I was a salary employee at a financial institution working in Information security. I very rarely took my breaks and to avoid traffic I typically came in early and left late. After about 1-2 years they decided they wanted me to get a degree(despite 20 years of exp). They had a really great tuition reimbursement program and would allow for a flexible schedule so I figured I would do it to appease management.
My boss was fine with however many hours I put in as long as my work was done and I only had gotten positive reviews. I took a 7 am math class which was in person only and ended up getting to work a little late around 9:45 or 10:00. I usually worked until 6 and didn’t take a lunch so I was still working 40 hours a week.
About a month or two into the math class my boss pulls me into a meeting. He starts off by saying how good of a job I was doing and he was mandated by his boss the information security director to speak to me about not working enough hours. He then tells me the director was apparently monitoring our Skype status and said mine was not green enough of the time. He goes off about her and tells me how he tried to argue with her and asked why she can’t leave him to manage his team. He told me to power on my laptop from home and keep Skype green after hours while I watch tv or play video games or w/e to appease her until the class was over.
I was fairly irritated at this point as college was something THEY wanted me to do, my experience in a field with a massive negative unemployment rate is enough for me to land a new job fairly easily. On top of that I was working 40 hours a week! At this point my resume was updated and LinkedIn was set to open to new jobs.
After the class was over I dropped out of school. I stopped caring, I no longer pushed self imposed projects forward, I did the bare minimum to keep the tools running and mostly just worked the ticket queue and watched a bunch of YouTube. I also stopped coming in early, I would now sit in traffic and arrive promptly at 9am and left at 4:45. I would take often breaks to wander around, do some puzzles in the lunch room and bullshit with random other employees at their desks causing countless hours of wasted productivity to multiple IT departments. I took 1-1.5 hour lunches. Good job micromanaging you now got exactly what you wanted I’m in the office 9-5 and being less productive and working less hours then ever!
A few months later a recruiter reached out on LinkedIn and I was offered a job with a 30% raise working from home.
During my exit interview I went into detail on why I left and what caused me to start looking for another job.
Shortly after I quit both my boss and my coworker quit as well for similar reasons. They were down to 1 person besides the director in information security in the whole department.