Boss tells longtime manager to stop answering questions — regrets it when the team misses every deadline

A former manager shared on Reddit how a simple case of doing what he was told ended up proving his point to leadership. Posted by u/blueboy714, the story explained what happened when his boss ordered him to stop helping his old team after a department merger. In his post that gained 6.3k upvotes, he explained that before retiring, he worked as a manager and programmer in a US department. "I would program, manage, assign projects, create timelines, answer questions that my staff had, etc.," he said.

"The company I worked for decided to consolidate the US and UK programming departments, and the new boss decided to have only managers in the UK oversee the programmers in the US," he wrote. "This meant that I was only supposed to keep programming and no longer needed to do the management side of things, but I still got the same pay I used to." Because of the six-hour time difference, the teams overlapped for only a few hours each day. "This left the rest of the day for my old staff to either wait until the next day to ask their new boss or come to me and I could answer immediately," he explained.

The second option helped the team stay on schedule until the UK managers complained that the US programmers were still turning to him for help. "So it was time for malicious compliance." He stopped answering questions and followed the new rule exactly. "When my old staff came and asked me questions, I told them I was told to no longer help them and they should ask their new UK manager the next day or send their UK boss an email with their question," he said.

Within two weeks, "the US team was missing deadlines, etc., and the UK managers had to answer for why their team was missing deadlines." After several more weeks of missed targets, management finally realized "that due to the six-hour time difference, there should be a manager in the US." When his boss asked if he would return to the role, he said he preferred programming. "They ended up giving me a raise in order to get me to go back to managing the US programmers," he said.

It’s a pattern that plays out often when teams are spread across time zones and communication slows down. A study published in Group & Organization Management titled "Team Self-Regulation and Meeting Deadlines in Project Teams" found that teams function best when they share a common understanding of time, known as temporal consensus. When members work in different zones or depend on delayed responses, that shared rhythm breaks down, coordination slips, and missed deadlines become more likely. 

The post drew hundreds of reactions from users who shared similar experiences. u/vaisatriani wrote, "Managers never seem to realize what will happen when people need to wait for an answer to something from coworkers on the other side of the world." u/UnhingingEmu added, "My partner works in shipping, and the two-hour time difference between our city and the coast already makes coordination difficult. I couldn't imagine having a whole work day between contacts." u/DapperExplanation77 wrote, "At my latest job, I’ve had to wait for a whole week because only one person can answer some questions and if they are overwhelmed or out of office, you simply wait. So far no one’s bothered us about delays but I’m looking forward to this LOL."

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