Employee walks out in the middle of a work crisis after being told not to work overtime

People set rules at workplaces to make life easier for all the stakeholders. But sometimes these rules might end up being a tad bit unreasonable and cause inconvenience for all the people involved. A similar thing happened with an employee, u/runnerdan, who worked as a developer at a large-scale financial services company when their boss banned them from working overtime. They shared how they followed the strict rule 20 years ago and the consequences of the same.

"I was a developer for a large financial services company and because we lacked many tools, I was usually tasked with building various tools, scripts, reports, etc., to help automate the environment and really just worked around the inadequacies of our off-the-shelf tools," the employee shared. "At my peak, I probably had around 300 apps and/or scripts in production. Due to the number of asks from leadership and to keep the lights on, I usually booked anywhere from 4 to 10 hours of overtime per week." They added, "After about a year, I got a new boss who decided that she would ensure that I take NO overtime for any reason. She proclaimed that I would ONLY be allowed 8 hours per day and not a moment more. 'No exceptions.' I wasn't a full-time employee, so I didn't have any grounds to push back."

"I usually started at 8, so with my 30-minute lunch, that meant my new hours were 8 to 4:30. Flash forward to later that SAME WEEK, an upstream system changed their data feed and it corrupted one of our downstream systems. Stuff like this happened often enough that I had translation tools built to resolve any of those feed-related issues, but even then, I still had to spend a few minutes figuring out what changed in order to adjust my own code," the person revealed. "Anyway, as the operations have come to a halt, my boss and HER boss are looking over my shoulder as I'm diagnosing the feed problem, which I found pretty quickly. The clock strikes 4:30 and I lock my computer, stand up from my desk, and say, 'Well, it's 4:30. That's my 8 hours. I'll see you tomorrow' and walk out. The look of confusion, rage and exasperation was just (blows chef's kiss)."

"At this point, all of our overnight backups have stopped and WILL NOT RUN until I resolve things. This means a global financial institution no longer has any data backups being made for that entire night and will be completely screwed if, well, ANYTHING happens," they continued. When the employee reached the office at 7:56 the next morning, their boss' boss was waiting for them and directed them to his office. Then, he calmly said, "Moving forward, I'll manage your timesheet and you can take as many hours as you need." However, the person left the job after a few months and a couple of months later, the entire building was laid off, leaving only two people out of 200. "One of those people was the guy I hired to backfill me as someone had to keep all the code running," the employee concluded.

People took to the comments to express their opinions. u/pdx_mom wrote, "It is truly amazing how some things are just held up by spit and glue though. Like...not one other person knew how to do anything." u/Dumbname25644 commented, "This is standard for IT. I work in a fairly large IT department where we have 40 staff. Not one of the other guys could deal with 80% of what I do day to day. But on the other side of that coin, I doubt I could do much of anyone else's role either." u/Pale-Jello3812 remarked, "I got framed and fired at one job (office politics) when I left, so did all of my files/shortcuts, visited a friend there a week later and was told that 6 people are trying to do my former work and failing!"