What law or rule exists because of you? What happened?

"Ok class, for the rest of the semester, we're going to use the C89 standard".

I forgot the return 0; at the end of my main function and lost points on a test. Decided to be a point slut to ensure an A in the class and argued that it's allowed in the C99 standard. The professor sighed and gave me back my points, but next class specified the exact standard he was grading by.

"Train new people"

What do you think is going to happen if you hire a brand new person out of college, give them no directions, mentorship, processes, or procedures, and literally say "don't ask me, I pay you to figure it out"?

I can work in a "ask for forgiveness, not permission - move fast and break things" culture. But then people shouldn't be getting mad when shit breaks.

"New lab rule: no Ph.D. defences in poetry form."

Still passed and had a grand old time.

As a second-year uni student I applied for a tutoring job at the university. I was still underage by a few weeks when the semester started, which caused them a bit of extra bureaucratic hassle when I was supposed to sign the contract.

After that, they've added a question "are you going to be at least 18 when starting the position" to the application form :D

Not so much a rule, but a new restriction. So, in my school, 8th grade classrooms were directly above the floor where 6th grade classrooms were. The classrooms on the upper floor were connected by what were essentially just concrete bridges. You could just jump from the upper floor corridors to the ground floor and skip the crowded stairs, but teachers were always on the watch. I guess they cheaped out.

So back when I was in 6th grade, I used to get bullied a lot. Like, the whole time. One day, I was in a particularly bad mood, as I was returning to my room just after the recess bell rang, from the upper floor to the ground floor. A kid decided it was a nice idea to grab my books and throw them down to one of his friends, where he could run away with it. The stairs were too overcrowded usually at this time, the complete recess could be over and you'd be stuck halfway.

So the guy ran up to me from behind, grabbed my books and threw them below, where his friend caught it as expected. Me being in a fuck-all bad mood, I just jumped straight down from the corridors, and much to the bewilderment of the guy below, caught him in just a second. Teachers went wild on me for that. I was called to the principal's office, threatened suspension, yada yada, but they didn't do anything in the end because I was good at studies - the whole reason for me being bullied.

Over the weekend, they removed the tiny railings and installed complete floor to roof bars to prevent anyone from dropping below. So yeah, I kind of changed a rule, depends on how you view it.

No nested SQL queries allowed.

Edit: it was for a built in query language to populate dashboards (think Jira JQL meets Domo).

I had some inefficient SQL queries that meant we had to put some guardrails around user input so others didn't take down prod like I did

Where I work in software development, we were about to undertake writing a pretty large application from scratch. Mostly, the company was a Java plus Spring shop with a few exceptions. One team wrote almost exclusively Python, for instance. But as far as I knew, there wasn't any specific policy requiring the use of any particular language.

So as a team, we pushed to write our new project in Python. It was originally my idea, but my team got on board with it pretty quickly. Plus there was precedent for Python projects and Python was definitely appropriate for our use case.

The managers took it up the chain. The chain hemmed and hawed for months, but eventually made a more official policy that we had to use Java (and Spring).

Not exactly a rule but I work in a call center and during Covid it was decided that we would help with contact tracing. But this was a special contact tracing program for a specific large city and they had their own system setup for this. Before covid it was used for STD contact tracing and trained nurses did most of the work.

So they spend a week training us on this new system and it quickly becomes clear that this is way above our pay grade. We are dealing with confidential health records and shit, not at all something we are trained or qualified for. Certainly not after a week of garbage training.

So I start looking into our job description and quickly determine that this is not at all covered. To make things worse, the nurses currently doing this job are getting paid triple what we are to do the same work. I decided to question this and asked upper management if they felt this fell in our job description and if it's something we should be doing. After a bit of back and forth of explaining why they said they would get back to me.

Well sure enough, a week later they cancel the project and tell us to go back to our regular work. I never heard back from them but I guess they also determined we weren't qualified.

At an old job, I used to work the early shift from 6am-3pm with an hour lunch whenever I wanted. One winter, I thought it'd be nice to try and commute home with plenty of sunshine, so I "took my lunch" at 2:00 and went home. This ended up going on for a couple months until other people started doing it too, and finally management started telling us that we couldn't take our lunch breaks during the last hour of a shift.

Sure was nice while it lasted!