condition is being solved, he knows nothing about the complexity of the system, he just thinks that the team is really good at identifying causes and solving them fast. Glorified pencil pusher.
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    He gathers the team and says that he did a query and found out that the comments being put into the bug tool are really short, like less than 50 characters long, and that is not enough to explain what has been done to solve the incident.
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    The whole team explains that what's being put into the comment field is more than enough. He says that comments should, AT LEAST, have 1000 characters, it's the minimum he'll accept.
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    He says that having comments with less than a 1000 characters will impact his valuation of the work being done.
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    Bedu, being the devious character he is, decides to complain. Specially since he knows that boss would never open the bug tool, he loves his databases.
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    First ticket comes in, "this value is this, should be that", he updates value, writes the same comment he always does "End value verified and corrected" and
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    then, taking advantage on the fact that the comment field has format capabilities (WYSIWYG type of editor) copies and pastes the chronicle from the latest futbol match into the field,
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    changes the color to white and the font size to 1 so it can't be seen against the background on the tool and closes the ticket. If
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    you're the original ticket poster, that comment field is read-only, so unless someone selects and highlights the comment, they won't know that something else is there.
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    Next ticket comes, does the same but writes a rant about some stupid thing. Then on the next ticket, he just puts keeps pushing random keys and the space bar until the character counter reaches 1000.
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    He gets bored of doing this, so he becomes more ingenious and inventive by the ticket.
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    Somewhere hidden in that bug tool comment system, a complete original Bedu NOVEL separated in small chapters ends up being written that noone knows about (outside of us few that have lunch with Bedu and the team).
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    Boss comes a month after and says to Bedu: "I've noticed that the size of your comments has gone up last month, you're averaging well over a 1000 characters per ticket, keep it up!"
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  • 36
    Bedu (plus all my other friends and myself) left the company to greener pastures a year later. I still talk daily with Bedu and people from that team.
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  • 37
    TLDR: New boss says that bug tool comment should be AT LEAST a 1000 characters when 50 are more than enough, engineer starts writing hidden messages to comply with that, while making it interesting for himself.
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  • 38
    aldwinligaya • 5h ago Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but the new boss is supposed to be a database guy but doesn't look at the comments? The font size/color doesn't matter, when you query the database it would show the full text.
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    PAUL_DNAP • 5h ago That's wonderful, when I close my Jira tickets I don't put any additional comments only close them as done. If anyone mentions that I now have a plan to deal with it.
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    "It was a sunny but chilly February morn, and it was my quest to add a new specification to the product so armed with only a strong coffee and a packet of skittles I set forth into the depths of the quality system...."
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  • 41
    Nunov_DAbov · 3h ago . This sounds like my high school history class. We would have homework assignments to discuss 3-4 topics. My answers were terse - 2 or 3 sentences.
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    The teacher told me he wanted longer answers - 2- 3 paragraphs. I responded by turning in 10-15 pages per answer. After a few assignments that took hours to grade, he relented and said my original answers were fine.
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