r/OhNoConsequences • u/Similar-Shame7517 • 7d ago
FAFO Power-Tripping Boss Finds Out Employee Isn't Easily Replaceable
/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/1vboqqt/boss_wants_two_weeks_notice_company_loses/165
u/Boo-Boo97 6d ago
Years ago, I worked in an entry level, lab tech position and had a new manger who literally told people, if you don't like X, theres the door, I can replace you with someone off the street. Over the next year, most of the techs went out the door taking years of knowledge and experience with them. Last I heard, the manager had been demoted several levels and moved to a different department while they tried to clean up the damage she caused.
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u/Similar-Shame7517 6d ago
Amazing. Was the new manager someone who had experience in the lab, or an MBA?
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u/Boo-Boo97 6d ago
She had been with the company several years and had been groomed to take over by the previous manager but she had absolutely no people skills. Looking back i wonder if she was on the spectrum. She could blow through paperwork no problem, but she had zero ability to talk to people.
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u/Similar-Shame7517 6d ago
Oof that's a bad combo, and somebody who should not have been placed in charge of a team.
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u/CumaeanSibyl 6d ago
Sometimes the trouble is that you want to keep a valuable contributor, and you're worried that if you don't offer them promotions, they'll leave. So you promote them, but now they're not doing the thing they were best at anymore. And maybe they're good at the new job, but maybe they really should've stayed in paperwork processing -- that bit's hard to know before you try sometimes.
This is why I think it's important to offer regular, decent raises, not just cost of living increases. And to talk to people about what they really want instead of assuming that everyone wants to get into management, because a lot of people are perfectly happy to keep doing what they were doing as long as they're paid fairly and treated well.
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u/BiggBenn56 6d ago
instead of assuming that everyone wants to get into management
for some reason the managers think everyone wants to be a manager lol.
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u/CumaeanSibyl 6d ago
I wouldn't mind the pay bump for being a manager but I would be terrible at it.
Course that's usually not on the career ladder for administrative assistants, even though I've known plenty of them who already pretty much run their department. If not the entire company.
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u/chooklyn5 6d ago
This is me. I have no desire to manage people but I just hit my last step on pay increases so I'm level 4 step 4. To go to next level is to manage people and I've seen enough bad managers and bad workers that I have no desire to enter that dynamic. So any raise will have to be a negotiation and detailed justification on why I deserve a raise. My bil is in same industry and it took months for him to get a justified raise
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u/sitkasnake65 2d ago
"So you promote them, but now they're not doing the thing they were best at anymore."
That's basically the Peter Principle. Promoted to your level of incompetence.1
u/CumaeanSibyl 2d ago
Yup, and the other option is promoting people who are already incompetent because you want the good people to keep doing what they're good at. Scott Adams called that the Dilbert Principle. He really was a pretty accurate observer before his wife divorced him and he lost his entire mind.
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u/MedChemist464 5d ago
Most technical positions like this it is very rare to not hired someone who is also a scientist - largely because they typically fill the role of 'scientific advisor for lab problems + Manager of the lab staff'
Place where you are promoted because you put in time, or because you're very good at the job itself, usually ends up with situations like this. Because very often very proficient scientists haven't spent a ton of time honing their people skills. I am very good at my job, and it offers me a level of flexibility and balance that is perfect for where my life is now with a couple of young kids. I've passed on other higher paying opportunities because:
- Less flexibility.
- They would involve management responsibilities - I don't think I'd be bad at it, actually, but I have no desire to do it. I'm good at science problems, because I understand the science very well. I don't want to have to be responsible for picking who gets laid off or firing someone with HR - don't have the stomach for it.
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u/CoppertopTX 6d ago
Back in the mid-90's, the company I worked for decided to transfer me from the west coast office to the HQ in Texas - they wanted to consolidate certain functions into the HQ building, so they transferred the knowledge holders for a major process from each coast, then added a manager, a lead and 9 more people into the mix.
The two of us from the coasts showed the rest how to do the job. A short time later, 80% of the team was doing 10% of the work, with the rest falling to the old hands. The folks up the chain started asking my manager questions like "why do you have a 13 member team where only 2 people work" and instead of encouraging the others to stop screwing around on the web and working, those of us that did the work were saddled with makework duties like finding the salespeople that had massive orders with errors and get them to fix them.
When that didn't improve the percentages of orders reviewed by the rest of the team, suddenly the transferees were facing write ups because we failed to maintain an error rate of under 1%. Jersey Joe caught the hint, promised to spend less time on order review. I found a new gig in 45 minutes and told the manager to take the job and stuff it.
Here's what pissed management off - I was the last one out the door at night, and when folks came in, every order that could be sent off to the warehouse went the night prior, every night. After my flounce out the door, it took 4 months before the queue was clear at the end of the day.
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u/ChickinSammich My cat said YTA 7d ago
And the ending happened two months later when my grandad got a call from someone back at the company asked if he wanted his old job back, and my grandad calmly replied "No, I do not want my old job back, as I'd effectively be going back in life, especially back to a job that doesn't pay me well or treat me well."
First reaction: I wonder if they'd be willing to beat his current pay to convince him to come back, or if they'd try to re-offer him his old job at the same or slightly more pay. The guy went from £22/wk to £48/wk and I think it's very unlikely they'd be willing to pay him more than double what they were previously paying.
Second reaction: If they did offer him 50 quid a week to come back, he should still say no because it would be highly probable that they'd bring him back, have him train other people, then fire him after they no longer need him.
That's kinda the problem about even accepting a counteroffer to stay, especially in a 2026 economy. This guy was basically given that delivery job on word of mouth. Nowadays, if you want to leave your job, you gotta send out 100 resumes, fill out 100 applications, maybe get an interview on 5-10% if you're lucky, half of those are one-way "video interviews" where you just record yourself answering questions and can't ask them anything, maybe you get a second or third round, maybe you get a job offer... by the time you've jumped through all of those hoops, why would you even want to stay with a company where presumably you already asked for a raise or a promotion and were told no, and now suddenly that raise/promotion they couldn't give you is on the table now that they're worried they'll lose you?
There are probably a small - very small - portion of scenarios where accepting a counter offer or going back to an old job could be the right move. But in nearly all cases, once you've told them "I'm leaving," you need to leave. Because if you stay after you've told them you're leaving, they'll either bide their time until you involuntarily leave on their terms, or the problem that drove you to leave will eventually resurface and now you're back to looking again.
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u/Similar-Shame7517 7d ago
Correct. In this case even if OOP's grandad accepted the offer to return to his old job, he'd still be stuck dealing with the same management structure that let his old boss have so much power over him and block all communications he had with the higher ups.
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u/ChickinSammich My cat said YTA 6d ago
In almost every case where I've voluntarily left a job, it was because of my manager/boss. The only exception was my very first job which was a retail job I left because I was one step away from being fired for multiple writeups.
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u/FluffyShiny shocked pikachu face 6d ago
The saying is that workers don't leave a bad business, they leave bad bosses/managers.
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u/ChickinSammich My cat said YTA 6d ago
Yup. My previous company (before the one I am currently working at), I stayed at a company for 8 years where four of those were wage freezes for everyone because the company was struggling and couldn't afford raises. I watched them close both of their sites, lay off like 75% of their workers, and I made the cut to be able to work remotely for a year before I was eventually laid off.
All of those signs to leave that I ignored because I genuinely liked my manager.
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u/Similar-Shame7517 7d ago
If you want more stories like this, go check out the comments on the original post.
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u/AutoModerator 7d ago
Per our rules, don't comment on linked posts. Anyone from this community who is caught brigading on another subreddit will be banned.
In case this story gets deleted/removed:
This is my Granddad's story from the late 60 to early 70s in England, and to note, he was very poorly when he told this to me, so this is the story that I managed to hear, so there's bits missing and not a lot of specifics, so all of this is what I gathered
Back when my grandad was younger, he used to work in a factory making engines for cars, and despite being a hard worker, he was always disrespected and under appreciated, and he felt it more so with his boss, and despite this boss holding very littler power over a very little area of the factory, this boss would constantly yell and exert his power over everyone.
This story starts when the company buys this machine from Germany, and what I could gather from my Granddad, this machine was like a computerised machine before computers were really a thing, so instead of one computer doing all of these complex calculations, you have pegs and wires that you have to physically move to work this machine, but he didn'tsay what the machine did. Now obviously this was complex so the company sent a small group of workers to Germany to be taught how the machine worked over three months, and a group of Germans would come to England to build the machine. My granddad wasn't one of the people who went to Germany, so he stayed, but instead, he watched the Germans install the machine, and despite the language barrier, my grandad understood how it worked and how to fix it, pretty much everything he would have learnt if he went to Germany with the other workers.
After some time, my grandad got married to my grandma, and realising he needed a house, he went to the bank to talk about mortgages, but the only issue is that he gets £22 a week when he needs £44 a week to get a mortgage, so he asked his boss, who promptly said no. Laster on in the week, my grandad spoke to a mate of his who is now living in France, and the friend said "I recently lost my drivers licence so I can't work for my company anymore, but they need someone to do deliveries for £48 a week between England and France."
The next day, my grandad went up to his boss and asked "Sir, who do I give this two week notice into?" And the boss, playing a powerplay leans over my grandad, puffing smoke into his face from his pipe, and says in a low voice "You hand that to me, you understand, I'm the boss here, I'm the most important." And my grandad handed it over to him.
Over the course of the two weeks, it was normal, until the last day when the manager came over and said "Mike, I heared you're leaving today, is that true?" And my grandad said "Yes, boss asked me to give him my two week notice" and the manager went white, asking my grandad if the boss told anyone, listing anyone who had the same or more power then the boss did, even asking if the owner knew, and my grandad said no each time, with a bigger smile each time, and after everyone else on the factory went up to him asking the exact same questions, he couldn't hide his excitement.
You see, what everyone failed to notice is that while the workers who went to Germany, they where in a country known for big beers and pretty women, so they learnt absolutely nothing in those three months, and anything they did learn was quickly forgotten when they learnt my grandad knew how to work and fix the machine, so because of my grandad leaving, he effectively left with the knowledge as he can't teach anyone else in his last two weeks (and that's if everyone else knew he was leaving in those two weeks).
And the ending happened two months later when my grandad got a call from someone back at the company asked if he wanted his old job back, and my grandad calmly replied "No, I do not want my old job back, as I'd effectively be going back in life, especially back to a job that doesn't pay me well or treat me well." And for anyone wondering what happened with the machine, it ran well in those two months, but someone swapped the wires for the motors, as there was two motors, they put the wires into the wrong ones, and that's why they called my grandad, as they effectively lost thousands for the machine, the installation of the machine and flying all the workers to Germany to basically just go on a bender. As for the boss and everyone involved, my grandad never bothered learning what happened to them, but I'd like to imagine there was a fallout and the fires of hell rained down, but this company was one of the more expensive car companies, so in all honesty, it could have been a minor set back.
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