Project Sabotage Patterns

There is the lady at my organization who is a master at sabotaging IT projects. She's a con artist. I'll call her "Connie". Why she is not working for some big company selling over-priced equipment to PointyHairedBosses using buzzwords and bull, I don't know. (Perhaps she is on the side, since she doesn't do much real work.)

The management turn-over is high enough that she is able to repeat the pattern and get away with it each time. She's yet to be promoted because she's otherwise incompetent. She seems to enjoy tossing monkey wrenches into the works more so than she wants a promotion. (She wants both, but mucking seems a priority.)

The pattern usually works as follows. The project is typically given mediocre or minimal funding and thus there will be trade-offs. Those in the industry expect such with limited resources. However, naive PointyHairedBosses (PHB) often don't. So Connie cozies up to the new PHB in town and acts all concerned about his/her family, back problems, etc.

She pretty much ignores the new project until it's just about ready to be released, at which point she produces a list of all the short-comings for the PHB, who is then overwhelmed and surprised, and cancels the project. She then proposes some BS buzzword that will magically fix it all, and claims the project would go well if she was in charge. (She fouls up projects she's in charge of also, blaming others. Some suspect she deletes files and corrupts the source code.)

I've proposed better up-front documentation in order to clarify the trade-offs, etc., but for some reason she's sabotaged that also. (I don't know how, it's behind closed doors. I suspect she claims planning is an unnecessary make-work program; despite the fact that non-planning has failed repeatedly in the past.)

Consider the possibility that she's not a con artist, but genuinely believes she's doing the Right Thing(TM) by protecting her beloved organisation and its exalted PointyHairedBoss from the ravages of the broken software created by those unpleasantly antisocial, undisciplined, careless, and lazy software developers. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H misguided good intentions.

There are other traits she displays, such as blaming others for her mistakes, not apologizing when caught screwing up, not sharing information that others should have for the project, broadcasting others' mistakes widely, and being unnecessarily rude. Either way, the "trade-off load dump" pattern is disruptive to projects whether she intends it or not. It's caused wasted time and resources multiple times. If PHB's are repeatedly surprised by the down-sides on repeated attempts, then obviously there is a problem pattern. Whether she is entirely to "blame" or not is perhaps debatable, but the problem pattern is there. Her actions are disruptive, conscious or not. Nothing ends up getting done.

Perhaps she reasons like the GrammarVandal in that she's "saving the world from impurities". However, it's at the expense of having nothing written. We can kill the cancer by killing the entire patient. If you value dead cancer more than living patients, then you've indeed "done your job" of ridding the cancer.

However, this person does not display enough consistency to fit the purist profile. If you improve ease-of-learning by making it less flexible, it gets criticized for being inflexible. If you make it flexible by sacrificing ease-of-learning, it gets criticized for being hard to learn.

In an odd way, that is consistent with the "saving the world from impurities" theory. She may be trying to save the world, so to speak, from imperfection. Less-flexible but easy-to-learn is imperfect; so is hard-to-learn but flexible. What she wants easy-to-learn and flexible, dammit! Never mind that these are an impossible contradiction; that's the part she doesn't (or refuses to) understand.

Years ago, I had a client who demanded that a report be simultaneously sorted by two columns. He wanted customer statements sorted by both his customers' cheque numbers and his invoice numbers. At the same time. Of course, that was impossible -- a customer who paid invoices out of order (which was many of them) or who changed banks and resequenced their cheque numbers would mean you could sort sequentially by cheque number, or you could sort by invoice number, but not both. We gently pointed out the problem using a few real-life examples. His response was to shout at us, "You guys are the fucking experts! You fix it!" Then he stormed out of the room. The project was cancelled and he returned to using a 1950s era accounting machine that didn't sort anything.

I bet your Connie and my ex-client would have got along like a house on fire.

          Seq.Chck.Note
          004 1234
          005 1238
          006 1241
          007 1235 Seq.
          008 1242 
          009 Etc.
The upside is that we still get paid to reinvent doomed wheels. We should learn to enjoy the violins on the Titanic and be grateful they have an orchestra. Maybe there is an art to appreciate in her sabotage, similar to CleverTrollAdmiration.


Patterns and techniques:


I discovered at least one possible "rational" motivation factor. Connie often gets overtime pay to fix critical problems or redo "crashed" content and seems to really enjoy the extra cash. Thus, if she can make the system fragile and rickety, she is more likely to get overtime. It's the proverbial fox guarding the hen house.

Further, her (selectively) rotten personality scares away cross-trainees such that often she just happens to be the only person who knows how to fix stuff, and more importantly break stuff at "convenient" times to get her overtime.


Anecdotes

Connie probably deleted an important folder. Although nobody directly accused her of doing it, she got defensive and said something like, "I can't delete it, I don't have "write" access. Besides, I put under-scores at the start of folder names to hide them (from the visible listings) rather than delete." Somebody pointed out that if she has access to put under-scores, then she probably also has write access. She went quiet.

She claimed she likes hot weather. Somebody later whispered, "That's why she's not afraid of hell."

Somebody called her "Bernie Madoff's dumber sibling". Group chuckle.

Connie as a fire-fighter: "Oh, you mean I'm supposed to put OUT fires?"

Simplified version of a true story:

[cough] When it comes time for RussianRouletteWithAnAutomatic? be sure to offer her the first dibs.

I'd even give her 4-to-1 odds on the bet, to sweeten the pot.

Both her bosses were away, and drama spiked. Probable thought: "Hmmm, these spare bosses don't know I'm a jerk yet. Time to leverage that..."


Our group has pondered why Connie is not using her large basket of con skills in a business that pays more for the ability to dupe customers, such as insurance sales or Wall Street. Our conclusion is that her evil tends to only focus on about a month out. She's not capable of longer-term evil because she lacks the discipline. She seems to want instant gratification and would rather kill lots of rodents rather than hold off for an occasional moose. And perhaps figuratively kicking people is more pleasurable to her than money. She's managed to work her way into a position that's uniquely suited to be able to agitate the most people per hour. I don't think she's a sociopath because sociopaths don't care about feelings of others. She cares deeply about others' feelings, but cares about hurting them. I don't know the correct term for that characteristic.

The correct term is "asshole".

Too broad. We need sub-classifications for asshole.

I'd rather not examine assholes that closely.

"Would rather kill lots of rodents ... than hold off for an occasional moose." That's the best phrase I've read here in a while.


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