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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/simonpigg on 2023-06-17 11:01:14+00:00.

tl;dr at the bottom

Years ago I was a low level IT manager at major media company. My team was understaffed, we had too many projects to care for and no IT tester to test our apps, so me, the programmers and the Product Owner (a business side, non-technical member) needed to test our apps ourselves. The IT director (my boss) never helped with this issues because of budget reasons, it was common knowledge that the company has major money problems for years. It sucked, but we managed to properly care for our apps. Our primary project was redesigning our sport news app that produced the biggest revenue with mobile ads. The app was 8+ years old at this point and it worked like a really old car. So obviously we were creating it from scratch. It was a slow process, because at the same time we needed to update and fix many other apps, we were basically a skeleton crew.

The problems started when the Product Owner left and was replaced by someone that I can only describe as “cartoonishly not fit for the job”. It was a person that did not care for the product, users or other people. The only important thing for her was to make her boss, a business director, happy. An ideal yes-man. She also was lazy and had no true experience or knowledge about creating mobile apps. She never really did anything important that the former Product Owner did. What she was doing was organizing meetings, going to meetings, drinking coffee and just slacking off on the web. It was not a big deal for me, because I did my job well and everything was going forward as planned. And she behave ok-ish. Important part is that she did not test the app and she really didn’t know or wanted to know the app. I have never seen her using any of our apps now that I think about it.

One day, she informed us that there is some internal deadline for finishing our app, and it is February 1 (almost a full year later). This is just some budgeting date that for any sane company is not that imporant for in-house projects. We informed her, that with all our responsibilities and lack of programmers, the chances of finishing every planned function are near zero, but we could release a basic version of the app (without this and that fumnction) for a really small portion of the users, like 1%. Later we could update the app with missing stuff and then progressively go to 100%. She was happy with the solution and the whole team was informed about our plan. So we proceeded as before, creating the new app and caring for other apps at the same time and informed about our new app progress every week. Fast forward to November and I have a short vacation period. When I return, I learn that the new PO is furious with our progress, even though everything is going according to plan. During my absence she informed our bosses that we are in crisis mode because the app will not be ready for February 1 and we (and mainly me) are to blame. Turns out, her boss wanted the WHOLE app to be ready and not some basic version of it. She never really informed him of our agreeded plan or he changed his mind or whatever. So she tells everyone that the plan was always to fully release the whole app and now we are the liars. No one took our side and at this point I was already looking for new job, because fuck that shit. We needed to cut many functions after all, because it was just impossible at this point to finish them.

Here’s the malicious compliance. I stayed at the company untill the deadline and the last thing I did was releasing the new app to every. Single. User. One of the most important part of the app were the mobile ads that created the revenue (the app itself was free). I created the ads just as I was told to and tested them myself, the PO did not test the app. So nobody noticed, that the new app had waaay less ads that are showing waaay less frequent. But what the app had more is bugs of course, because we couldn’t properly test everything with that amount of work in that shor time with no tester. Month after release the ad revenue plummeted and the users were not happy with the app, so many of them moved to other news apps. I was happily working somewhere else at this time and I heared that it was a total chaos with this new app. Because of the revenue issue the PO and her boss even concidered bringing the old app back, which is hilarious, because that shit barely worked. Last time I checked, even the most die hard programmer (that worked there for more than a decade, which is a miracle in IT) said fuck it and left some time later. Years later and she still works there, the current team is still understaffed and overworked, the apps are buggy and poorly managed. Meanwhile I have the best job of my life and for many years everyone is extra happy with my management.

tl;dr

I was a programmer/manager creating a sports app with understaffed team. New business team member lies about our arrangements and forces us to deploy an unfinished and buggy app with wrong advertisement placement. I happily deploy the app on my last day and app loses tons of money and users, there is total chaos, people leave the team. Years later the mobile apps are in shitty condition and I have the best job ever.

EDIT:

1. In my country “working in IT” is a general term. It can be sysadmin, it can be software dev, it can be even scrum master. I was both software dev and a manager. Also I’m not a native english speaker, so sorry for any mistakes.
2. Yes, I fucked up royally by not getting exact scope of our plan in writing. Of course I know that now. I was stupid back then and I did not expect to be fucked like that by someone from my own team. We had UX sheets etc, but it was for the whole app, there was no indication what will be in the finished product. This was in-house project, not some software house job.
3. To everyone implying that I make this up… why would I? This is not some crazy I-was-super-smart-and-my-revenge-was-awesome story. I’m the stupid fucking idiot in this rather boring story. If I would be making this up there would be at least three explosions, guys.
4. Yes, right now I have “the best job ever” and I by that I mean the salary is great, the project is fun and I work with awesome people. I’m not saying I’m some president of human-cat relations, because THAT would really be best job ever. Also I was not fired, I bailed as soon as I found better job.