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Comment by jruohonen | Hacker News Reader

"And that was exactly what had happened here. It wasn’t that people were deliberately trying to sabotage progress, they were showing up to work and doing their jobs as instructed. But nothing more."

In labor market conflict situations it is called an Italian strike?

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Work to rule!

Do work exactly as specified, not including all the little things needed to actually make work happen. All the glue work needed to make an organization function just doesn't sometimes!

So why would anyone do an actual strike? This sounds better and more convenient.

It's more likely to kill the parent organization than enact change. This may not be a problem for the individuals in an organization if they have reasoned that

1. Personal Growth is limited, or further upward movement is undesirable.

2. They intend to be with the organization a finite remaining time, or would welcome an early exit

A proper strike can be differentiated from a lazy workforce, self-sabotaging work cannot be.

Work to rule can be differentiated from a lazy workforce if it’s done well.

Typically, work to rule is used to highlight specific bad rules, regulations, or enforcement practices at a company.

Say a company expects employees to do non-rule “glue” work to keep the company functioning. But, randomly and capriciously the company punishes workers for doing this “non-rule” work. A union can then announce that they will only be sticking to the letter of the rules until either the rules are changed, or the arbitrary and capricious enforcement of the rule is changed.

I often advise teammates to follow destructive rules by management to force management to overrule or cancel rules. The employee has cover for following the rules vs breaking rules set by management to meet goals set by management.

It can also be a rational response to a company that follows "management to rule". For example, I was once on a team where almost all of my time was spent coordinating with other teams and helping other developers instead of developing myself. When performance reviews rolled around I was told that none of that stuff mattered; only the number of tickets that I completed matter.

So I switched my focus to completing tickets. A few weeks later I overheard my manager complaining about a breaking change made by another team that I had previously been coordinating with: "Why is this happening so much? We didn't used to get surprised by these sorts of problems."

This is super common in engineering organizations. Any shop with a standard performance review will have a "score card" where your contributions are summarized in a method that can be compared to others.

Being a great team player can't be quantified, and gets dropped.

The point of a strike is often to make a big statement, say “fire me if you dare,” and show that your unit has cohesion and resources. You want something dramatic and noticeable. For example, if you want to kick contract negotiation out of stagnation, you want to do something that the business can’t ignore for a couple months.

Work-to-rule doesn’t really accomplish that.

I think they’re typically targeting different changes and different outcomes in an organization.

Work-to-rule is most effective when you’re trying to highlight particularly bad individual rules, or arbitrary punishments, etc. The work to rule action serves to clearly highlight to management why the current status quo rules are broken. This is, naturally, the most effective when there are very specific problems that lead to pretty direct consequences.

Work-to-rule would be much less effective when used for the kinds of things a strike might be used (increased pay, improved benefits, etc).

Basically, they’re just different tactics that highlight different things, and are each best used to achieve different kinds of goals.

>That's the American Way! If you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half assed.

- Homer Simpson

Work-to-rule is less dramatic than a strike and thus less effective. If, however, you can't strike for whatever reason it's a good tool to be aware of.

Also Soviet civil disobedience. You can’t break the rules or you’ll get punished but you can do things literally and not get punished. You’re not paid to think after all

> You’re not paid to think after all

This is an unfortunate issue with most of modern society. It's often compared to communism, yet how many capitalist bosses really want you to do much other than implement their "vision?"

> When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist. - Hélder Câmara

> yet how many capitalist bosses really want you to do much other than implement their "vision?"

Most of them? Or, more accurately to my knowledge, most of the ones I've had. I mean, hell, even when I delivered pizza, they didn't really get all bent out of shape when I tried to do things differently as long as it was something vaguely towards the goal they wanted.

In my experience, unless someone is really hardwired for micro-management, people cool of and let you do things your way once you have a couple months at the place and have demonstrated some competence (this includes in some very traditionally corporate environments).

"malicious compliance". Do exactly what you're told!

The boss pretends to pay and you pretend to work, it all works well.

Many managers will be happy to have people who are showing to work and just do their job. Isn't it the reason why people are hired? To do their job.

Of course everyone wants to get more for free, that is why do many complaints that people are lazy and don't do any extra work which can benefit their employer.

If you are subject to more corporate performance review shenanigans it feels like anything less than 10x performance is insufficient to upper management. Maybe you will even be subject to something as unhinged as being told not to rate all of your self assessment too highly because it's "not possible" to be high performer in all the meaningless "company values" they put into their performance rubric. perhaps you will even be given the example of "working overtime" as a good example of something to put in your self assessment.

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