It’s hard to be efficient at your job when the technology you have been given to complete your tasks is wildly outdated.
Unfortunately, that was the predicament that this team of consultants founds themselves in at this pharmaceutical company. For the record, the author of this anecdote no longer works at this place, which is why he felt compelled to share the story of his team’s successful act of malicious compliance.
Apparently, the consultants were treated like the bottom of the barrel at this place, and the old computers they were given to work with became the physical manifestation of this treatment. The problem was that they had to run the debug and update the same code as some other employees at the company, who were all given the latest Apple product. I guess that aspect of their jobs was actively ignored when HR made the decisions as to which teams were given which laptop models.
Eventually, it got to the point where the consultants could not take it anymore. They were sick and tired of being held accountable to meet unnecessarily strict deadlines while working with interminably slow computers. So, they decided to mimic the pace of their laptops in order to prove a point. Let’s just say that said point was ultimately proven…


