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Comment by selfishgene | Hacker News Reader

Would not be all that surprised if someone were to feel sufficiently inspired by this document to draft a similar pamphlet for disaffected employees of tech companies who spy on their employees and/or abuse their customers' privacy.

What would covert acts of "simple sabotage" look like at a company like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook?

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An Italian Strike (aka Work-to-Rule) is a version of this aimed at minimizing civil or criminal liability to strikers - pick the most inconvenient and debilitating safety regs that no one follows, and follow every single one of them. This is particularly common in countries or workplaces where law or contract prevents direct strikes.

Unions would have trouble advocating this as a form of strike in a direct dispute, because a union can only exert negotiating leverage if it publicly declares its intentions. However, I've heard anecdotal reports of this kind of sabotage being common in secondary/solidarity strikes - shipments showing up late or damaged or incorrect, external maintenance being done improperly, etc.

EDIT: With a bit of poking around, I found that the Wobblies were big into this (and it's even where they got their name!): https://www.iww.org/history/icons/sabotage

Quite common back in engineering the day in the UK, just before a big delivery it was common to go slow and work to rule - until suddenly some brown envelopes magickly appeared.

As the guy said even the tea boy got £900 and in the 70's that was a lot on money

This was exactly my same thought. One could argue that a lot of the so-called "research" that is conducted at government subsidized laboratories in the United States like MIT Lincoln Laboratory provides a more modern example of this same form of "passive aggressive" workplace resistance.

For example, the former technical director of ballistic missile defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory used to build miniature Rube Goldberg-style contraptions and display them in his office just to ridicule the military's stupidity for wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on useless R&D programs like "Star Wars," which hearkens of course all the way back to the Reagan era.

He famously once told a Lincoln employee that he instructed his subordinates to bill hours against government programs that they never worked. Unfortunately for the laboratory, however, this particular employee chose not to join him and his colleagues in their "passive aggressive" form of workplace resistance.

Instead, he reported the fraud to the FBI, in connection with this famous investigation:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401412/postol-vs-the-pent...

Work to rule is often used by American schoolteachers. It makes a point without resorting to a politically unpopular strike.

Is this similar to “work to rule?”

> (aka Work-to-Rule)

Yup! Same thing, different name. "Italian Strike" is what they call it in European and Middle Eastern labor organizing traditions.

EDIT: With a bit of research: the term seems to have originated with the Biennio Rosso in Italy in 1919-20, when work-to-rule strikes were practiced on a large scale.

FIY, in Italy the Italian strike is called “white strike” (“sciopero bianco”). No idea about the origin of this name.

Not surprised

I'm mostly familiar with it from Israeli discourse.

> What would covert acts of "simple sabotage" look like at a company like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook?

Hitting "LGTM" without actually reviewing the change.

The "work to rule" concept can be quite effective in a programmer's hands. Be militantly pedantic about requirements: fulfill them, but nothing that wasn't written in the spec. This can result in a pushback process where managers need to do ever more work specifying the work they want done; developers get smarter about poking holes, and productivity grinds to a halt.

One example, thanks to a recent article by Rachel By the Bay: badly crafted queries can bring an organization to a halt.

I think "work to rule" is a large company's dream. "Things are moving slowly because our rockstar developers have to get their code reviewed!" "Excellent, I guess we'll need to hire a team to manage the code review process more closely." <1 year passes> "Wow Bob, the size of your org tripled. You are doing three times as much work, so please enjoy this new title and a yacht!"

That's if you only make it personnel-expensive. If your code is also blowing up computational requirements, it'll make it hardware-expensive too -- but as you note, even that might be a boon for somebody. If the crap performance impacts customers, or managers doing their jobs, then dissatisfaction will mount.

This is how most startups operate, in the unlikely event that code reviews are required at all. :-)

Can you put it in your vacation autoresponder?

Back in the day, that worked.

> What would covert acts of "simple sabotage" look like at a company

"Middle Management"

Maybe we're already seeing them. Maybe that's why all the front-end React JavaScript nonsense is so terrible, while oases like this are rare.

What would covert acts of "simple sabotage" look like at a company like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook?

They'd look like examples from past discussions of how a bad programmer can provide negative value to the company.

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