'Deserved': Internet Applauds Man Who Automated 'Useless' Boss Out of Job

Any unscrupulous bosses out there should be afraid of Reddit's r/MaliciousCompliance forum. Filled with tales of employees getting revenge on exploitative managers, the subreddit is a warning to never take your team for granted.

For example, this former receptionist, who got sweet revenge on her boss using post-it notes. Or this retail worker, whose hypocritical supervisor had to "eat his words" regarding longer lunches and overtime rules.

The latest work story to go viral on the forum involves an extremely efficient employee. So efficient in fact, they automated their manager out of a job.

In a post shared on Sunday, u/lungbong shared how his "useless" boss was fired after dumping her responsibilities on the wrong person.

He wrote: "I was a data and reporting analyst and did all the ad hoc reports for the company.

"My boss, we'll call her Kerry, was useless, she was one of these people that was always late, left early, and took days off at short notice.

"The only thing of value she did was all the regular reports—sales, revenue etc. We suspected she got away with it because she was having an affair with her boss, we'll call him Stewart."

However, it turns out the Redditor wasn't the only one fed up with Kerry's behavior. The company CEO caught wind of Kerry and Stewart's affair after asking employees to share cost-cutting ideas.

The poster continued: "Kerry was very keen to submit ideas and encouraged us all to automate our tasks so she could try and take the credit for the savings.

"On one of her skive days, which coincidently Stewart was "sick" as well the CEO was desperate for the sales report my boss does. I said I'd give it a look and see if I could get it done.

"Normally she'd spend 2-3 days doing it each week but the CEO wanted it that afternoon. A quick inspection of the data showed it would quite easily be automated so I knocked up the necessary script and got it over to the CEO.

"[He] was super impressed that not only had I got it done in a couple of hours but also that it could be updated whenever he needed it.

"He asked if I could also look at the revenue, churn and a couple of other reports. Over that afternoon I automated everything my boss did."

When Kerry and Stewart returned to work the next day, they were immediately suspended, before eventually losing their jobs altogether.

He added: "Turns out the CEO knew they were having an affair and all the times they were sick or late or had to leave early was so they could sneak off and have sex.

"He'd not done anything about it because how important these reports were. Now they were automated he was able to get them suspended and later fired for gross misconduct for all the time they'd taken off."

According to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, 800 million workers across the globe will lose their roles to automation by 2030.

An estimated 73 million of those people will live in the U.S., with a third of the U.S. workforce expected to need new skills by the end of the decade. Food production workers are especially at risk, followed by construction and cleaning jobs. The International Federation of Robots reported three million industrial robots operating worldwide in 2021, with that figure expected to rise year on year.

Earlier this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his plans to develop a humanoid robot in 2022, while a restaurant in Dallas and a Denny's recently resorted to robot servers to help ease the labor shortage.

The job post received 36,000 upvotes and more than 900 comments from Reddit users applauding the man's ingenuity.

Bdidonna commented: "Kudos to you for automating it and getting a well deserved bonus." WhatACunningHam said: "The justice is tasty."

While IsThatDaveByChance joked: "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script."

Newsweek has reached out to u/lungbong for comment.