I don’t consider it malicious if people won’t listen to my advice. I gave you my advice. Ignore it now and cry about it later. I don’t waste my time trying to persuade you.
The law says that the students are not allowed to have food or water during the test?
Does getting married count?
Yup. I will happily conspire with people intent on their own destruction.
You want to work on that machine without following proper lock-out / tag-out procedures? Sure, I’ll hand you a screwdriver. I warned him, but I’m not his babysitter. He was in a sling for a month.
Want to sue to reduce your child support payments even though you haven’t actually been paying your existing court-ordered child support? Great! Here’s how you file the paperwork. Good luck, and don’t take any shit from that judge. Went straight to jail, did not pass go, lost a lot more than $200.
Unfortunately, yes. I’m also a consultant. A few years ago, I was hired by a huge corporate client for a long-term integration project. I was expected to work independently, and to make sure that all of the upstream and downstream flows for the system I was working with were working as expected. A big part of this was testing the incoming data, ensuring it was correct, and then verifying it was loaded correctly.
So first iteration of testing, I had to create tools, basically spreadsheet templates, to verify the incoming data. Once verified, I’d run whichever load program was needed, and then check the data in-system using a series of ad-hoc reports I wrote. Everything went pretty well, that round of integration went live, and we moved onto the second phase of the project. This was a breeze because I already had the tools I needed and I spent more time helping to troubleshoot upstream data issues than actually testing.
After the second iteration went live, I was told that the testing would be taken over by offshore outsourcers, and I needed to turn it over to them. No problem. I refined things a bit, wrote up a couple of documents, sent them to the outsourcing manager and requested he set up an initial meeting so we could go over the procedures and schedule a walkthrough. Initial meeting is scheduled, I call in, and then am told I got the scope wrong – only the technical testing was being handed over. Confused, I asked what they meant by technical testing. It meant they would run the load programs.
So, previous way things worked. Data centre prepares a file, sends it across and informs me, I pick it up, verify the data, load it, test the loaded data, inform people of the results and then generate any outputs going downstream. New way things would work. Data centre prepares a file, sends it across to the test system the outsourcer used (which had a different file network that I didn’t have access to) and informs outsourcer. Outsourcer emails the file to me to verify. I verify it and inform outsourcer. Outsourcer runs whichever load program is needed, and then notifies me to do the in-system testing. I do this and report on the results. Outsourcer then generates the outputs. I should mention at this point that the data centre, the outsourcer, and me are all in different time zones.
I called my boss, who was in a fourth time zone, and let him know I disagreed with the new plan. He agreed with my disagreement, and told me he’d get back to me. He did, the next day, and told me the new plan was going forward. So from that point, every test took twice as long. If there were any testing issues, they took three times as long to resolve. On the other hand I had free time pretty much every afternoon because the outsourcer employees had gone home. Two weeks before go-live, we’re severely behind schedule. A meeting with all involved parties and several senior directors was called to ensure the deadline would be met. The data centre director, who was aware of the hand-off and timing issues, explained the problems to the senior boss. Senior boss then informed the outsourcers that their day would start one hour before the data-centre’s start time, and it would continue through UK hours into whatever time I needed to get the testing back on track. I was told to do the testing hand-offs by phoning the outsourcing manager, and if he didn’t pick up his phone, I was to call the senior boss.
We did meet the deadline after working a fair amount of overtime, and went live on schedule, but there were some very unhappy people at the outsourcer. The fourth, final phase of the project went better, but only because the outsourcer had to stay on UK time, and the project was now being micromanaged by a project manager assigned for that phase.
Definitely no food, unless the test goes so long that they get a lunch break.
As for water, they may not keep water at their desks (O NOES THE TEST COULD GET WET). There are some listed “emergencies” for which students may leave the room, e.g., bathroom emergencies; being thirsty is not one of those.
When I explain the procedures to students, I remind them that the water fountains are directly across from the bathrooms, and that if they ask me for a bathroom break, they’ll go right by the water fountains, hint hint.
But that’s my trying to find a way around the spirit of the rules, in order to protect the kids. The whole thing is pretty appalling.
The question has been answered, but /r/maliciouscompliance is full of stories of malicious military compliance. Mind you, most of them are of the type of “senior officer gets anal about doing this thing, so I do it absolutely perfectly, wasting 0.0001 seconds of his time”
[Bolding added] Passive-aggressiveness gets a bad rap. (As do passivity and aggression.) With some people and in some situations, it’s the only thing that works. Short of an action that will cause injury or significant financial loss, though, walking away is probably the best course to take. Let the next schmuck be the patsy.
The military as an institution is predisposed to this. In the Air Force there are regular inspections, called Operational Readiness Inspections, where officials come and ensure you’re doing everything to the letter. Spending months preparing for these inspections is normal.
Once they’re done everything goes back to the way it was pre-inspection. Don’t get me wrong, nothing is unsafe, but it’s not done to the letter because if it were the planes would never fly.
Once I was a basically-volunteer host of trivia games on AOL when an enthusiastic player wrote a game for me to run. I marked it up as all of the questions were pretty abysmal. He sent it back with almost no modifications. I figured it wasn’t worth my time to continue to try to tell him diplomatically that his questions needed improvement, and I did not want to look bad by flatly telling him his questions sucked, so I ran the game with just the very minor revisions. The players hated it, so that accomplished the goal of dampening his enthusiasm for writing crappy games, and got back at him a little for wasting my time by not improving the questions given feedback.
If the players had liked it, he might have continued to send me more games which would have felt like work instead of fun since I would have still had to review them each time until he got more accomplished.
I don’t know if it counts exactly, but about 17 years ago, I was accepted to graduate school, and was working the last nine months at that particular job. My job was as an ERP developer, using a rather obscure 4GL called “Progress”. In our particular company, we had v4 installed, but our code was almost all legacy v3 code, and maintained mostly in that same style, because the old-timers didn’t know how to actually program using stuff like arrays and parameters, etc… (!)
Anyway, my boss at the time was a self-taught developer, and not too good at it to be honest. And she only knew version 3 of the language- she’d never cracked the v4 manual and played around with it, and even at that, never really used a lot of the more complicated constructs available in v3. This was because for the most part, v3 was about all she could handle- she never had the time or motivation to learn more than she already knew- she was probably in her late 50s and was just marking time until retirement.
So in my last nine months, she’d managed to colossally piss me off several times, so I decided on my course of malicious compliance.
For that six months, I used EVERY “advanced” programming trick I ever learned in college, and every handy dandy function and construct available in v4. My thinking was that when I left, she’d be faced with nine months worth of maintenance and new development done in code that she barely understood. But they really couldn’t get too pissed at me- I didn’t actually go out of my way to obfuscate the code at all- any competent developer would probably have preferred what I did during those nine months to the clunky crap we did prior to then.
But I’m absolutely sure she struggled mightily with it, and probably looked somewhat incompetent in the process.
There are different levels of malicious consent.
There is the when someone with authority and accountability orders you to do something counterproductive, against your professed advice, I’d call that begrudging malicious consent. Except in cases where it will actually do harm, like the naval nukies or aviation or healthcare (or other examples), then the only one who is left discomfited is the person who overrode your advice. There may be times even, when after you have consented to do what you believe to be harm, you find out that you just didn’t know something that the person who told you to do it that way knew, and that they were right, and you were wrong. I’ve certainly had many instances where a boss told me to do something in a manner that I did not think was best, and I would tell them that I think there is a better way, but sometimes, they actually did have a reason for the way things were done.
Then the is gleeful malicious consent, where you are looking for something that you can “get them” on. Maybe they didn’t understand something, maye they misspoke about something, but there is no confirmation, no advice against this action, just happily going about doing sabotage because when called on it, you can say, “Well, I’m just doing what I was told to do.”
Most of the stories in this thread have been of the former, but I have encountered people that take the latter attitude.
Then there is the interesting case of what I will call “martyrdom consent”, where someone will cause themselves discomfort or harm in order to perform a task that you have asked of them, so that they can then complain about how hard the task was that you asked of them. For an example, if you ask your roommate to grab you a coke, and you are not aware that you are out of coke in the fridge. 3 hours later, they come back with your coke, complaining about having to walk to the store in the rain.
A variation of the Scotty System
I’m not good at malicious compliance, and it gets me into trouble at work. I am not inclined to let customers blindly buy what they think they need when they are wrong. People buying fabric often ask for too much or too little, and I try to ask questions so we can determine the right amount.
Some customers don’t want to be educated. Some get mad at me for telling them the fabric or notions they have selected are inappropriate for the project they are working on. The most laughable was on the afternoon of Oct 30. A man picked up a sewing pattern of a Wonder Woman costume that had been on display for a couple of months. He thought he was buying the full costume as pictured on the envelope (how he imagined the whole thing would fit in that envelope, I have no idea). When I explained to him what it really was, he wanted to know if he could put it together in the afternoon. It was a very fitted costume, so even an experienced sewer would struggle with it. He cursed at me for telling him he couldn’t have what he wanted. I wished I had just let him buy it and be disappointed, but he probably would have complained to management about me.
When I was 12 or so, there was a car accident right in front of my house. The street was one of these wide Salt Lake City streets that has an island in the center to make it into one lane on each side. It was in the winter, and the island was covered in snow.
My neighbor had pulled out from a street parking spot and was hit by the oncoming car. They were having a heated discussion before the police came, and weren’t moving to allow traffic to get though.
Cars coming up behind them eventually had to back down the street to get around.
My sister and I decided to help out, so we went down to the corner to direct traffic around. Everyone was pretty cool about it until some driver insisted on going through. We tried to warm him but he was going to get through.
Then, since we were kids with our pride hurt, we let the next four or five cars go through as well, getting jammed up behind him.
He got up to the accident and discovered that his horn wasn’t sufficient to clear the road. He got out and argued with the people, which also failed.
He then had to go to the very end car, get them to back up, then the next and the next.
Finally, he was able to leave. Grinning broadly, my sister and I were sure to wave to him as he backed out of the road.
Ooh! My worst example (before administering standardized tests at least) is from 20 years ago, when I was just out of college and subcontracting for IBM to write courses on Internet Marketing in the days of the early Internet. It’s what I think about whenever anyone complains about the public sector being inefficient.
I had to write the course as a slideshow, and it had to be in Lotus 123 or whatever IBM’s inferior version of PowerPoint was. The program was horribly buggy: a significant number of times that I saved a file, it not only crashed the program, but it also corrupted the save file. I lost a fair amount of work before adopting the system of rotating save files (save1, save2, save3, etc.)
The course had slides that students would see, as well as notes that would also print with the slides, as well as separate notes for the course teacher. I wanted it to be as useful as possible to students, so I included as much crunchy information as I could on the student note page.
Near the end of the 6-week writing assignment, I got a new directive from my IBM liaison: there was too much in the student notes. I had to remove everything from student notes.
I was shocked and asked why (among other things, this would mean about a day and a half of work, given the number of slide shows created for the course).
The reason was extremely clear: the IBM department paying for the course wanted to be able to bill other departments for teaching them the course. If the student notes were too useful, other departments could send a single employee to take the course and then teach it within their department. If the student notes were useless, they’d have to send a bunch of people, and could get billed for more money.
Granted, IBM had an internal memo saying any department could request materials from any other department for no charge. Didn’t matter. I had to spend about 10 hours removing utiltiy from the courses I’d written.
It still steams me to think about.
I actually got fired over something similar in my consulting days. I was what was called a forensic data mining consultant. What that meant was that I could basically figure out how a series of database tables related to each other, and then after some work, tease out some useful data for accountants.
In practice, I did a whole lot of SQL coding. However, I’m not the very best at formatting as I go along; I kind of have my own idiosyncratic style that works for me and is fast, but isn’t necessarily pretty. And my co-workers did too.
So the powers-that-were decided that we had to have a formatting standard for getting all our SQL code looking the same. This was because, being consultants, we would print all that shit out, put it in binders, and deliver it to the client, all at a cost of only 8-16 hours worth of additional billed time. This was done despite giving it to them on a DVD anyway. So I already thought this was pretty shady to begin with.
The formatting standard was something that would have made Byzantine politics look straightforward and easy. It wasn’t like “Tab once, tab twice, keywords in all caps”, but rather everything had to be just so- any variable names had to be broken up, so that something like totalaccrualvalue had to be turned into “Total_Accrual_Value”, and so forth. Things had to be put in particular places- variable definitions were 3 spaces in, and keywords were always left, and ANDs were always 5 spaces, and so on.
I already got bitched at a lot because I wasn’t good at being that detail oriented, and this struck me as a lot of trouble and something I’d be terrible at. So I suggested that instead we find one of those code-formatter utilities and come up with a set of corporate settings that everyone could set up- maybe even via a shared config file, and then EVERYONE would have identical code, there would be no question of someone fucking up, and best of all, we could do it in bulk in a fraction of a second.
I got told no, because basically we couldn’t bill our clients for the HOURS of time it would have taken us to format our code in that super-nitpicky way.
I basically told the partner in charge that it was super-unethical to do that if there was literally an alternative that worked better and that took 1/1000th the time, and did it the same way every single time. He didn’t like that.
Did she actually tell you to do it that way?
If so, then sure, good example.
If not, then it wasn’t malicious consent or compliance, it was just malicious.
She didn’t ask to do it that way or not (although she would get annoyed if I used new functions from time to time), but it was more technically correct in the sense of what I did conformed more to industry standards and best practices than the way she programmed and how the people before her had.
In other words, for that last nine months, I did things RIGHT, rather than the way she did them. Maybe it was malicious, but it felt good to not be deliberately doing things wrongly because some old lady who started out as a keypunch operator and who had a set of corporate programming classes had never gone past what they had taught her in 1992 (this was 2002).
So, more like malicious insubordination than compliance.
You are right, it can feel good to be malicious, especially when you can do it to someone who is so obviously inferior to you.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.