Employee complies with manager's request only to confuse them with technical jargon

Employees often find it hard to function aptly within an establishment that gives them the short end of the stick. Reddit user u/ShallowHal99 has some advice for people stuck in such a situation and that is: "Go unhinged." It is exactly what they did when they found themselves stuck in a position where their company was laying off its employees soon. Rather than follow any of the overwhelming instructions or, to be specific, "traps" thrown their way, the employee decided to give the company a taste of their own medicine.

The employee shared they worked in a small company, later acquired by a group of investors, who made it pretty clear that they were looking "to replace everyone with low-skill contractors and sell the company." Thus, with no fault of theirs, the company's employees found themselves about to be let go. In this mental state, the company forced them "to update our procedure documentation." The establishment was pressuring them to make a detailed report on how they were fulfilling all the duties they were assigned step by step. In all probability, this was being done to help the people who would come on board after them in the company.

As expected, nobody took this seriously and therefore, the "senior-senior manager announced in FY23 that there will be a monthly quota for procedure documentation." People pushed back as they understood their company was exploiting them to make way for their replacement. The senior-senior manager's response was, "It doesn't always have to be complicated procedures or a perfect procedure." The employee decided to beat them in their own game. The establishment wanted procedure documentation so they could give references to future workers. So, the employee documented the procedures that would be absolutely useless to those workers.

Some procedures the employee did were: "How to turn on my computer (Accessing information technology resources). How to log on to my computer (Utilizing security practices for informational technology resources). How I delete and move files out of Google Drive (allocating digital assets for collaborative processes). How to block your Outlook calendar (Automating availability information across teams). How to request new office supplies from Staples (Physical asset procurement)."

None of these would be remotely helpful to the prospective workers. The employees went by without anyone catching on to them because "the lower level managers left or were checked out as they searched jobs." Also, there was no review system, as everyone was busy handling this acquisition. To make the documentation more believable, the employee asked for feedback on the few real procedures they did for the show.

The employee left the company in December for further studies. Just a few days ago, they heard the company figure out their ruse. They wrote that a friend in the company "just texted me and said the senior-senior manager is furious because other people were basically doing the same thing and now most of our team has left and they barely have anything documented." They tried to take advantage of the employees and ended up getting the same behavior served on the platter.

The comment section loved the tactic. u/Aduiavas pointed out every mistake made by the company in this case and wrote, "If you want people to do a proper job explaining what to do, you should probably give them a reason to do it, or at the least check that they are in fact, doing it..." u/Agitated_Basket7778 shared how foolish it was of the company to take the employees lightly and commented, "Your group of investors are very short-sighted and very stupid. They think their plan will work, but they did not factor in the ability of employees ( esp. engineering types) to look for patterns of behavior to predict what will happen, rather than what management says will happen. It's amusing watching someone else's hubris.