Malicious compliance crosses cultural barriers
Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register ’s reader-contributed Friday column that celebrates the unique workplace cultures that make delivering tech support such delightful fun.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Antonio” who told us that in the late 1990s he worked for a multinational financial services organization.
Not long after taking the job, Antonio was dispatched to Hong Kong to oversee the regional rollout of a new reverse proxy.
Antonio gathered the local team for a town hall meeting at which he introduced himself to the 25-strong tech team who would work on the project.
“I walked them through exactly what we were going to do and how everything had to be configured,” he explained to On Call. And then, cognizant that some on the team were more comfortable speaking Cantonese, he apologized for speaking in English for so long and asked if everyone understood the plan.
“I was met with beaming faces and vigorously nodding heads,” Antonio told On Call.
“Implementation weekend came and went in a bit of a blur, but on Monday morning all sorts of weird things started to go wrong,” Antonio wrote.
He looked into it and found configurations that were close to those he had put in the plan, but not quite perfect.
“Key parts of our production environment - and elements on which we had dependencies, like load balancers, routers and so on, we're all ‘out of whack,” he told On Call.
It took Antonio four days to figure out the problems and fix the mess.
“I eventually pulled the team back together for a de-brief to figure out where things had gone wrong and why the production build had been subtly tweaked so that it appeared to comply with our plans but in fact did not.”
A solemn-faced team member offered an explanation: “Our way is better.”
Antonio responded without containing his incredulity. "Not better," he countered, "because the parts you changed broke.”
He then reminded the team that he had asked if they understood the migration plan, and that everyone indicated they did.
“So can you help me understand why you said you understood the plan and then did something else?" he asked.
"We said we understood your plan,” came the response. “That was the question you asked, not whether we would follow it. Our plan was different. Our plan was better."
Antonio said he tried to explain his point of view and eventually came to realize that when working abroad, understanding local culture can be as important as technical skill.
Or as he put it to On Call: “Tech is easy. People are hard.”
Have you attempted to make tech work across cultures? If so, click here to send your story to On Call so we can share it on a future Friday. ®