Simple sabotage for software · Erik Bernhardsson

2023-12-13

ivity

CIA produced a fantastic book during the peak of World War 2 called Simple Sabotage. It laid out various ways for infiltrators to ruin productivity of a company. Some of the advice is timeless, for instance the section about “General interference with Organizations and Production”:

  1. Insist on doing everything through “channels”. Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
  2. Make “speeches”. Talk as frequently as possible and at lengths. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experience. Never hesitate to make a few “patriotic” comments.
  3. When possible, refer all matters to committees for “further study and consideration”. Attempt to make committees as large as possible — never less than five.
  4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
  5. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
  6. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
  7. Advicate “caution”. Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
  8. Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

I guess I've always been fascinated with how well this has stood the test of time? I even got this particular section framed and hung up at our office:

c1c2e9667bfc65004733efac0ae1ef78_MD5 1.jpg

Let's say you were employed as a CTO behind the front lines and you wanted to destroy productivity for as long as you can without getting caught. You can of course make a series of obviously bad decisions, but you'd get fired quickly. The real goal here is to sap the company of its productivity slowly, while maintaining a façade of plausibility and normalcy. What are some things you can do?

Technology

Product

Leadership

Hiring

Project management

!_resources/Untitled/709066b055531887641ac7fe8a12b3b1_MD5.jpgThis is from the 1994 music video Sabotage by Beastie Boys. The lyrics are mostly about technology leadership and developer productivity.

It's a hard job to pull it off! But if you can parachute behind the enemy front lines, and land a job as a CTO, you can make this happen.

For the non-saboteur: this is obviously a story about how to get the most out of your team. Productivity in general is a story of a thousand cuts, and none of these things are in themselves the thing that will ruin the productivity. But productivity adds up on a logarithmic scale, meaning that all these things compound in a multiplicative way. Basically, do 100 things that each is a 5% tax on productivity, and you just slowed everything down by 131x! The only way to keep engineers happy is to say no to 100 minor cuts that each sound plausible and specious.

Tagged with: management, software