20 ms·

Updating classic workplace sabotage techniques

378 points by cstross 10y ago

tajen 10y ago
1) Everything which doesn't have a rule should have a rule. It applies to the kitchen policy, to the bathroom policy ("Keep the toilets clean"), to the password policy. Initiate a company discussion to get feedback, the exclude the black sheep. 2) Spread rumours about how the dept/company/sector is cutting jobs. It is very important that employees feel they're in surplus so they'll work more. Keep them upset about things, so they'll focus on that instead of programming. 3) Promote women. Don't help men to succeed or learn things.
wglb 10y ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage
cdevs 10y ago
Is my job being taken down by the cia? So many meetings and rules! This list is epic I would expect mike judge to write t for Silicon Valley. As for its usefulness in the real world the opposite of each rule should be shown to all management as what to do.
alva 10y ago
Researching leaked/de-classified governmental documents can be incredibly interesting, especially if its from a 3 letter agency. Tons of practical techniques can be gleaned from studying the content or citations, which is easily translatable from warfare/diplomacy to layman personal/professional interactions. A basic analysis of a selection of the NSA/GCQH leaks showed a significant number of citations to various marketing textbooks and public research papers.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tyre 10y ago
1) Promote based on tenure. If they found your company first, they're a priori more dedicated and therefore better qualified to lead. 2) Promote into/within people management roles based on their skill as an individual contributor. E.g. the better the programmer, the better they will be at managing programmers. 3) Create a set of company values vague enough to be meaningless. Enforce them selectively and only when convenient. 4) In the name of inclusiveness, expand meeting invitations to anyone who could possibly be affected by anything talked about. Refer to them as stakeholders. Be sure to include anyone whose job is unrelated but may be interested or have an opinion. 5) All goals should be subjective. The subjective meaning of the goal should change based on timing, external factors, mood, or self-confidence. If you aren't happy, someone (else) is doing something wrong and you should immediately switch directions. This is especially important in hiring. 6) In all meetings (see 4), require consensus. 7) Set individual performance metrics based on effort. Strong indicators: - Individual sends emails late at night - You see individual in the office late at night/early in the morning - Individual speaks frequently in meetings - Individual always seems so busy 8) Hire based on pedigree, especially from names you know. If they did not attend the Tier 1 school (Stanford), they're probably not an A player. Recruit from companies with entirely different problems from your own. For example, if you're a small startup, target executives at Google so they can make you into Google. If you're a large company, acquihire small startups to inject agility and hunger.
- sputknick 10y ago
  Well done. Corollary to #4: expand email "To" field to anyone who could possibly be affected by anything talked about.
  - erichurkman 10y ago
    4(c). Make sure to include company@ in the BCC field of every email you send, just in case your email affects someone you don't know.
    - andymurd 10y ago
      Better tick that "high-priority" flag too. Your message is more important because it is from you.
thedevil 10y ago
I'm a career changer from actuary to software developer. The most shocking part of the career change was open office arrangements. Both careers are technical and require both concentration and collaboration. Actuaries tend to have their own cubicles (offices for mid-level and higher). Software developers require much more concentration. So I just assumed that the virtually all software developers would have their own offices because a solo cubicle seemed inadequate for most developer jobs. And of course, who would be dumb enough to use open office for developers? ... well, I got a little surprise. Everyone tries to undo the damage of a bad floor design with expensive headphones, but it's just not adequate.
- kaishiro 10y ago
  I'm clearly the outlier here - reading through the rest of the comments - but I actually hate working by myself. Given the choice between a private office and a shared table at a coffee shop I'd take the coffee shop every time. The thing is, for me it's not about social interaction. I just enjoy working amongst other people who are also amongst others working. Something about the energy I guess. Sounds silly when I write it out.
  - johnmaguire2013 10y ago
    I think this may largely depend on facts like whether you are naturally introverted/extroverted, and how you grew up, or learned to program. For me, I learned to program as a hobby, from ages 10-18, for fun at home. I mostly worked alone. Learning to work on a team took some time, but even now I often times wish I could work remote. I don't mind getting pinged about things people need, but the constant noise and movement of the office makes me far less productive than I would otherwise be. However, sometimes it offers me the focus I need to actually work, if I'm in a procrastinating mood. And I think some people probably struggle with this more often than I do.
    - nalllar 10y ago
      I'm in almost the same situation as you, of learning to program alone at home and introverted in general. I feel much more productive working in an open-plan office than working alone. :s
klenwell 10y ago
A corollary to #3: It is also the job of Human Resources to ensure that the company scores as highly as possible in the local business journal's annual edition of the Best Places to Work. Here's a link to an "anonymous" survey with a unique ID embedded in the URL. We strongly encourage you to fill it out.
epalmer 10y ago
Heros that invoke long days to save the company from a crisis are well rewarded. The rewards are increased by a factor of two if the hero sleeps under their desk in an old, moldy sleeping bag. The rewards are tripled if the hero created the crisis him or herself. Edit: typo
gonyea 10y ago
You don't need to sabotage competing tech companies. They sabotage themselves just fine. - Byzantine hiring practices. Create engineering teams that are 95% new college grads. They're the only ones who'll suffer your BS, while having no experience to call upon in challenging decisions.
flerchin 10y ago
Disallow email export. Delete all email older than 90 days.
- cardiffspaceman 10y ago
  FRCP?
F_Catalan 10y ago
Pile on every cargo cult "quality assurance" technique until everybody keeps getting glowing performance reviews about how they helped implement the neat SWOT matrix that pointed to the need for better performance reviews whose consequence will make clear the path to even better SWOT matrices that will discover that more extensive performance reviews would result in...
- a3n 10y ago
  I call this work about work.
nxzero 10y ago
If someone was actively subverting an office it would rapidly kill a company. Maybe this is the point, but to me all the comments and even article itself read more like a commertary on common issues than an subversive insider attack.
- Namrog84 10y ago
  I read it and thought it was just a commentary on things that are wrong. With a slight sarcastic and reverse psychology spin.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Just like a virus that kills their hosts quickly is a shitty virus, killing the company outright may not be the best way of sabotage, especially today, when companies are dime a dozen. Instead, a good sabotage will make the company extremely unproductive but still alive - which leads them to suck a lot more money in than they'd otherwise need, waste most of it, and then turn out subpar products being sold by the power of marketing itself, and otherwise a waste of energy, fuel, materials and man-hours... ... oh wait, we're talking about sabotage, and here I am describing most of the consumer electronics.
- StillBored 10y ago
  I think the key is, small acts of sabotage that could never be considered sabotage, so there isn't any chance of getting caught. Using a hammer that is to small or adding another technology to an already complex technology stack would never be considered sabotage. They likely wouldn't even be considered incompetence, especially in the latter case if the person who added another database/programming language/web toolkit/etc managed to achieve something with in in a short period of time. Instead that person is a hero, and the costs associated with the decision are initially small and don't show up until that person is long gone. Repeated a few times the small hits to productivity/quality/etc will result significant lost ground. This is probably even more important long term in the technology industry than it is to a war effort. The sides would have to be close to evenly matched and the war would have to go on a long time for all the little bits of sabotage to add up.
DanBC 10y ago
1) Make people clock in. A local aerospace company used to make people clock in, which is bad enough, but they had to clock in at 8:42 because $BUREAUCRACY. 2) Have a small room for tea breaks. Split the workforce into two groups. Schedule one to end at the same time as the next one starts. (Teabreak for group A ends at 10:00 am; teabreak for group B starts at 10:00am;) This causes disruption and disgruntlement between people trying to wash up their cups and people trying to make their tea. 3) Allow some people to have cigarette breaks. Do not allow anyone else to have anything similar. 4) Occasionally drop in to the small room during teabreaks and have an important conversation, then allow that group an extra 5 minutes for their break but make sure the next teabreak group does not have that extra 5 minutes. 5) Observe what side of the desk people prefer to have their telephone. Tell them it's the wrong side, and that they must have it on the other side. Switch it for them. A surprising number of people don't just walk out here. The ones that stay? YOU HAVE BROKEN THEM AND VICTORY IS SURELY YOURS. CONTINUE TO CRUSH THEIR SPIRIT UNDER YOUR BOOTHEEL. 6) Tell someone that you're going to give them a payrise if they meet some vague but easily achievable criteria. Then, when they've achieved that, tell them that you hadn't promised the pay rise, and that their 360 feedback is disappointing this month. Especially because they keep moaning about the generous pay. There's probably plenty of good material in "Processed World" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_World_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_World_(magazine)
- JetSpiegel 10y ago
  http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue29/i29down.html http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue29/i29down.html Thanks for that link.
skrebbel 10y ago
Am I the only one here who doesn't understand posts like these? Anyone who's had a job or read a Dilbert comic once or twice can come up with lists like these. The difficult part is doing all of it right.* Look, I appreciate the history here, but nothing in the article ties back to actual planned sabotage. Do companies actually do this? Are top managers paid by competitors to break the companies they run? I mean, nearly all items on this list require C-level executive powers to effectively implement. In all honesty, it feels to me like this article is more about how happy Stross is about his career change than anything else. That's a perfectly good topic, but can we turn this around? What's good, actionable, advice for (aspiring) managers, founders and employees? What's the oppposite of active sabotage? And can we encourage active, constructive anti-sabotage without becoming a creepy cult? *) HN used to have lots of submissions about how to run companies right. Is it just me, or have those disappeared somewhat?
- ghughes 10y ago
  > HN used to have lots of submissions about how to run companies right. Is it just me, or have those disappeared somewhat? I interpreted this as being one of them.
  - huac 10y ago
    How? He provides no tips or guidelines for what to do, only some snark about what not to do.
    - a3n 10y ago
      "Do Not Enter" street signs are useful.
    - fighting 10y ago
      It's the principle of "first, do no harm". Almost nobody follows it, but there are good reasons it is the first and in many circumstances the only real piece of advice that can be given. Look up 'via negativa' as well and daoist wu wei philosophy if inclined.
- 10y ago
gabesullice 10y ago
A lot of these read more like workplace complaints and poor management processes. The point of the original was how an individual already on the system could perform small acts of sabotage. My list would be: 1) overestimate small tasks 2) Corollary to #1, underestimate large tasks 3) Find reasons to take the overestimated tasks and perform them slowly 4) Encourage your colleagues to take the larger tasks 5) Encourage bike shedding. Frequently evaluate your code standards. 6) If you are in the position to do so, enforce a terrible naming standard. 7) Write slow tests 8) Write useless tests 9) If you notice a coverage gap, try to introduce a subtle bug As a manager: 1) Discourage specialization in favor of "flexibility" 2) Assign tasks to those with the least domain knowledge, within reason 3) Avoid letting more than a single developer work on a particular system/increase the "bus factor" 4) If you are able, under promise and under deliver 5) When brought new ideas or are asked to use new tools, be very encouraging but say you need approval. Never ask for approval.
- karmacondon 10y ago
  The upvote button wasn't enough for me. Thank you for extending the ideas of that work place sabotage concept for modern tech work, like Stross implied he would. I'm not sure what to really learn from this sabotage idea, but your comment pointed out many of the obvious flaws in how things are done currently.
yuhong 10y ago
I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates, and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives. Or pick CEOs randomly from resumes submitted and trains them to be professional CEOs.
rcarmo 10y ago
I went through the second list and got a perfect 10 for one of my previous positions and an 8 for most of the others. This is as realistic as Dilbert.
EthanHeilman 10y ago
>"Programmers don't need root/admin access to their development environments. Marketing, however, need to be able to manage the CRM and should have global admin permissions across the network." This! Air gap developer workstations, have a formal procedure including a detailed approval form which must include a justification and must be reviewed and signed off by C-level for moving information/software between the outside network and the inside network.
- JetSpiegel 10y ago
  Include clauses on the contract that forbid you from installing any kind of software on work machines, and at the same time provision work machines with a clean Windows 8 install. Not even Notepad++, it's notepad.exe for C# or violating the contract.
vertis 10y ago
My problem with posts like this is that it's a vehicle for bashing the currently accepted practices. Here are a few of my favourites in no particular order: * Stand ups are bad - Let's be frank, I'm belting out code so quickly that staying on the same page as everyone else is just not worth the time anyway (at the speed I'm going it'll be done tomorrow anyway). * Pair programming is bad - when was the last time I caused a bug, right? Or for that matter hit a problem I couldn't solve, and wasted time having to research the solution. Never, right? Right...ohhhh look at the cute picture of my niece on Facebook. * Open plan offices are bad - I'm super important to the company, the company would break if I went away. I'm so much of a star that I should have the best office. Not to mention, I need somewhere to put all my trophies. * Meetings - don't get me started on meetings. BAN THEM ALL. There must be a better way to communicate? Email? Ummm, yeah Email, wait, no, I'll come back to email. I know, lets just have someone decide on the direction we're going to go and write it on a stone tablet, that'll save some meetings (I'll get started on the tablet right after I finish here). I mean lets think about it, why do we need to coordinate anything? I'm the rockstar and if you just leave me to belt out the code it'll all come together...what do you mean other parts of the business need to do things to get ready? * Emails - I get too many of them. For stupid things too. Ops alerts, customers asking questions, internal announcements, travel itineraries. Being included on email chain discussions about direction? Who needs that. What do you mean you made a decision without consulting me? Now we have to start over with the direction I want to go in. And I'm out of time. Off I go to my lean, agile, open plan job.
- vertis 10y ago
  Not sure I understand the down votes? Sure I made up the reasons above, but people are genuinely hating on the things I've mentioned with no real alternatives offered.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    Instead of engaging the actual points made, you made up a fake idiot, and made different, stupider arguments to support the same points. Lunch breaks are good - Dude, I love to eat, and if I can't stop working when I have my cheeseburger then nothing is getting getting done here even though I'm smelly and 500 pounds. Paychecks are necessary - I'm such a loser that I work for money instead of just loving cranking out sick code that disrupts the world. I grew up poor so I whine about people who don't need the money. Not eating arsenic - Oooh, I'm such a picky wimp that I can't take a little arsenic in my food... And I'm done. Off I go to my volunteer sweatshop that's slowly poisoning me to death.
hackbinary 10y ago
Give everybody in the company local admin rights. This will give all staff the ability to experiment and learn more about technology. Since everyone now has local admin and they can now manage their own computers, you can fire the IT staff who previously managed these workstations.
- 1ris 10y ago
  This sounds like it will result in a better environment that there is in many places. I have seen places with a strict "don't install anything policies" far to often. (I have even seen terms that techincally forbade executables in the home dir. For programmers.) Don't use anything you like. Or want. Or could use to work more productive. Use the outdated debian version of the shitty software that the benevolent admin choose for you. And good forbid you BYOD. Or want to the admin to install anything else. Fist of all, the admin knows best, second it's not in the debian repos. Given you have backups and ensure they can't fiddle with the authentication system: Go for it. It's like BYOD but with provided hardware.
  - hackbinary 10y ago
    We give our people who have reasonable need Local Admin. Giving local admin to the non-technical staff who want to download 'free' software (not FLOSS, free as in beer) because they think (at best) that they are saving the company money, but instead infest their computer malware. Most people are totally disinterested in their computing environment, let alone managing it. We standardise on certain packages because there is utility in having common programs from support, training, and administration points of view, but ultimately if there is a good reason to get/use something else, we will do that. Furthermore, any user with a local admin access can use a Kerberos 'Golden Ticket' leverage attack to gain full domain access across the entire realm. Are you seriously telling me that you want the teller at your bank to have local admin access to his workstation? How about the person at the IRS/CRA/HMRC/<you government tax office> that you just called? Local admin has its place, and certainly the first test is that will the person endanger their system by running dubious programs. The next question is if that person does infect their system, can they clean up the mess themselves? We went from a situation where we had local admin across our estate where we had at least one virus problem a week to one where I can not remember the last time we had one. Finally, can you really trust a Windows workstation after it has had an infection?
kmfrk 10y ago
Maybe this one is too obvious, but: 11) Ping ping tables and other noisy shit.
- 1ris 10y ago
  tabletop football is mandatory for hipness.
  - kmfrk 10y ago
    oh my god
- dumaspere 10y ago
  Air hockey is excellent for this.
ipsin 10y ago
I'm disappointed that this list seems to be made with the intent of describing current practices, rather than how you can actually disrupt the workplace as a saboteur. The idea of promoting incompetent people still works. That's a gem. For the small hammer/big hammer, simply choose technologies that are less suited and make them work. Sorry, our CRM is also our mapreduce framework. Make security an afterthought, and the world will do your sabotage for you.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Surprisingly many get away with only rudimentary security controls. I have a client that absolutely refuses to upgrade off Rails 2.3, even to the drop-in Rails LTS releases. Their "web director" keeps insisting that no one would want to infiltrate and that there's no damage can be caused by a compromise of Rails anyway. The frightening incompetence of that guy is maddening. Incidentally, I don't think he was put in place to sabotage the company. Just a case of well-meaning nepotism.
protomyth 10y ago
Pick vendors that ship patches to their enterprise software as a 705 megabyte SQL file that must be run and files that must be manually placed on the machine. You might think I joking, but I'm not.
- JetSpiegel 10y ago
  That's child's play. Here's a much worse true story. - Spend a couple months researching existing solutions for a complex product - Pick the "perfect" one - Ask for a quote - Recoil in horror at the price (about 1 weeks pay for that decision maker, in a 100+ people company) - Steal the damn JS library from their demo page - Use it on the product - ... - Profit? Once they can sell this turd
ipsin 10y ago
It's also a little irritating that a couple of commenters focus on minority/diversity hiring as a way to commit sabotage. In my experience, people who might be called "minority" or "diversity" hires tend to kick ass, possibly because they have put up with so much cognitive bias about how they supposedly don't belong.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> we can go a step further and institute hot desking—we will establish an average developer's workstation requirements and provide it for everyone at every desk. Oh, dont' we all wish. In practice, unfortunately, what's calculated is the average office worker's workstation requirements. Then the developer gets that, too, like everyone else.
- JetSpiegel 10y ago
  8GB of RAM ought to be enough for everybody. Even if you need two instances of Visual Studio on a VM.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    I was mostly thinking of monitor arrangements and how hotdesking messes with that. For instance, in my old workplace at Small Company™ I had two 24-inch monitors. In my current (but only for another two days) workplace at Big Corp™ we're only allowed a single 19-inch monitor. Try running two instances of VS on that. I have to constantly Alt-tab between browser and IDE, or stack windows side-by-side, which is not optimal. Obviously, because we're not allowed to keep anything on our desks, we can't bring our own monitor from home. So. >> 8GB of RAM ought to be enough for everybody. And even that is not a given. Frex, in the last two years at Big Corp™ I had to run a lot of machine learning algorithms - those were for my MSc course, sponsored by my employer so it was OK to run during office hours. Now, my work laptop has 12 GBs of RAM and it's noticeably faster than my home laptop, with 8 GBs and a similar processor. And the fact that my office laptop has 12 GBs is a happy accident. Normally you only get 4 GBs, 8 if you ask nicely. So I was going to ask for 8, but let's just say I got lucky and the person who managed my request for the new laptop didn't know much about RAM and suggested the 12-GB stick spontaneously (and obviously I didn't turn it down). But that's just a silly way to handle this sort of thing. Big Corp™ can afford to give devs much more if it wants to. It just doesn't value them as highly as other staff, who get the goodies they value highly.
lisa_henderson 10y ago
My favorite by far: "Teams are better than individuals and everyone has to be aware of the valuable contributions of employees in other roles. So let's team every programmer with a sales person—preferably working the phones at the same desk—and stack-rank them on the basis of each pair's combined quarterly contribution to the corporate bottom line." That is gooood. I would quit, yet be so traumatized that my productivity would still suffer, even at my next job. A double win for the enemy.
rcthompson 10y ago
Fortunately, someone already wrote the corresponding guide for software developers: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code
rdiddly 10y ago
I declare false advertising. Q: "How can we sabotage stuff?" A: "Here's a bunch of stuff I think is messed up. Leave your own complaints in the comments." I am disappoint. No creative sabotage ideas here, only observations of stuff already going on that we think is "wrong." Now granted, when looking for tips on how to fuck shit up, you can look at actual fucked-up shit and get ideas. But I guess I was hoping for something more creative. And yeah not the supposedly hilarious hahajoke that "Golly things are so messed up we can't even tell if they're inept or saboteurs," and not more complaints about "If only the world listened to my brilliant ideas about how to do things the 'right' way (my way)." If I had a dollar for every asshole with an opinion...
- chippy 10y ago
  It's because to admit to themselves that someone would want to sabotage a technology company would be to admit something much more troubling. There's no reason, in their healthy minds, why someone would want to sabotage their IT company. For me, the real interesting question is why would someone want to sabotage my workplace.
bitJericho 10y ago
I'd rather have a closed door and office and a company wide IRC server.
davidgerard 10y ago
As a sysadmin, I have long thought that the most effective workplace sabotage I could do would be not to question anything I was told to do. A huge chunk of my job is suggesting when things are in fact a bad idea.
ddalex 10y ago
I'm weirded out by not seeing Intel mentioned here, as being the inventor of cubicles, hotdesking, and failure to be in mobile business while having the best phab tech out there.
nutball 10y ago
I think the "sabotage" techniques suggested by the author actually benefit companies whose main product is built by intellectual labor. Companies care a great deal about controlling workers: to get them in line, to squeeze labor from them, to weed out motivated folks whose interests don't align with profit, to shut down rabble-rousers, etc. Since the dawn of work, workers have resisted working, and Agile, etc. are just the new strategies management use to control this new group of creative workers. I wish the author had addressed worker sabotage too. More on that here: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/manual-override/ http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/manual-override/
xerophyte12932 10y ago
It's scary how many of these policies my company follows...

378 points by cstross 10y ago

tajen 10y ago

1) Everything which doesn't have a rule should have a rule. It applies to the kitchen policy, to the bathroom policy ("Keep the toilets clean"), to the password policy. Initiate a company discussion to get feedback, the exclude the black sheep. 2) Spread rumours about how the dept/company/sector is cutting jobs. It is very important that employees feel they're in surplus so they'll work more. Keep them upset about things, so they'll focus on that instead of programming. 3) Promote women. Don't help men to succeed or learn things.

wglb 10y ago

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage

cdevs 10y ago

Is my job being taken down by the cia? So many meetings and rules! This list is epic I would expect mike judge to write t for Silicon Valley. As for its usefulness in the real world the opposite of each rule should be shown to all management as what to do.

alva 10y ago

Researching leaked/de-classified governmental documents can be incredibly interesting, especially if its from a 3 letter agency. Tons of practical techniques can be gleaned from studying the content or citations, which is easily translatable from warfare/diplomacy to layman personal/professional interactions. A basic analysis of a selection of the NSA/GCQH leaks showed a significant number of citations to various marketing textbooks and public research papers.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

tyre 10y ago

1) Promote based on tenure. If they found your company first, they're a priori more dedicated and therefore better qualified to lead. 2) Promote into/within people management roles based on their skill as an individual contributor. E.g. the better the programmer, the better they will be at managing programmers. 3) Create a set of company values vague enough to be meaningless. Enforce them selectively and only when convenient. 4) In the name of inclusiveness, expand meeting invitations to anyone who could possibly be affected by anything talked about. Refer to them as stakeholders. Be sure to include anyone whose job is unrelated but may be interested or have an opinion. 5) All goals should be subjective. The subjective meaning of the goal should change based on timing, external factors, mood, or self-confidence. If you aren't happy, someone (else) is doing something wrong and you should immediately switch directions. This is especially important in hiring. 6) In all meetings (see 4), require consensus. 7) Set individual performance metrics based on effort. Strong indicators: - Individual sends emails late at night - You see individual in the office late at night/early in the morning - Individual speaks frequently in meetings - Individual always seems so busy 8) Hire based on pedigree, especially from names you know. If they did not attend the Tier 1 school (Stanford), they're probably not an A player. Recruit from companies with entirely different problems from your own. For example, if you're a small startup, target executives at Google so they can make you into Google. If you're a large company, acquihire small startups to inject agility and hunger.

sputknick 10y ago
Well done. Corollary to #4: expand email "To" field to anyone who could possibly be affected by anything talked about.
- erichurkman 10y ago
  4(c). Make sure to include company@ in the BCC field of every email you send, just in case your email affects someone you don't know.
  - andymurd 10y ago
    Better tick that "high-priority" flag too. Your message is more important because it is from you.

thedevil 10y ago

I'm a career changer from actuary to software developer. The most shocking part of the career change was open office arrangements. Both careers are technical and require both concentration and collaboration. Actuaries tend to have their own cubicles (offices for mid-level and higher). Software developers require much more concentration. So I just assumed that the virtually all software developers would have their own offices because a solo cubicle seemed inadequate for most developer jobs. And of course, who would be dumb enough to use open office for developers? ... well, I got a little surprise. Everyone tries to undo the damage of a bad floor design with expensive headphones, but it's just not adequate.

kaishiro 10y ago
I'm clearly the outlier here - reading through the rest of the comments - but I actually hate working by myself. Given the choice between a private office and a shared table at a coffee shop I'd take the coffee shop every time. The thing is, for me it's not about social interaction. I just enjoy working amongst other people who are also amongst others working. Something about the energy I guess. Sounds silly when I write it out.
- johnmaguire2013 10y ago
  I think this may largely depend on facts like whether you are naturally introverted/extroverted, and how you grew up, or learned to program. For me, I learned to program as a hobby, from ages 10-18, for fun at home. I mostly worked alone. Learning to work on a team took some time, but even now I often times wish I could work remote. I don't mind getting pinged about things people need, but the constant noise and movement of the office makes me far less productive than I would otherwise be. However, sometimes it offers me the focus I need to actually work, if I'm in a procrastinating mood. And I think some people probably struggle with this more often than I do.
  - nalllar 10y ago
    I'm in almost the same situation as you, of learning to program alone at home and introverted in general. I feel much more productive working in an open-plan office than working alone. :s

klenwell 10y ago

A corollary to #3: It is also the job of Human Resources to ensure that the company scores as highly as possible in the local business journal's annual edition of the Best Places to Work. Here's a link to an "anonymous" survey with a unique ID embedded in the URL. We strongly encourage you to fill it out.

epalmer 10y ago

Heros that invoke long days to save the company from a crisis are well rewarded. The rewards are increased by a factor of two if the hero sleeps under their desk in an old, moldy sleeping bag. The rewards are tripled if the hero created the crisis him or herself. Edit: typo

gonyea 10y ago

You don't need to sabotage competing tech companies. They sabotage themselves just fine. - Byzantine hiring practices. Create engineering teams that are 95% new college grads. They're the only ones who'll suffer your BS, while having no experience to call upon in challenging decisions.

flerchin 10y ago

Disallow email export. Delete all email older than 90 days.

cardiffspaceman 10y ago
FRCP?

F_Catalan 10y ago

Pile on every cargo cult "quality assurance" technique until everybody keeps getting glowing performance reviews about how they helped implement the neat SWOT matrix that pointed to the need for better performance reviews whose consequence will make clear the path to even better SWOT matrices that will discover that more extensive performance reviews would result in...

a3n 10y ago
I call this work about work.

nxzero 10y ago

If someone was actively subverting an office it would rapidly kill a company. Maybe this is the point, but to me all the comments and even article itself read more like a commertary on common issues than an subversive insider attack.

Namrog84 10y ago
I read it and thought it was just a commentary on things that are wrong. With a slight sarcastic and reverse psychology spin.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Just like a virus that kills their hosts quickly is a shitty virus, killing the company outright may not be the best way of sabotage, especially today, when companies are dime a dozen. Instead, a good sabotage will make the company extremely unproductive but still alive - which leads them to suck a lot more money in than they'd otherwise need, waste most of it, and then turn out subpar products being sold by the power of marketing itself, and otherwise a waste of energy, fuel, materials and man-hours... ... oh wait, we're talking about sabotage, and here I am describing most of the consumer electronics.
StillBored 10y ago
I think the key is, small acts of sabotage that could never be considered sabotage, so there isn't any chance of getting caught. Using a hammer that is to small or adding another technology to an already complex technology stack would never be considered sabotage. They likely wouldn't even be considered incompetence, especially in the latter case if the person who added another database/programming language/web toolkit/etc managed to achieve something with in in a short period of time. Instead that person is a hero, and the costs associated with the decision are initially small and don't show up until that person is long gone. Repeated a few times the small hits to productivity/quality/etc will result significant lost ground. This is probably even more important long term in the technology industry than it is to a war effort. The sides would have to be close to evenly matched and the war would have to go on a long time for all the little bits of sabotage to add up.

DanBC 10y ago

1) Make people clock in. A local aerospace company used to make people clock in, which is bad enough, but they had to clock in at 8:42 because $BUREAUCRACY. 2) Have a small room for tea breaks. Split the workforce into two groups. Schedule one to end at the same time as the next one starts. (Teabreak for group A ends at 10:00 am; teabreak for group B starts at 10:00am;) This causes disruption and disgruntlement between people trying to wash up their cups and people trying to make their tea. 3) Allow some people to have cigarette breaks. Do not allow anyone else to have anything similar. 4) Occasionally drop in to the small room during teabreaks and have an important conversation, then allow that group an extra 5 minutes for their break but make sure the next teabreak group does not have that extra 5 minutes. 5) Observe what side of the desk people prefer to have their telephone. Tell them it's the wrong side, and that they must have it on the other side. Switch it for them. A surprising number of people don't just walk out here. The ones that stay? YOU HAVE BROKEN THEM AND VICTORY IS SURELY YOURS. CONTINUE TO CRUSH THEIR SPIRIT UNDER YOUR BOOTHEEL. 6) Tell someone that you're going to give them a payrise if they meet some vague but easily achievable criteria. Then, when they've achieved that, tell them that you hadn't promised the pay rise, and that their 360 feedback is disappointing this month. Especially because they keep moaning about the generous pay. There's probably plenty of good material in "Processed World" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_World_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_World_(magazine)

JetSpiegel 10y ago
http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue29/i29down.html http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue29/i29down.html Thanks for that link.

skrebbel 10y ago

Am I the only one here who doesn't understand posts like these? Anyone who's had a job or read a Dilbert comic once or twice can come up with lists like these. The difficult part is doing all of it right.* Look, I appreciate the history here, but nothing in the article ties back to actual planned sabotage. Do companies actually do this? Are top managers paid by competitors to break the companies they run? I mean, nearly all items on this list require C-level executive powers to effectively implement. In all honesty, it feels to me like this article is more about how happy Stross is about his career change than anything else. That's a perfectly good topic, but can we turn this around? What's good, actionable, advice for (aspiring) managers, founders and employees? What's the oppposite of active sabotage? And can we encourage active, constructive anti-sabotage without becoming a creepy cult? *) HN used to have lots of submissions about how to run companies right. Is it just me, or have those disappeared somewhat?

ghughes 10y ago
> HN used to have lots of submissions about how to run companies right. Is it just me, or have those disappeared somewhat? I interpreted this as being one of them.
- huac 10y ago
  How? He provides no tips or guidelines for what to do, only some snark about what not to do.
  - a3n 10y ago
    "Do Not Enter" street signs are useful.
  - fighting 10y ago
    It's the principle of "first, do no harm". Almost nobody follows it, but there are good reasons it is the first and in many circumstances the only real piece of advice that can be given. Look up 'via negativa' as well and daoist wu wei philosophy if inclined.
10y ago

gabesullice 10y ago

A lot of these read more like workplace complaints and poor management processes. The point of the original was how an individual already on the system could perform small acts of sabotage. My list would be: 1) overestimate small tasks 2) Corollary to #1, underestimate large tasks 3) Find reasons to take the overestimated tasks and perform them slowly 4) Encourage your colleagues to take the larger tasks 5) Encourage bike shedding. Frequently evaluate your code standards. 6) If you are in the position to do so, enforce a terrible naming standard. 7) Write slow tests 8) Write useless tests 9) If you notice a coverage gap, try to introduce a subtle bug As a manager: 1) Discourage specialization in favor of "flexibility" 2) Assign tasks to those with the least domain knowledge, within reason 3) Avoid letting more than a single developer work on a particular system/increase the "bus factor" 4) If you are able, under promise and under deliver 5) When brought new ideas or are asked to use new tools, be very encouraging but say you need approval. Never ask for approval.

karmacondon 10y ago
The upvote button wasn't enough for me. Thank you for extending the ideas of that work place sabotage concept for modern tech work, like Stross implied he would. I'm not sure what to really learn from this sabotage idea, but your comment pointed out many of the obvious flaws in how things are done currently.

yuhong 10y ago

I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates, and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives. Or pick CEOs randomly from resumes submitted and trains them to be professional CEOs.

rcarmo 10y ago

I went through the second list and got a perfect 10 for one of my previous positions and an 8 for most of the others. This is as realistic as Dilbert.

EthanHeilman 10y ago

>"Programmers don't need root/admin access to their development environments. Marketing, however, need to be able to manage the CRM and should have global admin permissions across the network." This! Air gap developer workstations, have a formal procedure including a detailed approval form which must include a justification and must be reviewed and signed off by C-level for moving information/software between the outside network and the inside network.

JetSpiegel 10y ago
Include clauses on the contract that forbid you from installing any kind of software on work machines, and at the same time provision work machines with a clean Windows 8 install. Not even Notepad++, it's notepad.exe for C# or violating the contract.

vertis 10y ago

My problem with posts like this is that it's a vehicle for bashing the currently accepted practices. Here are a few of my favourites in no particular order: * Stand ups are bad - Let's be frank, I'm belting out code so quickly that staying on the same page as everyone else is just not worth the time anyway (at the speed I'm going it'll be done tomorrow anyway). * Pair programming is bad - when was the last time I caused a bug, right? Or for that matter hit a problem I couldn't solve, and wasted time having to research the solution. Never, right? Right...ohhhh look at the cute picture of my niece on Facebook. * Open plan offices are bad - I'm super important to the company, the company would break if I went away. I'm so much of a star that I should have the best office. Not to mention, I need somewhere to put all my trophies. * Meetings - don't get me started on meetings. BAN THEM ALL. There must be a better way to communicate? Email? Ummm, yeah Email, wait, no, I'll come back to email. I know, lets just have someone decide on the direction we're going to go and write it on a stone tablet, that'll save some meetings (I'll get started on the tablet right after I finish here). I mean lets think about it, why do we need to coordinate anything? I'm the rockstar and if you just leave me to belt out the code it'll all come together...what do you mean other parts of the business need to do things to get ready? * Emails - I get too many of them. For stupid things too. Ops alerts, customers asking questions, internal announcements, travel itineraries. Being included on email chain discussions about direction? Who needs that. What do you mean you made a decision without consulting me? Now we have to start over with the direction I want to go in. And I'm out of time. Off I go to my lean, agile, open plan job.

vertis 10y ago
Not sure I understand the down votes? Sure I made up the reasons above, but people are genuinely hating on the things I've mentioned with no real alternatives offered.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Instead of engaging the actual points made, you made up a fake idiot, and made different, stupider arguments to support the same points. Lunch breaks are good - Dude, I love to eat, and if I can't stop working when I have my cheeseburger then nothing is getting getting done here even though I'm smelly and 500 pounds. Paychecks are necessary - I'm such a loser that I work for money instead of just loving cranking out sick code that disrupts the world. I grew up poor so I whine about people who don't need the money. Not eating arsenic - Oooh, I'm such a picky wimp that I can't take a little arsenic in my food... And I'm done. Off I go to my volunteer sweatshop that's slowly poisoning me to death.

hackbinary 10y ago

Give everybody in the company local admin rights. This will give all staff the ability to experiment and learn more about technology. Since everyone now has local admin and they can now manage their own computers, you can fire the IT staff who previously managed these workstations.

1ris 10y ago
This sounds like it will result in a better environment that there is in many places. I have seen places with a strict "don't install anything policies" far to often. (I have even seen terms that techincally forbade executables in the home dir. For programmers.) Don't use anything you like. Or want. Or could use to work more productive. Use the outdated debian version of the shitty software that the benevolent admin choose for you. And good forbid you BYOD. Or want to the admin to install anything else. Fist of all, the admin knows best, second it's not in the debian repos. Given you have backups and ensure they can't fiddle with the authentication system: Go for it. It's like BYOD but with provided hardware.
- hackbinary 10y ago
  We give our people who have reasonable need Local Admin. Giving local admin to the non-technical staff who want to download 'free' software (not FLOSS, free as in beer) because they think (at best) that they are saving the company money, but instead infest their computer malware. Most people are totally disinterested in their computing environment, let alone managing it. We standardise on certain packages because there is utility in having common programs from support, training, and administration points of view, but ultimately if there is a good reason to get/use something else, we will do that. Furthermore, any user with a local admin access can use a Kerberos 'Golden Ticket' leverage attack to gain full domain access across the entire realm. Are you seriously telling me that you want the teller at your bank to have local admin access to his workstation? How about the person at the IRS/CRA/HMRC/<you government tax office> that you just called? Local admin has its place, and certainly the first test is that will the person endanger their system by running dubious programs. The next question is if that person does infect their system, can they clean up the mess themselves? We went from a situation where we had local admin across our estate where we had at least one virus problem a week to one where I can not remember the last time we had one. Finally, can you really trust a Windows workstation after it has had an infection?

kmfrk 10y ago

Maybe this one is too obvious, but: 11) Ping ping tables and other noisy shit.

1ris 10y ago
tabletop football is mandatory for hipness.
- kmfrk 10y ago
  oh my god
dumaspere 10y ago
Air hockey is excellent for this.

ipsin 10y ago

I'm disappointed that this list seems to be made with the intent of describing current practices, rather than how you can actually disrupt the workplace as a saboteur. The idea of promoting incompetent people still works. That's a gem. For the small hammer/big hammer, simply choose technologies that are less suited and make them work. Sorry, our CRM is also our mapreduce framework. Make security an afterthought, and the world will do your sabotage for you.

cookiecaper 10y ago
Surprisingly many get away with only rudimentary security controls. I have a client that absolutely refuses to upgrade off Rails 2.3, even to the drop-in Rails LTS releases. Their "web director" keeps insisting that no one would want to infiltrate and that there's no damage can be caused by a compromise of Rails anyway. The frightening incompetence of that guy is maddening. Incidentally, I don't think he was put in place to sabotage the company. Just a case of well-meaning nepotism.

protomyth 10y ago

Pick vendors that ship patches to their enterprise software as a 705 megabyte SQL file that must be run and files that must be manually placed on the machine. You might think I joking, but I'm not.

JetSpiegel 10y ago
That's child's play. Here's a much worse true story. - Spend a couple months researching existing solutions for a complex product - Pick the "perfect" one - Ask for a quote - Recoil in horror at the price (about 1 weeks pay for that decision maker, in a 100+ people company) - Steal the damn JS library from their demo page - Use it on the product - ... - Profit? Once they can sell this turd

ipsin 10y ago

It's also a little irritating that a couple of commenters focus on minority/diversity hiring as a way to commit sabotage. In my experience, people who might be called "minority" or "diversity" hires tend to kick ass, possibly because they have put up with so much cognitive bias about how they supposedly don't belong.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> we can go a step further and institute hot desking—we will establish an average developer's workstation requirements and provide it for everyone at every desk. Oh, dont' we all wish. In practice, unfortunately, what's calculated is the average office worker's workstation requirements. Then the developer gets that, too, like everyone else.

JetSpiegel 10y ago
8GB of RAM ought to be enough for everybody. Even if you need two instances of Visual Studio on a VM.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  I was mostly thinking of monitor arrangements and how hotdesking messes with that. For instance, in my old workplace at Small Company™ I had two 24-inch monitors. In my current (but only for another two days) workplace at Big Corp™ we're only allowed a single 19-inch monitor. Try running two instances of VS on that. I have to constantly Alt-tab between browser and IDE, or stack windows side-by-side, which is not optimal. Obviously, because we're not allowed to keep anything on our desks, we can't bring our own monitor from home. So. >> 8GB of RAM ought to be enough for everybody. And even that is not a given. Frex, in the last two years at Big Corp™ I had to run a lot of machine learning algorithms - those were for my MSc course, sponsored by my employer so it was OK to run during office hours. Now, my work laptop has 12 GBs of RAM and it's noticeably faster than my home laptop, with 8 GBs and a similar processor. And the fact that my office laptop has 12 GBs is a happy accident. Normally you only get 4 GBs, 8 if you ask nicely. So I was going to ask for 8, but let's just say I got lucky and the person who managed my request for the new laptop didn't know much about RAM and suggested the 12-GB stick spontaneously (and obviously I didn't turn it down). But that's just a silly way to handle this sort of thing. Big Corp™ can afford to give devs much more if it wants to. It just doesn't value them as highly as other staff, who get the goodies they value highly.

lisa_henderson 10y ago

My favorite by far: "Teams are better than individuals and everyone has to be aware of the valuable contributions of employees in other roles. So let's team every programmer with a sales person—preferably working the phones at the same desk—and stack-rank them on the basis of each pair's combined quarterly contribution to the corporate bottom line." That is gooood. I would quit, yet be so traumatized that my productivity would still suffer, even at my next job. A double win for the enemy.

rcthompson 10y ago

Fortunately, someone already wrote the corresponding guide for software developers: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code

rdiddly 10y ago

I declare false advertising. Q: "How can we sabotage stuff?" A: "Here's a bunch of stuff I think is messed up. Leave your own complaints in the comments." I am disappoint. No creative sabotage ideas here, only observations of stuff already going on that we think is "wrong." Now granted, when looking for tips on how to fuck shit up, you can look at actual fucked-up shit and get ideas. But I guess I was hoping for something more creative. And yeah not the supposedly hilarious hahajoke that "Golly things are so messed up we can't even tell if they're inept or saboteurs," and not more complaints about "If only the world listened to my brilliant ideas about how to do things the 'right' way (my way)." If I had a dollar for every asshole with an opinion...

chippy 10y ago
It's because to admit to themselves that someone would want to sabotage a technology company would be to admit something much more troubling. There's no reason, in their healthy minds, why someone would want to sabotage their IT company. For me, the real interesting question is why would someone want to sabotage my workplace.

bitJericho 10y ago

I'd rather have a closed door and office and a company wide IRC server.

davidgerard 10y ago

As a sysadmin, I have long thought that the most effective workplace sabotage I could do would be not to question anything I was told to do. A huge chunk of my job is suggesting when things are in fact a bad idea.

ddalex 10y ago

I'm weirded out by not seeing Intel mentioned here, as being the inventor of cubicles, hotdesking, and failure to be in mobile business while having the best phab tech out there.

nutball 10y ago

I think the "sabotage" techniques suggested by the author actually benefit companies whose main product is built by intellectual labor. Companies care a great deal about controlling workers: to get them in line, to squeeze labor from them, to weed out motivated folks whose interests don't align with profit, to shut down rabble-rousers, etc. Since the dawn of work, workers have resisted working, and Agile, etc. are just the new strategies management use to control this new group of creative workers. I wish the author had addressed worker sabotage too. More on that here: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/manual-override/ http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/manual-override/

xerophyte12932 10y ago

It's scary how many of these policies my company follows...