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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/mdlapla on 2024-02-06 12:22:47.
This happened around mid 2006. I was a low level team leader in a tech consulting company.
I was in charge of two teams of 3 each.
The client was a bank, if you've ever worked with a bank, you know that technology moves pretty slowly on a bank.
For instance, the project we worked at was in Java 1.3, that got deprecated in march 06.
One of the guys in my team, let's call him MaxPowers, was the kind of guy that's always always trying to be on the cutting edge of everything, and we had him working on the project and he asked several times to migrate the project to a newer version of Java or be assigned to a project with more up-to-date tech (there were, he just was assigned to this one) but I couldn't do any of those things.
I knew he was unmotivated because of this, and I was also pretty bummed about having to work with outdated technology, so we both started researching open source tools to use in the company that were cutting edge and proposed some improvements to our manager. He liked the idea so he formed a "task force" to create tools for the company, the tasked force was Max and myself.
However, this was a side job, our main responsabilities were still on the bank project.
One day, on a team, project leaders and managers meeting, we were talking about desired and undesired rotation (people leaving the company) and how to stop it. I brought Maxes case up, saying that having someone extremely focused on cutting edge tech doing boring outdated stuff was probably the recipe to undesired rotation.
The manager said: "you're wrong, this is totally desired rotation, we want people motivated to work here, he's not".
I said: "But he's not because you're unwilling to move it to a project with better tech, plus, he's one of our best assets by a mile, he's doing the work of 2-3 people and the task force, we wouldn't want him to leave, it would be a problem".
Then manager said: "then it's your fault, you have to motivate him better!".
I stopped arguing, to me, Max leaving was totally a case of undesired rotation, it was a problem to my planning and, furthermore, it was losing someone whom I saw as one of the top assets available in the company.
But the manager said that I needed to motivate Max better. Cue malicious compliance.
So I did. I motivated him to get the hell out of the company. He wasn't going to be allowed to work in cutting edge projects there.
He found a new and exciting job in no time. He's a millionaire now, he got called by Google to interview with them (he rejected the offer), he could have been retired by age 38, but he kept on working because he still loves what he does.
We struggled to cover him, we had to hire 2 more devs and the task force came to an end (I couldn't do it just by myself and the rest of the devs weren't as interested in it).
TLDR: Manager told me to motivate a bored employee without tending to the underlaying problem at the company, I motivate him to leave the company.
EDIT: changed "cutting edge companies" for "cutting edge projects".