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Do you disagree with how the company you work for is run? Are they on the BDS list? Are they a fossil fuel company or SUV manufacturer? Is strike action not an option? Try hiding under a rock! Alternatively, adopt ‘slow-down’ tactics among your colleagues. These methods of industrial action are intended to slow down the efficiency of companies without risking disciplinary action. ‘Slow-down’ might take the form of playing everything ‘by the book’ and taking procedural processes VERY SERIOUSLY. In practice, corners are cut, so why not become that sticker for the rules and make sure everything is signed off exactly how the bosses intended? In an industrial dispute in 2011, right-handed Australian workers at the airline Qantas started using their left-hands. So get out from beneath that rock, and if you’re stuck by circumstances working for a bad-guy, get creative with your resistance - and organise offline with your colleagues. Crab Museum takes no responsibility for you getting the sack, but it’s worth thinking about what power we still have over the world around us.
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Italian Striking by forcing the CHUDdy devs on my team to learn a (not-very-)convoluted Git branching strategy and apply it to every single software project in our repositories, regardless of the scope of the feature, enhancement, or defect tickets that come in. One line change? Sorry, you gotta make a milestone for your target version, make a release candidate branch that will be your eventual merge target, make an issue and track it against the milestone, make a branch for the issue and a merge request that targets the release candidate branch, and keep your work the fuck out of Main/trunk until it has been reviewed by a team lead.
Oh, you didn’t add trace loggers in this one function? You failed code review, go back and create another issue, a branch for the issue, and a merge request targeting the release candidate branch. Oh, you forgot to update the version string in the Maven POM file to indicate that this is a
-SNAPSHOTrelease? Undeploy your non-Prod code and fix it. Yes, that means another issue, a branch, and a merge request targeting the release candidate branch. The control plane should not be reporting a non-snapshot version on a pre-release, god damn it!…except this is all ultimately just good housekeeping because it makes sure those motherfuckers are very intentional about what they do in that codebase, given that we had a revolving door contractor situation for a few years that left us with more tech debt than any small team could ever hope to address.
sounds more like making life miserable for your coworkers than anti-boss action tbh (with the caveat that i know exactly nothing about how coding/software development works)
Yeah but it says in the first like 5 words they’re chuds so it would annoy chuds and slow productivity. Win-win.
The coworkers being chuds is the implied justification for this, but I do want to caution against individual action. It’s very easy to find yourself out of luck and good will when taking action against both the company and coworkers, even if the latter isn’t the main target.
It’s always better to find a route that results in at least passive support from your coworkers. In my experience this usually isn’t difficult and just takes patience, since the bosses inevitably screw things up and make more work for everybody by cutting corners and searching for more productivity while keeping pay and benefits as low as they can get away with.
(with the caveat that i know exactly nothing about how coding/software development works)
spoiler
What I described above is just how most public open-source projects operate their public source code repositories. It’s not even overkill for a private company’s setup; depending on the org, it might not even be quite enough. At my company, I have seen – and personally shot down – far worse branch management strategies (e.g., git-flow, which may have its own SCP entry).
Granted, it’s probably overkill for a personal project unless you’re collaborating with someone else and/or actively trying to track deliverables or target milestones or some such. Or, as I like to call it, “mitigating my own unmedicated ADHD symptoms by tracking EVERY GODDAMNED THING so I don’t need to think back and remember it three weeks from now when I actually see this half-abandoned project again.” Sometimes it even works!
git-flow, which may have its own SCP entry
i’d read the shit out of that, git flow is so cursed lol
Oh trust me I already have designs of this nature. We have a meeting tomorrow about how management wants us to make more thorough use of Salesforce to log every little action. I intend to be very thorough.
I have maybe a dumb question, are the bosses supposed to know about the slow-down? Is the idea to pressure them to do something, or is sabotage the whole point?
Not always, but it can be a specific form of extremely legal public sabotage. Teachers have used it a few times in the UK because plenty of corners are cut in practice, and it is absolutely impossible to fire them for following their government legislated requirements to the letter, no matter how much time it wastes.
The idea may be pure sabotage. It may also be for them to kind of know, ie they can tell things are running slower/breaking more, but they can’t tell what’s going on or prove any conspiracy. Either are worthwhile strategies in certain cases
Huehuehuehue
If I go to the UK this will be my primary destination.
Turns out an 8 hour postal route takes closer to 11 when you follow every bullshit rule. Only took a couple days, with scores of customer complaints about not getting their mail, to get management off our backs.
