Comment by pm90
14 hours ago
Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.
Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job.
I have been in such a situation before, and while I was not able to coast along until the company went under, the time delta between me getting fired and the company going under was measured in weeks.
In hindsight I'd probably not do it again, it was hugely mentally taxing, and knowingly performing work in such a way that it provides negative value to the company (remember, the goal is to make it go under) is in my experience actually harder than just doing a good job... Especially if being covert is a goal.
Have you read the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual?
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
I've seen it, but I think it's got some places that it would benefit from more clarity. Can we put together a committee to improve and protect our processes from it? We could call it a task force if that's easier to sell to management.
I did not know the existence of this manual. It was a very interesting read! Especially after page 28 (General Interference with Organizations and Production).
> Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job.
What...? In what way is it anything other than highly unethical to sabotage someone you have a contract with, because you disagree with them?
Plenty of historical examples of work environments where sabotage would have been the most ethical thing to do (and often you will only know in hindsight). But yeah in most circumstances a simple disagreement doesn’t warrant the psychological cost of such sabotage.
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"Don't struggle only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down." -- Malcolm X
"If you're unhappy with your job you don't strike. You just go in there every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way. -- Homer Simpson
"To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral." -- Abbie Hoffman
Some might consider it unethical but others might also consider it immoral to not do what you're describing.
I guess you're fortunate enough to have only worked at places where your moral framework matched up with their business practices and treatment of the staff.
That isn't the case for most people. Most people are put into situations at one time or another where the people they're working for don't value them as equals, where the people they work for casually violate reasonable laws like product safety or enivronmental standards laws and what's worse these people will suffer no consequences for doing so.
No White Knight in shining armour is going to come from the government to shut them down. No lightning from heaven will strike them down. No financial penalty to dissuade them from further defection from society and the common man in the game that is life.
So what do you do? Do you do nothing? Just put your nose to the grindstone and keep working for the man? Do you quit, only to end up penniless and jobless, with poor prospects of an alternative, and even if you found one maybe it's 'meet the new boss same as the old boss'?
Nah, you cone into work every day and you subtly fuck it up. You subtly fuck it up and you take whatever value you can extract.
They'd do the same to you.
They are doing the same to you.
> In what way is it anything other than highly unethical to sabotage someone
Ethics is more complicated than that. Is it unethical to sabotage your employer if your employed is themselves acting unethically?
Have we gotten so lost that “working against your enemies” is no longer something we aspire to do?
Assume you work for e.g., a cigarette company. A company responsible for many deaths by unethically adding highly addictive substances. By sabotaging the company you are making this world a better place. Ethically it's the right thing to do.
Or, assume you're hired by the Nazi to work in concentration camps. Ethically it's the right thing to do to sabotage their gas chambers.
You’ve seen Schindler’s List, right?
Let's say you work for elon musk and are a decent person…
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I don't think sabotaging a company just because you don't want to work with a certain framework and deploy it on k8s is a good idea.
Yeah, I could see this being true if there was really _nothing else_ I could possibly be doing with my time that is worthy. But there are a lot of worthy things I could be doing with my time.
Ethically perhaps but financially and mentally its surely better to start looking for a new role (at a different company) that is more in alignment with you, no?
Ethically, if you extend this reasoning, are we not obligated to find a position in the most morally repulsive organization we are aware of, and then coast?
yes, this is called 'effective altruism'
I think there is an implied "given the company you joined turns out to be nonethically aligned"
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One could find a position in the most morally attractive organization they are aware of, and then work really hard.
well not coast, the intent is sabotage
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Even ethically, this is only true if you think the ethics of the place are so bad that sabotage is warranted. That's not every place that you have ethical problems with.
To do that (and hide it), you have to become a dishonest person yourself. That is ethically destructive to you. So the threshold for doing this should be pretty high.
As they say, two uneth’s make a thical.
I really wouldn’t want to be in this position. But it feels very motivating. It would sooth some difficult memories.
I can see myself putting in a lot of hours.
The willingness to be fired, in both good and bad situations, can be mentally freeing and an operational/political advantage. Many of us fail to push as hard as we optimally could, when we have too much on the line.
IMO, this is a good question and deserves a solid answer, so I’ll do my best.
Setting aside the “fixer” for the time being, I really enjoyed the work I did at Tesla. Tesla was the first company that gave me very high levels of autonomy to just own projects and deliver. It also pushed me to take on projects that I had previously wanted to do that I hadn’t been given a chance to work on before.
(Side note: At that point in time in my career, my thinking was that I needed to earn opportunities to work on projects at work to build skills that would enhance my career. I didn’t see the value in working on projects outside of work to build skills because I didn’t think those side-project skills would be valued by other companies the same as “day job” experience. I’ve since learned this isn’t true when it’s done right.)
I spent a lot of time at Tesla delivering value for a bunch of people who desperately needed it at the time, and the thanks I received from them was genuine. It felt very good to help others at Tesla out in a meaningful way, so I kept chugging along to the best of my abilities. Life was throwing lemons at me in my personal dealings, and Tesla was helping me make lemonade from a career standpoint. Besides, all the long work hours were a good distraction from the home life stuff.
In a lot of ways, it was a very fulfilling environment to work in, but it wasn’t for the faint of heart. People often quit within a month or two because the environment was too fast paced with too many projects under tight deadlines and projects quickly followed one after another. An environment like Tesla just doesn’t let up, so one has to figure out how to manage the stress without much support from others. Oftentimes, if you do need to let up at Tesla (or introduce friction in any sort of seemingly non-constructive way), that’s the cue you aren’t working out for the company anymore and it’s time to find someone to replace you.
Coming back around to the original question of why I stuck it out until the end. Just before the “fixer” was brought in, I was “soft promoted” by a director (no title change, but was given direct reports and a pay bump, the title change was suppose to come a couple of months later as the soft-promotion happened just before an annual review cycle). The director who soft-promoted me was someone who I got along with well and it seemed like things were going in the right direction in my career at that point. The director was in charge of a couple of projects that went sideways in a very visible way, and Elon basically fired the director after the second project went south, which is why the “fixer” was brought in.
When the “fixer” first took over things, it seemed like I was going to continue on the path that the director had originally laid out for me. The “fixer” said I was going to get more headcount and work on bigger projects, but this never materialized.
I really didn’t like working for the “fixer” after a while. IMO, it was clear they didn’t know what they were doing, they weren’t willing to listen to feedback, and I spent a lot of time trying to provide guidance to the “fixer”, but it wasn’t seen as helpful and I felt like I was spinning gears. My mental health did start to suffer as I got more burned out towards the end of my tenure there.
Eventually, I was tasked with hiring someone to be my manager and I saw the writing on the wall (sort of). I started to look for a new job just in case. At one point, I thought bringing in someone between myself and the “fixer” would be a good thing. I didn’t realize I was actually finding my replacement. Two days after my replacement was hired, I was let go (this was the 1:1 meeting where I was going to turn in my notice, but HR served me papers instead).
To your original point, if I was in a similar situation now, I would be planning my exit immediately instead of trying to make the best of a bad situation, but I had to learn that lesson the hard way.
Hey, thanks, that was quite interesting!
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how the "fixer", who sounds rather ineffective as an executive, came into this position, in what sounds like overall a rather effective organization.
I've been personally thinking quite a bit about what makes organizations work or not work recently, and your story is quite interesting to me as a glimpse into a kind of organization that I've never seen from the inside myself.