Early in my career I was the only engineer in a company with a dedicated office building full of people selling my work to Fortune 500 companies as that of a large team. Slept under my desk a lot as the 80 hour weeks made me choose between commuting and sleeping.

It got worse when they hired someone to manage me that demanded I use Basecamp to log every action I take in my day .

I wrote a script to fill it out with technical sounding nonsense. After a few weeks the manager came to compliment me on hearing his demands out and being so detailed in my reporting without productivity going down as I suggested in my early reservations.

I explained that I automated it. He was fascinated and asked how it knows what I am doing, smelling a startup opportunity. I explained that it just makes stuff up to appease non technical managers.

"Did you just do this as an elaborate way to give me the middle finger?"

"Pretty much."

He never tried to manage me again, realizing I had automated his job reporting to his managers too.

Said script for fun: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lrvick/5ecabfc4bb5a2f5578...