An Action of Punctuality

When following the rules makes everything stop…

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My all time favorite type of industrial action is the "stiptheidsactie".

A “stiptheidsactie” is an industrial action where the employees are frustrating the normal operation of business by following all the rules to the letter. Isn't that amazing? Apparently we need rules to guide the correct way of doing things and then, when we want to mess things up without actually walking out on the job, we just follow all these rules! Punctually and to the letter…

The stiptheidsactie is a devastating blow to anyone with a firm belief in the power of rules and regulations. Yes we have rules, but please don't follow them too strictly or all hell breaks loose (actually, the opposite happens, as hell instead freezes over and things grind to a halt :-)

Apparently, rules need to be followed lackadaisically…

During a real strike nothing happens, but that is kinda obvious because there is nobody doing any work: The lack of output is completely explained by the absence of processing power. During a stiptheidsactie nothing happens but the system is 100% busy!

It’s a bit like an operating system thrashing under heavy load… 

Apart from being a form of industrial action, the stiptheidsactie also shows that normally speaking people want to get things done and they are willing to break the rules to do so. Apparently, during the course of your normal work day, as you are getting things done, you are breaking the rules all the time. How else can you explain your output?

This is no surprise to lawyers: In his excellent book "You have the right to remain innocent" (based on an equally excellent YouTube talk), law professor James Duane explains quite clearly that you are always breaking the law in some respect or another. 

Really the only reason you are not in jail right now is because you didn't annoy enough of the right people yet :-)

The more rules there are, the more likely it is that you have to break them in order to get useful work done. And the dumber these rules are, the more likely it is that you have to break them. Unfortunately there are many rules out there, not all of which make sense in all situations.

For instance quite a few organizations I have worked for had strict rules about installing software on your company laptop (in short: Don't). These rules were designed by well-meaning security minded administrators who were afraid of importing viruses and equally well-meaning careful lawyers who were afraid about illegal software and license violations. All of this makes sense. However, in order to do my job as a software engineer, I need tools, and pity the fool who thinks they can predict what tools I need. So we all broke those rules left, right, and center to install our favorite editor, a SQL workbench, a network packet sniffer, Perl, and what have you.

One particularly security conscious customer I worked for restricted access to the Internet through a proxy server that required authentication. Unfortunately it was so cumbersome and expensive to get access to that proxy that the entire army of contractors and quite a few full-time employees used the credentials of one of our project managers. I was already gone when she finally left the company, but I assume hundreds of people lost their Internet access that day 🙂. One other thing we did was port scanning the networks of our foreign subsidiaries which had their own Internet hookup. Through these scans we found a few Internet proxies that did not require authentication and we used those as well.

At one customer there was no WiFi support. One fine day, when I had forgotten my ethernet dongle (or couldn't find a desk, or something else), I inquired: "You guys don't have WiFi, right?" One of the local developers quietly informed me that they in fact did as they had illegally hooked up a WiFi router somewhere inconspicuous and given it the SSID of a neighboring company so as not to alert the security team.

At that same customer I felt a need to SSH out to my server on the Internet. Of course there was no direct Internet access; the only supported access was web browsing (through a Netscape proxy server) and email (through the corporate email server). I wrote a little doodah that used the Internet proxy protocol for SSL (the HTTP CONNECT method) to set up a connection with a remote SSH server on port 443. By running an SSH server on that port and then configuring my SSH client to use the widget I had written, I could SSH out to my heart’s abandon.

It wasn't long before I realized that I could use this solution to SSH in as well, using an unholy combination of a cron job and a reverse SSH tunnel. One day when I was vacationing abroad, one of the managers called me with some problem. I told him I would connect and fix it. He asked me in surprise how I would do that, but then quickly corrected himself to retract that question, lest he would have to do something about it…

That little doodah became quite popular. Once the internal audit department had figured out what was going on, they found dozens of instances running on the HP-UX machine we used for testing and development…

One customer used Lotus Notes for email. I have no fondness for Lotus Notes and had never bothered to get an account on the internal email system. I also didn't want to acquire and install a Lotus Notes client on my (Linux) laptop which I used to do all of my work for that customer (in itself a violation of the rules). One of the reasons that I didn’t want to use Lotus Notes was that the customer imposed an 80 MB inbox size restriction which meant that everyone’s mailbox was permanently full. We could for instance no longer send email to the SVP in charge of the entire division for exactly that reason.

Since I did not have a Lotus notes account I did all of my email using my (Dutch) company's email address which was hosted on a server which I co-managed. At one point this started to attract attention and I got word that I really would have to switch to Notes. Instead, I went out to my Internet domain name provider to find a top level domain where the customer didn't have a domain registered yet. As it turned out, I could register the customer.nu domain, which was fairly topical because "nu" means "now" in Dutch and a lot of Dutch companies were starting to use that TLD. I reconfigured my email server (SendMail) and client (mutt) and started sending and receiving my emails to and from that customer as "josv@customer.nu". All criticism went away as everybody assumed this was some new email feature that had become available.

Years later I got a call from a lawyer at the customer who had figured out that I owned customer.nu. I agreed I would transfer the domain to them, but then I never heard from him again. Some more years later I relinquished the domain because I had no more use for it.

You might think that I am an unrepentant Internet criminal or at least an inveterate rule breaker. That last one is at least somewhat true; I really do have a healthy (Dutch) lack of regard for rules. The Dutch typically consider rules to be situationally applicable at best. I do however do my best to follow all the rules that make sense or where I would get in a lot of trouble if I don’t follow them. 

In all of the examples I gave above my goal was not to break the rules for “breaking the rules” sake; the goal was to get my work done as fast as possible and as cheaply as possible, all in the best interest of the customer.

At one of the customers referred to above, I once introduced myself to a bunch of consultants from a big new vendor as follows: “My name is Jos Visser and I run black ops for <manager>”. This elicited some chuckles from the new consultants. After a few weeks, when they had gotten the lay of the land, the senior consultant accosted one of my colleagues and said: “Remember Jos’s introduction last month? That wasn’t a joke, wasn’t it?” 🙂

Another advantage of breaking the rules is that it makes you seem more powerful. This is such an important side effect that I will write about it some more in an upcoming WW series called “Machiavelli for Software Engineers”.

Many companies' internal rules are worse than the average Soviet five year plan in their assumption that they can control the entire process, working environment, and working style of everyone in the organization. Companies are hiring expensive skilled people and then tie at least one hand behind their backs by constraining them in a set of rules that, even if they make sense at a high level, do not work well at a micro level, and often do not serve a reasonable purpose. 

In a lot of cases the desire for extreme prescriptiveness is justified by operational arguments: If people install software and their setup stops working well, it will be too hard to debug because of all this extra stuff of which we don’t know what it is and how it works. This is a fallacy; just make it clear that corporate IT will only debug plain vanilla setups. If someone then rocks up with a laptop that is riddled with extra software, perform a clean install of the standard setup and Bob’s your uncle.

Another frequently used reason for rules is to limit cost. However, quite often rules are put in place that reduce cost in one way only to increase it much more in another way (and in another budget code).

A long long time ago I was working at a customer who used Token Ring as their preferred local area networking tech.

I love Token Ring. I love the whooshing sound the token makes as it flies by.

To do my work I had bought a PCMCIA Token Ring adapter for my laptop.

Remember PCMCIA? Apparently the acronym stood for: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms 🙂.

Unfortunately that PCMCIA adapter came with a male RJ-45 plug and the IBM cabling system that the customer used also came with a male RJ-45 plug. Clearly what I needed was a female-female RJ-45 coupler. Right now these can be had for less than $2 a piece on Amazon, but I assure you they weren’t much more expensive back in the nineties.

I asked the local IT department for one of these couplers and they told me that they didn't stock those and that I had to open a procurement ticket so that they could buy one. I was shocked and told them so: “Why don't you have a bucket of these things lying around? They cost next to nothing! Surely it doesn't make sense for me to kick-off a process that will cost $150 (in manpower and shipping) and takes two weeks in order to get a $2 widget?” They agreed with me that this was nuts, but this was how the company operated. For reasons of “cost effectiveness” they were not allowed to stock them.

Two days later I was at a conference in a hotel in Hoofddorp when I saw exactly the widget I needed extending a telephone into an empty conference room. I surreptitiously disconnected the phone and pocketed the widget. To compensate the hotel I ate one cheese sandwich less during the conference's catered lunch :-)

Clearly if you want to be busy without actually producing something you need to follow all of the rules to the letter, which is what makes the stiptheidsactie such a powerful industrial action. Or, alternatively, companies could have some faith in the sanity and skills of the people they hire and only regulate things that should actually be regulated.

Too often rules come into being because something bad happened and the powers that be slap a general rule on it instead of treating it as an incident and an opportunity to remind people to be sane adults.

At one of my previous employers we had a tradition of events with copious amounts of alcohol. At one event (organized by a remote office on an island known for excessive alcohol consumption), things got out of hand a bit and ambulances had to come to get people to a hospital where they were treated for alcohol poisoning. This had made the local news, which made us smile (“HWops be HWops”) and made other people unhappy. These are the kind of events that lead to new rules.

The company let it be known that from then one each event would have drink tickets and there should be a max of two drinks tickets per person. So at our next event (at another remote location in a country known for temperance), everybody in attendance had two drinks tickets. When the SVP inquired if we had given everyone two drinks tickets we could answer truthfully that we had. The bar never asked for drink tickets, but we sure had given everyone only two.

Having a limit on alcohol consumption at a company event is of course a good thing, but there are multiple ways to get there. My way is to tell people not to be muppets and to assign a senior manager during the event to ensure that nobody is going crazy. Slapping an unnecessarily detailed rule on everyone to deal with the problem of a few can be counter culture and, as we saw above, ultimately not even very effective.

You invite people to break the rules, even the good ones, by having many dumb ones.

Rules are great, but they work best if they are sane and work well when adhered to, even when adhered to stringently. We have lots of evidence that good rules will be followed by everyone, even by people who don't necessarily agree with them, as long there is some overall sanity to the whole situation.

Here’s some free advice: When instituting rules, always imagine what would happen if everybody would constantly follow that rule to the letter.