> One time he decided he really-really wanted a raise at the next review and introduced a system of punishment where if you're late by N minutes you'll have to do N*P (Where P is number of people in the team) tasks from the backlog.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how this relates to the parent. Your story portrays a hypocritical and abusive manager. That "rule" was not enforced by the contract, and you were not legally obliged to follow it. I would've been more curious to see what you tried to do or say to repel it.

What I did was try to stall to see if he would run out of steam and come to his senses, this was on Wednesday. That day I also made the call to a team I've interviewed with before to ask if they would still be happy to see me. They were.

Next Monday what I said was roughly this: "We've got more important tasks than the backlog now, let's discuss how we can fit them in later today". What I heard next were profanities saying that I literally fucked up and I have to do them after work.

(Mind you, this was not 1-on-1 but a team meeting, so the entire team was present, 3 more people) Next I asked whether I would be paid for that work and the answer, of course, surprised nobody. I asked him whether HR would share his point of view (This is a company who cares about the image of a model employer), to which he said that I come to work later than the hours that are in my employment contract. (This was a guy who supposedly cared about the output, not asses in chairs and he was OK with people showing up later) I grew tired of this attitude and politely told him that I already made arrangements for my next job and I quit.

Transferring my work to the team was smooth and I left in good spirits.

Yup, number of managers who say "I don't care about effort only output" is much higher than managers who actually care about output over effort.

I'm fortunate that my manager actually does act how he talks. Personally, I don't care too much if you value the presence of my butt in my seat more than how much I get done; it's your dime, so to speak. However if you lie to me about what you are paying me for, then neither one of us is going to be happy.

not taken as an attack :)

every software engineer with a few years experience has a stack of these anecdotes.

they happen because non-technical management don't understand the creative nature of coding, so treat it as an exercise in numbers - "if I have x coders working for y hours then I will get x * y development done".

trying to persuade them that it's not like that, and (for instance) adding one more developer may reduce productivity over the team as the communication and training load increases, is a really hard problem

Sad thing is, this manager was technical and also the CEO of the company was a developer himself for 2 decades.

In this case it was not about ignorance or incompetence, it was about greed.