Introduction
Smart people sabotage their competition in ways that most common people find hard to follow or comprehend. Even other smart people might find it hard to follow the ways they are being sabotaged. Hence, raising awareness of these matters levels the playing field.
Most DEI initiatives seem to miss the core patterns that are used to discriminate and block career progressions. The fact of the matter is that the humanities cannot follow the conversation around deeply technical topics and do not understand the software development and the software deployment process. And yet, these processes are at the core of the discrimination taking place.
Sabotage comes in many forms, and there are numerous manuals on the internet from the CIA, the Norvegian resistance during WWII, the French resistance during the Vichy regime and the nazi occupation, and other examples. They mostly center around adding frictions and delays to smooth running operations.
In fact, delaying the nazi forces during the Normandy landings was extremely crucial to the operational success of the whole mission.
Operational success is dependent on the lack of delays during mission-critical periods. Low friction is also critical: if there is operational confusion or a gridlock due to lack of managerial approval, one can only expect catastrophic results.
Frictions and delays are the invisible saboteurs, yet very few software organisations are willing to tackle them in any way. That's because frictions are delays are a normal part of an emerging piece of software or a new platform: people have to interact in new ways, new ways of thought challenge existing preconceptions, there are clashes of value. There is a healthy difference in values and opinions.
As such, the sabotage is invisible, and the saboteur is hidden for a long time.
The family example: how freaking out about delays makes you seem like the bad person
There are multiple movies where a girl is trying to get ready for a date only for the bathroom to be occupied by the older/younger sibling which refuses to acknowledge that they are monopolizing a critical resource.
Now an outside observer (often a psychologist) might point out that the person going on a date is suffering from anxiety. To cope with the anxiety, the person going on a date is obviously projecting their negative emotions onto the poor person monopolizing the bathroom.
While this seems like a legitimate observation, without knowing the objective facts (did the younger/older sibling take up the bathroom for 5 minutes, or 60 minutes) it is impossible to make an objective judgement.
Now if the person going on a date complains in any way, or shows anger, they will be told to "be reasonable" irrespective of the facts of the case. There is a certain amount of social tolerance expected of each person in a family.
Now consider the case where the saboteur understands the social tolerance, and only takes up 5 minutes in the bathroom. The person being delayed cannot reasonably complain, even if the saboteur does it every time everywhere. This is the invisible sabotage that is used in a myriad of different forms.
This is a simple example of sabotage by delays during critical periods. In a corporate environment, things get much worse. The fact of the matter is that the victim might not even be aware of the way they are being sabotaged, and there are good reasons that people will surpress this line of thinking.
The easiest way to get rid of this invisible sabotage is to dedicate resources (for systems with unexpected schedules - that might mean building two bathrooms). Sadly, most organisations deduplicate resources which means that victims end up having to share a system with their abusers.
Easiest way to spot abusers
It's quite simple: They revoke access.
In a family setting it becomes quite obvious when a person is unwilling to share a common resource. However, in a corporate environment, an abuser can be a paragon of security. One of the best security lectures (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0aQ8EtrKAs) points out that security isn't about removing access from everyone. It is the ability to get things done while maintaining a secure environment. In other words: sharing, not controlling. Even the NSA hands out guest badges to visitors.
The inherent danger
As anyone who has played a game of Mafia (or Werewolves), or Among Us knows, reporting on the imposter or saboteur is the best way to get killed next.
The fact of the matter is that the higher positioned a person is in a hierarchy, the less likely is that they will be disciplined in any way, and more likely that you will be retaliated against.
Now an outside observer can easily spot that there are two places where bodies are piled up:
1) The bodies left by the saboteur 2) The bodies the saboteur is using to frame the paragon trying to take him down
It is surprising how often the paragon will be voted out due to 2) The most important corporate lesson is to realize that HR too is part of the game of Mafia: instead of being a regulating force, they're just one more participant in the game.
Labeling the paragons as saboteurs: Using caution against the paragons
There are legitimate reasons to delay, and it is often saboteurs which will insist that you rush through your tasks so that the work moves to the stage of the pipeline they are responsible for. Then, they can block remediation for any mistakes in your original work, and also to prevent any damage control (in case the mistake results in an outage).
If, after seeing the careless way changes are being made, you delay and take special precautions around every task being performed, you will seem like you are a saboteur yourself, even though you are preventing further mistakes.
Sadly, the only cure for this problem is responsible risk managment, defining an acceptable margin of safety, deep domain knowledge, intellectual honesty, ethics, and the willingness for objective assesment. Sadly, IT organisations are often unwilling and unable to enshrine these values.
However, there is one thing that a saboteur will avoid, and that is for the project to succeed. Much like Solomon's decision regarding the baby and the two mothers, if a person is worrying about the success of the project, and is willing to go the extra mile for the benefit of the project, then the person is likely not to be a saboteur.
Lastly, saboteurs do not create disaster recovery plans, since their whole motivation is for a disaster to occur.
And if the sabotage is coming from above, you will be asked to perform work without being able to check for its quality.
Why the obsession with customer success matters
I think the great advantage Amazon and AWS have is that they put the customer first. As a result, even if they have internal tensions, the customer is unlikely to be affected negatively, preserving the long-term success of the business.
Sadly, this is poor comfort for the losing person in these internal tensions. If they lose their job to people who do not care about the customer, the service will still degrade long-term, although at an imperceptible rate.
All sabotage aims to be invisible to management.