I think it hardly counts, but I was asked to make a rudimentary worker attendance system that would basically track arrival and departure times of my coworkers and store them online so the corporate office could have a record. I immediately thought of several ways I could accomplish this, but instead I insisted it just wasn't possible.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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While I can get frustrated by managers who insist on doing things in the most difficult and time-consuming way possible, it's sometimes a blessing that they lack the technical skills necessary to make some of their bad ideas come to life.
I had a manager who came up with an incredibly bad idea to track worker performance metrics. I played dumb and told him, "Oh sure, you can easily extract that from the database! It will take you only 5 minutes to set that up and then you can just run the report once a quarter." The cruelty was that he was incapable of doing any of that and that he was too prideful to admit to that fact.
I'm happy to help out coworkers and managers who are basically decent, and if I can make their work a little easier I'm 100% on board. These are also, not coincidentally, people who will listen if you tell them that their plan may be sub-optimal.
Supermarket employee here. I was aware about a system error of some sort where a type of frozen fish had a price of literally one cent per kg. (not providing any more details here, just in case). We had an asshole manager and lots of rather poor, old folks in the area that barely scraped by, like "please put this bread back because I am three pennies short and can't afford it" poor.
Instead of fixing the error, I told these customers to go buy that one brand of fish and STFU about it to anyone else. Our manager was the type of "comic villain" greedy asshole who would personally set expired food on fire rather than giving it to a charity, so I am not feeling sorry in the slightest. He once yelled at a coworker (in front of customers, no less) for suggesting that we could reduce the price on a bunch of wares that were damaged during transport instead of outright tossing them away.
I no longer work in that store, but not because of this thing (they never found out). I just couldn't stand that asshole manager anymore and switched jobs after getting a better offer elsewhere.
I was a bit of a Marxist communist in my mid 20s, and ate 'free'(stolen) food quite frequently at a restaurant I worked at, after a more hard core Marxist co-worker mentioned that as a way to drag 'the system' down. It seemed sort of ethical at the time, but I regretted it later in life.
I wish I could answer this but I don't want to be sued or fired. Need a burner 😂
Never really needed to, but if I did, I definitely would. That said, it seems highly unlikely to occur and my job already lends itself to a solid ethical code: I can't really see any ethical dilemmas coming up.
Closest thing I can think of would be smuggling food back from banquets to give to interns who weren't invited.