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.
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
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.
If you actively slow other people down as well it's even better though.
What...? In what way is it anything other than highly unethical to sabotage someone you have a contract with, because you disagree with them?
Your opinion of the situation is not enough to justify this course of action in 99.99% of cases and the residual 0.01% should not be enough to fuel your ego to do anything other than quit decently, and look for an employer that is more aligned with whatever your ideals are.
I repeat the insane statement that we are arguing over here: "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."
This says: ANY company you work for and disagree with over anything: Don't quit! Sabotage [maybe people are confused about what "do a bad job" means, and that this usually leads to other people getting hurt in some way, directly or indirectly, unless your job is entirely inconsequential]. And that's supposed to be ethically optimal.
What the fuck?
> (Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at), the optimal course of action is..
And
> Ethically, (if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action is...)
The former, should've probably been phrased "if you do not agree ethically with the company you work at, the optimal course of action is..."
First example that comes to mind, about a movie that portrays ethical sabotage is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler%27s_List
I'm actually a bit unsure about what could be the motivations of someone who engages in sabotage *not* for ethical reasons
Imagine I am working for a company and I discover they are engaged in capturing and transporting human slaves. Furthermore, the government where they operate in fully aware and supportive of their actions so denouncing them publicly is unlikely to help. This is a real situation that has happened to real people at points in history in my own country.
I believe that one ethical response would be to violate my contract with the company by assisting slaves to escape and even providing them with passage to other places where slavery is illegal.
Now, if you agree with the ethics of the example I gave then you agree in principle that this can be ethical behavior and what remains to be debated is whether xAI's criminal behavior and support from the government rise to this same level. I know many who think that badly aligned AI could lead to the extinction of the human race, so the potential harm is certainly there (at least some believe it is), and I think the government support is strong enough that denouncing xAI for unethical behavior wouldn't cause the government to stop them.
a) I understand the very few and specific examples, that would justify and require disobedience. In those cases just doing a "bad job" seems super lame and inconsequential. I would ask more of anyone, including myself.
b) all other examples, the category that parent opened so broadly, are simply completely silly, is what I take offensive with. If you think simply disagreeing with anyone you have entered a contract with is cause for sabotaging them, and painting that as ethically superior, then, I repeat: what the fuck?
c) If you suspect criminal behavior then alarm the authorities or the press. What are you going to do on the inside? What vigilante spy story are we telling ourselves here?
In reality, which actions a person considers ethical and in coherence with their own values is highly individual. I can be friends or colleague with somebody who has a different set of ethics and circumstances than me. If I were to turn this into a conflict that needs resolution each time it shows, I would set myself up for eternal (life long) war with my social environment. Some will certainly enjoy that, and get a sense of purpose and orientation from it! I prefer not to, and I can find totally valid and consistent arguments for each side. No need to agree to reach understanding, and respect our differences.
Typically, people value belonging over morality: they adapt to whatever morality guarantees their own survival. The need to belong is a fundamental need; we are social animals not made to survive on our own.
The moment I am puzzled about another persons reasoning I can ask and if they are willing they will teach me why their actions make sense to them. If I come from a place of curiosity and sincere interest, people will be happy to help me get over my confusion. If I approach that conversation from some higher ground, as some kind of missionary, I might succeed sometimes, but fail most times, as I would pose a threat to their coherence, which they will remove one way or another.
Of course. One always needs to weigh it against the psychological cost of complying with unethical directions.
Ethics is more complicated than that. Is it unethical to sabotage your employer if your employed is themselves acting unethically?
What is it? Am I to believe this person is a chaotic mastermind? Or a selfish idiot? Or non-existant?
Anyone working at Twitter at the time of its acquisition could have found themselves in such a position.
Changing one's mind about him can take a while.
With the benefit of hindsight, it certainly took me longer than I am happy with to change my mind about him; to be specific, I should have more radically changed my opinion of his personality when he libelled that cave expert in response to being told a submarine wasn't going to help, I should have recognised that only someone with a very fragile ego would react that way, that it wasn't just a blip on his record but something deeper.
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.
"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 come 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.
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.
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.
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.
My understanding of how the "fixer" came into there position is a somewhat circuitous route. From my understanding (I didn't hear any of this directly from the "fixer" themselves, but other people who spent far more time with the "fixer" than myself), the "fixer" had spent about a decade out of the workforce prior to joining Tesla. My understanding is that they were raising kids while also dealing with aging parents. We'll just call this time the "fixer"'s work hiatus.
Prior to the hiatus, the "fixer" had moved into a small-team managerial role at a large, name-brand tech company during the late 90s/early 2000s. At the end of the hiatus, they leveraged some connections and somehow attained a director position at Tesla managing a team of about 30-40 people straight out of the hiatus.
From my understanding, the first team the "fixer" managed at Tesla didn't like working for them and after about 18 months, the team basically forced the "fixer" out. I'm not exactly sure what the team was doing to push the person out, but from what I heard, work basically ground to a halt for the entire team where they refused to work for the "fixer".
This was around the same time that the two projects went sideways that I mentioned, so the director I reported to was on the outs and the director's manager (a VP) was looking for someone who could step into the role. The VP somehow connected with the "fixer" and they worked out a deal where the "fixer" would lead the team on a 3-month probation period while the VP continued to look for someone to come into the position, while also giving the "fixer" a chance to earn the role.
(Side note: One other bit of context I want to provide is that the team I was on was about 50-60 or so people at this time right before the "fixer" came on. The "fixer" also did not have any sort of technical background and this team consisted of probably ~90% software professionals in some capacity. A lot of the conversations were very technical in nature, and the "fixer" did A LOT of delegating and "just tell me what decision you'd make and we'll do that" leadership.)
During this probation period, I thought the "fixer" actually did a good job getting a lay of the land, the social dynamics at play, and helped work out some inefficiencies. However, a lot of this improvement was done by bringing in consultants to do the deep dive, discover problems, and provide guidance to the "fixer" on how to address the problems.
Once the probation period was over, the consultants left and the "fixer" was in charge. Pretty quickly, the firings began and over the course of the next 5-6 months, more than 70% of the team under the "fixer" was replaced. At the same time, the team I was working for merged with another team, and the team size under the "fixer" shot up to about 100-120 people post-merge (I forget the exact number). The "fixer" also hired quite a few more people thinking more people get the same projects done faster.
To say the least, it was a pretty chaotic time because the entire team was under a lot of pressure with in-flight projects, not knowing if they were going to randomly be fired or not, new people to mentor/gel with, and lots of random projects being thrown at us.
About 6 months after I left, the "fixer" was fired and someone else who had extensive experience was brought in to right the ship. Per my understanding with people who were still working there about a year after the "fixer" left, the new person was very successful and had done a good job leading the team. Also, the person who I found to be my replacement stayed nearly 7 years at Tesla, so I guess I did a good job with that one.