Remote consultants forced to work off old computers, they get even with management by slowing their pace down: 'There really is no way for us to go quicker without quicker laptops'

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Dec 15, 2025 4:00 PM EST

It's hard to be efficient at your job when the technology you have been given to complete your tasks is wildly outdated.

Unfortunately, that was the predicament that this team of consultants founds themselves in at this pharmaceutical company. For the record, the author of this anecdote no longer works at this place, which is why he felt compelled to share the story of his team's successful act of malicious compliance.

Apparently, the consultants were treated like the bottom of the barrel at this place, and the old computers they were given to work with became the physical manifestation of this treatment. The problem was that they had to run the debug and update the same code as some other employees at the company, who were all given the latest Apple product. I guess that aspect of their jobs was actively ignored when HR made the decisions as to which teams were given which laptop models. 

Eventually, it got to the point where the consultants could not take it anymore. They were sick and tired of being held accountable to meet unnecessarily strict deadlines while working with interminably slow computers. So, they decided to mimic the pace of their laptops in order to prove a point. Let's just say that said point was ultimately proven…

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  • "Give me a slow laptop [cause] I am a consultant - expect slower throughput"

    So this happened more than a decade ago when I worked as a consultant to a major pharma company. Now to be fair they were great people nice working culture etc very friendly relations
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  • culture etc very friendly relations between the pharma company devs and our devs. All great. Great WFH policy (in fact all us consultants worked remotely).
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  • Everything except ONE thing. We all had laptops (shipped to the consultants) with very heavy software running on it and it was both CPU and Memory intensive.
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  • Again totally fair. As developers our job was to run these to locally run the code and develop it, modify it etc. One *BIG* difference. The regular employees got really great fast
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  • high speed machines. As "Consultants" we got the lower end ones, despite all of us having to debug and update the same code!
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  • We brought this up to our team leads/managers/VP and to their higher-ups that "hey our overall throughput would be significantly higher and your own cost would go down if our laptops could run
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  • these local servers faster". The employee developers and teams leads also helped us make that same case.
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  • Average laptop cost is say $1500 for a high end (at the time). Average cost of the lower end one say $800. So a difference of $700 per consultant (times say 10 consultants) would have
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  • brought the total cost to say $7K. Total amount of extra HOURS we billed them due to this MUCH MUCH higher.
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  • But of course the bean counters at the parent company said, "no way in hell are we giving the lowly consultants the best machines".
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  • Add to that our main business point of contact was a real piece or work and pushed back *just as vehemently*. After lots of pleading arguing etc, we gave up.
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  • Now our strategy was simple. We'd simply get less work done in the day. To give everyone an idea of how this works. Each time you change a line of code and save. To recompile + restart the server locally it would easily take 10 mins on our consultant laptops
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  • (as opposed to just 3 mins on the employee laptops). We would deliberately make it compile multiple times. When the employee business team complained we'd screen-share and show them each time they complained, how long it took for even minor changes.
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  • Funny thing was the consultants were all remote so we'd put the code to compile and go have coffee or do household chores lol. Their POS business contact tried to crack the whip on us, we
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  • said "hey there really IS no way for us to go quicker without quicker laptops". After 6 months of them falling behind on projects AND being over billed due to to more hours being spent, they FINALLY woke up from their slumber and upgraded our laptops to bring them in line with the employee ones!
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  • Of course 2 months after we got better laptops I found a much better job and left. Still reminisce about those long coffee breaks though! ;-) Funniest part was when I called their helpdesk once. The agent quite literally
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  • admitted. "You know I have worked here for 10 years now and I'll NEVER understand why the Directors and VPs need top of the line laptops when all they
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  • they run is word excel and powerpoint and meanwhile the ones actually doing the heavy computing get 5 year old laptops". Amusing anecdote lol
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  • A frustrated young businessman works on a laptop from home.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • BayAreaPupMom LOL. Pharma is my industry. I have a few guesses who your client was. This is why I prefer consulting for start ups
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  • Mysterious_Lab_9043 Why, as an accountant, you modify or compile code? If it had to be constantly modified by accountant, that's a horrible business & development model, or just fake. Edit: Looks like I can't read. It says consultant, not accountant.
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  • Mysterious_Lab_9043 I don't understand why and how consultants needed to compile code constantly. Smells fake. Code is compiled once by developers, and used repeatedly.
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  • Relatents I thought the answer was to put cool racing stickers on the slowest laptops so the executives demand those because they look fast.
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  • high_throughput Reminds me of a Dilbert strip I can't find. Boss: For the project we've provisioned you with a 386 PC. It should be fine, how many times in your career will you be doing 3D rendering anyways Dilbert: Once if I hurry
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  • Coder Joe1 I've seen this dichotomy for the last 30 years. The top execs, who mostly do email on their laptops, get the latest and greatest while the engineers have to come up with software breakthroughs on the execs discarded laptops from years ago.
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  • Panthera_014 My brother went though this exact same thing The only difference was he only asked once for a better one Then he just rolled with the slow one for the next 3-4 years after getting denied Their poor choice= their loss of productivity
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  • A1batross I worked for Target corporate as a consultant twice. Both times I was fired inappropriately, once because a new manager had fired me at a prior job and simply did so again. Target did such dumb, petty shit. I'd speak up at meetings and be ignored or, occasionally, sneered at and then ignored. I warned them that another employee (with whom I had history) was untrustworthy, but they ignored me*. They sat us two to a cubicle. And yeah, they gave us shit equipment. All it did was slow down
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  • cacao_blanco_sexual As a former consultant - this is so true to my experiences, though I worked in the business side of healthcare. People would shoot themselves in the foot for the silliest damn reasons. I had a medical practice that had a "manager" (imbedded her entire family into the business) whose husband tried to get a kickback from a building contractor for hiring the company to repair roofing. I barely managed to get the patriarch Physicain to let him go, and he still kept the wife. And
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  • Interesting-Sense947 Christ I am glad I work for myself. I have a decent laptop (MacBook Pro M4) which is a decent bit more capable than I need - bit of 3D rendering, bit of video / photo / graphics, podcast editing, this and that. One key reason I work for myself? I was utterly sick of ignorant employers cheaping out on the tools and still expecting miracles. For example I was once expected to deploy an HDMI video over CAT6 distribution system with a £10 continuity tester to check the cables wi
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management remote work malicious compliance technology petty bad bosses consultants
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