15+ Stubborn managers who refuse to change their ways: 'This is how we've always done it'

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Nov 29, 2025 3:00 PM EST

Refusing to change can be bad for business — just ask the frustrated employees of these managers who won't change their minds about anything, ever. 

If your company still insists on faxing things in current year, please knock that off. It's not 1970 anymore, and in fact, it's 50+ years since then. Technology has evolved! No one knows how to work a fax machine. At a prior job, I had to use a fax machine, and it was stupefying not only to me, but also to my coworkers, including some who were in their 40s and 50s. We'd all stand around the infernal contraption, waiting for a fax to come through to us. An email could've accomplished this task in 30 seconds, but since things have to be done in certain old timey ways, we all had our phones out, Googling "how to use a fax machine." If you're ever at a company that does things just because that's how they've always been done, you can do 1 of 2 things. You can either accept that you're in for the ride, doing things in a painstakingly slow manner. Or, you can freshen your resume and keep searching elsewhere. Because companies that insist on only doing things one way aren't looking to go above and beyond — they're content to keep things as is, forever. At a certain point, it gets pretty ridiculous — some employees found themselves hand-writing Excel spreadsheets because of their boss's refusal to adapt! 

Check out a bunch of stories below of people who dealt with unchangeable workspaces, and you might notice a pattern — a lot of them left and never looked back. 

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  • 01

    'What is the most infuriating example of "We've always done it this way" that you've witnessed at work?'

    Older employee in blue shows paper to female employee in white sitting behind desk in home office setting
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 02
    sundaybest16 We had to FAX documents to other companies and weren't allowed to email them. In 2023. I died inside every time I had to ask someone for their fax number, which they never had of course
    via u/sundaybest16
  • 03
    flatstacy Petty cash, in a lock box, with paper receipts
    via u/flatstacy
  • 04
    NeedsltRough I do data entry for pharmacies, a lot of prescribers have switched from handwritten to escripts, or at least typed out and faxed prescriptions. But some doctors still do handwritten and it's usually the ones with the absolute worst handwriting.
    via u/NeedsltRough
  • 05
    There are a few in particular who are notorious for how bad the scribbles are. And it's extra bad because working in this job for as long as a lot of us have, we've gotten used to bad handwriting, so we can usually decipher it. But there are those few Drs whose handwriting is just so horrible that none of us can read it, and it has to be sent
    via u/NeedsltRough
  • 06
    back to the store so the store can call the doctor and get clarification. It's so, so dumb because this could very easily be fatal for a patient. Imagine they need .1 mg and it's read as 1 mg. Or they're supposed to take half a tablet daily and it's read as 1 tablet twice a day.
    via u/NeedsltRough
  • 07
    They just need to be made to use escripts, or at least use a damn scribe who can write better than a chicken having a seizure.
    via u/NeedsltRough
  • 08
    SendMeYourDPics At one job we still printed out every single invoice, walked it to a manager for a handwritten signature, then scanned it back into the system and emailed the PDF. The software we used already had digital approval built in and the manager literally sat ten feet away, but any time someone
    via u/SendMeYourDPics
  • 09
    suggested changing it the answer was "this is how audit likes it". Audit had changed platforms years earlier and didn't care anymore. We were wasting hours every week shuffling paper for a rule nobody was actually enforcing.
    via u/SendMeYourDPics
  • 10
    Wonderful_Price2... Years ago I took over supervising one of my company's biggest contracts that had been floundering for years. One of the employees followed me around and insisted I couldn't make any changes because "we've always done it that way"
    via u/Wonderful_Price2355
  • 11
    Eventually, I got annoyed and told a whole room full of employees that "always doing it that way" was the reason they were failing miserably.
    via u/Wonderful_Price2355
  • 12
    Local-Concern-47... So I work for a farming company and I'm taking over the food safety department. Well there's a huge lack of communication on what's being applied where and when. My department is always the last to know. Now there are certain regulations we have to follow to ensure whatever is applied is safe and has a certain time interval. Well yesterday I just
    via u/Local-Concern-4791
  • 13
    found out that a certain organic fertilizer was applied and I didn't even have the proper documents showing the product was safe. That product was applied beginning of November and was harvested 4 days later. I was like YOU ARE KIDDING ME.WHO is making the calls?! Welp the owner was. And the gal training me said "that's just how things are here. You can't keep getting
    via u/Local-Concern-4791
  • 14
    pissed off when something new like this happens" Uhhhh yes I fucking can. God forbid we run into a recall situation or audit. Because we would be FUCKED. But yeah sure. Keep doing it like this.
    via u/Local-Concern-4791
  • 15
    Legitimate_Repea... We had to fill out paper forms, scan them, email the scans to a coworker, who printed them again so the boss could sign them by hand. I suggested we just use an e-signature. Boss said: We've always done it this way, it works fine. The coworker's entire job was literally printing and scanning these forms.
    via u/Legitimate_Repeat_24
  • 16
    punkwalrus Ages ago, I was hired to be the assistant to a manager who insisted that we round by 3s. This was before computers were in stores, and so we had to take daily sales and tabulate them on physical spreadsheets, which were rounded off to the nearest dollar. I was flabbergasted. "You round by 5s," I insisted.
    via u/punkwalrus
  • 17
    "NO!" She shouted. "It doesn't matter WHAT you round by, as LONG as you use the SAME NUMBER! I have ALWAYS done it this way, and you don't know what you are talking about just because you are a MAN!" ... k." So when I called in the numbers for the weekly sales, they were always way
    via u/punkwalrus
  • 18
    off. The DM got sick of correcting her, and so when the manager was demoted and replaced, I asked, "do I still have to round by 3s?" to the new manager. "What? No! You round by 5s! Did Laura round by threes??" "Yeah, I tried to explain to her why that was bad, but she got all pissy about it, so I pick my battles."
    via u/punkwalrus
  • 19
    We had to redo all the spreadsheets by hand for the current and previous fiscal year to get all the numbers straight. The DM said, "No wonder her numbers were so far off."
    via u/punkwalrus
  • 20
    Lumber-Jacked My first employer did not use Autocad to it's full potential. They claimed it was too much of a time sink to get the smart elements to work and then that people would "trust the computer" too much instead of doing things by hand. CAD can create 3D surfaces with contours, pipe networks that interact with other pipes so you know if you have
    via u/Lumber-Jacked
  • 21
    conflicts, smart labels that read your surfaces, alignments, profiles and spit out a label that needs to go on the construction plans. They had me hand draw all of it. Never even knew the program could do half of that until we got new hires. that would use the tools they had. Company would
    via u/Lumber-Jacked
  • 22
    then try to force them to hand draw. Ridiculous. All because one guy who was the CAD manager and had been working for the company for like 25 years didn't like it.
    via u/Lumber-Jacked
  • 23
    LoFiQ RTO. Return to office mandates. Everyone discovered how productively they could work from home and management said, nope, we need to SEE people in the office to know that they're doing their jobs, just like it's always been.
    via u/LoFiQ
  • 24
    Matt DamonsTaco Marketing ignored a thoughtful, well-done analysis of their marketing email open, reads, and click throughs that suggested "the data suggest that customers open these kinds of emails four times more often than those kinds of emails and have been doing so for the last several years
    via u/MattDamonsTaco
  • 25
    so let's send more of these kinds of emails" and instead said "nah. We know what our customers want. We'll keep sending them the same bullshit every day."
    via u/MattDamonsTaco
  • 26
    Logical_Show4558 I worked somewhere in 2018 that still had the old clock in and out system. They did everything so old I quit pretty quickly. Who wants to do labor where you seen machines do it faster and easier at other places? And I'm talking about like lifting. stuff that people shouldn't be lifting for 10 hours a day.
    via u/Logical_Show4558
  • 27
    rolyattko Hygienist not wearing proper eyewear during patient care, she said she didn't have to at her previous office...
    via u/rolyattko
  • 28
    CaptainAwesome06 I work at an engineering company that designs buildings. In the last 10 years, the quality of work from contractors has steadily declined. At this point, it's not uncommon for contractors to completely ignore our engineered drawings. I routinely come across things that don't make
    via u/CaptainAwesome06
  • 29
    sense, will not work, and/or are against code (the law). When calling out contractors on these things, I often hear, "that's how we always do it." I respond by saying just because they did it that way doesn't make it correct. There is one contractor that has been a thorn in my side for a while now. For every project, they send the developer a list of
    via u/CaptainAwesome06
  • 30
    "qualifications". It's basically a list of grievances. The items are either things they just don't want to do or things that they say are wrong on our drawings that really aren't wrong. One of their guys in particular has a knack for misinterpreting code and then trying to throw us under the bus like we did something wrong. I often respond to these lists with, "that code section
    via u/CaptainAwesome06
  • 31
    doesn't even apply to this project." This wouldn't be that big of a deal except that the building inspector will stop construction if it doesn't match the approved drawings. Then the developer will tell us we need to change our drawings to match what was built. Instead of telling the contractor to fix his mistakes. Then they get
    via u/CaptainAwesome06
  • 32
    mad at me for charging them money for changing their drawings. Even worse when I say I can't change the drawings because what they built won't work.
    via u/CaptainAwesome06
  • 33
    ListMore5157 Our company uses entity framework and it's "always" been standard practice to let entity handle all of the database calls. Well we had a long running process that was pulling it a huge table with all dependencies and then stripping what we don't need. This isn't even for editing, just a simple select.
    via u/ListMore5157
  • 34
    I created a stored procedure to only get what we need to display at the out set and it ruffled some feathers because "we've never used stored procedures before". Meanwhile the app was choking on a massive query and taking upwards of 2 minutes to display something I was able to return in under a second.
    via u/ListMore5157
  • 35
    Wloak In advertising - Insertion. Orders to buy outside of large tech platforms. You know the joke "this call could have been an email?" Hold my beer.. Major retail company in the UK signs with one of our ad agencies who creates the campaign and gets them to agree to contact terms. Ad agency then sets a meeting with
    via u/Wloak
  • 36
    another one of our agencies that works on the floor below them, said agency comes up with a cost proposal and walks it upstairs to hand deliver it to the other company team. Company reviews, walks down the stairs to let the team know they approve and the downstairs company writes up an insertion order to then be walked back upstairs for signature and
    via u/Wloak
  • 37
    they send a copy via fax to the client and both advertising companies manually enter the information into their respective billing software - which is the same software. Eventually the downstairs ad company prints out an invoice and walks it back upstairs to the sister ad company.
    via u/Wloak
  • 38
    "We've done it this way for 30+ years!" and I reply "Yes but the software you pay an annual license fee to and are manually entering this into at the end has been able to do everything you just described from an online portal for 20 years." This is part of the world's largest advertising company, accounting for roughly 25% of every dollar spent globally on ads..
    via u/Wloak
  • 39
    xenogazer When I first started at this medical invoice billing place a few years ago, The lady who was training me would always make sure to emphasize how important it was to go over any specific invoices that I had questions about on their cover page.
    via u/xenogazer
  • 40
    So one cover page would have a following of probably 2 to 300 pages of invoices. She would print off this entire ream so that she could only use the cover page to input things in the system. Since she was older sometimes she couldn't tell what something on the cover page said so she would then look at one of the invoice pages she had printed off to fix the issue.
    via u/xenogazer
  • 41
    However, normally she would just throw all 300 pages directly in the shredder after printing them off without even needing to check them. Every day. When it was my turn to do the task, I just looked at it in the PDF reader and didn't need to print it out at all. This made it easier for me to zoom in on stuff I couldn't read and it really solved the whole problem without
    via u/xenogazer
  • 42
    wasting any paper. I told her this because I thought it was an efficient improvement to the process. She got so mad she packed her entire computer and everything in her cubicle into a copy paper box and walked right out.
    via u/xenogazer
  • 43
    Zabe60 Somehow related: My boss will email me. Print the email and put it in my in box. Then call me to tell me to check my email.
    via u/Zabe60
  • 44
    Miserable-Beyon... I know that but it took weeks to do it all by hand, when I had other more important tasks to do, then when a link is broken all the data is wrong.
    via u/Miserable-Beyond-166

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