Rules look good to read on paper, and they try to roll out order, clear expectations, and fewer arguments. But the real strength and backbone of a workplace lies in things that never appear in a policy document.A colleague who stays ten extra minutes to help, an engineer who checks a sudden call for an emergency code on their phone at night. A manager who also doesn’t budge when someone leaves early after a long week. These small, unwritten habits rarely get thanked, so they are easy to overlook.But sometimes when a new leader arrives, the urge to flip everything up can be strong. The unclear boundaries to work honestly yet being at ease get replaced with the measurable, and hours at desks begin to be noted down.One Redditor describes a similar scenario from their organisation when a New CTO joined the company and tried to change all the unspoken rules, turns out, the outcome did not turn out to be good.
How changed rules and noted hours at the desk by the new CTO wreaked havoc in the working teams
Reddit user u/plaintextcoder shared a story in the r/MaliciousCompliance community, describing how everything changed when a new CTO arrived from a much stricter company.A mid-sized B2B software company had worked in a hybrid style for years. Employees came to the office a couple of days a week. If something broke late at night or a client panicked on a weekend, someone fixed it from home. The extra time was unpaid, but nobody minded. It was goodwill, not a contract.Describing further, the user explained that at his second all-hands meeting, the CTO ended the flexible days. Everyone would be in the office from 9 to 5, with no exceptions. When employees asked about emergencies after hours, he replied, according to the post, “If you’re not at your desk, actively working, I don’t consider it work.” Someone half-joked, “So nothing outside 9-5 at the desk counts?” The CTO answered, “Exactly. Glad we’re aligned.”The team took him at his word, and describing the scenario the user wrote, “Slack got muted at 5:00 sharp. Nobody checked email after leaving. A PM pinged on-call at 6 pm about a broken integration and got silence until 9 am the next day.”
When the tables turned, and things went from bad to worse
The real test came on a Friday when a deployment went out just before the 5 pm cutoff, and a configuration mistake affected one customer segment.“One Friday, a deploy went out at 4:52, minutes before the freeze; a configuration value missed one customer segment. Under the old system, someone would’ve caught it from their phone by 5:30. Under the new one: the alert fired at 5:06. Nobody was at their desk, and per the CTO himself, that meant nobody was working. So nobody looked,” the user wrote, describing the nerve-wracking scenario.The problem ran all weekend. The company’s biggest client had a broken dashboard for 61 hours. By Monday at 9 am, more than 200 support tickets had piled up, the VP of Sales was all caught up on the employees, and the client kept using the word “churn.”Read Reddit post here.
The CTO demanded to know how nobody had noticed for two and a half days.
The team lead calmly quoted the CTO’s own statement from the all-hands meeting. Nobody was at their desk over the weekend, so by that definition nobody was working, and there was nothing to notice.“I’ve never heard a room go that quiet”, the Redditor said that the room went completely silent.Realisation hit, and things worked in employees’ favourThe results came quickly. Within a week, the company set up a proper on-call rotation with real compensation time. A month later, hybrid work quietly returned as a “pilot.” The Redditor ended the post with this line: “Turns out a lot of ‘not real work’ had been holding the place together for free.”
Corporate employees weigh in on social media
Turns out that rules are not the enemy, but a leader should understand what is already working before removing it. Some of the most valuable effort in a company is never taken note of on a timesheet, but it can be a secret ingredient to the company’s actual success.The post has since gone viral and received numerous reactions online. One user wrote, “They totally knew what they were doing; the fault was probably by design.” Another added, “Wait, did he inadvertently make it so that you all would be paid for this? ‘Not real work? Kind of a W actually; maybe he was just playing stupid.” A third user wrote, “Sounds to me like a pretty good wake-up call.”