Evil tip: avoid "easy" things

My writing has recently prompted an anonymous commenter to declare that people like me are what's wrong with the world. Oh joy! – finally, after all these years of doing evil, some recognition! Excited, I decided to share one of my battle-tested evil tips, which never ever failed evil me.

Don't work on "easy" things

An easy thing is a heads they win, tails you lose situation. Failing at easy things is shameful; succeeding is unremarkable. Much better to work on hard things – heads you win, tails they lose. Failure is unfortunate but expected; success makes you a hero.

Treat this seriously, because it snowballs. The guy working on the "hard" thing gets a lot of help and resources, making it easier to succeed – and easier to move on to the next "hard" thing. The guy doing the "easy" tasks gets no help, so it's harder to succeed.

Quotation marks all over the place, because of course what counts is perception, not how hard or easy it really is. The worst thing to work on is the hard one that's perceived as easy – the hard "easy" thing. The best thing is the easy "hard" one. My years-long preference for low-level programming results, in part, from its reputation of a very hard field, when in practice, it takes a little knowledge and a lot of discipline – but not any outstanding skills.

(Why then do many people fear low-level programming? Only because of how hard it bites you the first few times. People who felt that pain and recoiled respect those who've moved past it and reached productivity. Now you know why people take shit from the likes of Ken Thompson and Linus Torvalds, and then beg for more.)

The point where this gets really evil is not when a heroic doer of hard things decides to behave like a Torvalds. That's more stupid than evil. You'll get away with being a Torvalds, but it always costs some goodwill and hence, ultimately, money. So the goal-oriented evildoer always tries to be on their best behavior.

No, the point where this gets really evil is when you let them fail. When they come to you thinking that it's easy, and you know it's actually very hard, and you turn them down, and you let them fail a few times, and you wait until they come back with a readjusted attitude - that's evil.

Here, the evildoer needs to strike a delicate balance, keeping in mind The Evildoer's Golden Rule:

• You can only sustain that much do-gooding; however,
• Your environment can only take that much evildoing, and you need your environment.

Here's the rule applied to our situation:

• Working on the hard "easy" thing – all trouble, no credit – is going to be terrible for you. You'll get a taste of a do-gooder's short, miserable life.
• However, if this thing is so important that a failure would endanger the org, maybe you should be the do-gooder and save them from their misconceptions at your own expense. Maybe. And maybe not. Be sure to think about it.

The upshot is, sometimes the evildoer gets to be the do-gooder, but you should know that it's hazardous to your health.

Making easy things into hard ones: the postponing gambit

Sometimes you can't weasel out of doing something "easy." An interesting gambit for these cases is to postpone the easy thing until it becomes urgent. This accomplishes two things at a time:

• Urgent things automatically become harder, a person in a hurry more important. The later it's done, the easier it is to get help (while retaining the status of "the" hero in the center of it all who made it happen.)
• Under time pressure, the scope shrinks, making the formerly "easy" and now officially "hard" thing genuinely easier. This is particularly useful for the really disgusting, but unavoidable work.

But it is a gambit, because postponing things until they become urgent is openly evil. (Avoiding easy things is not – why, it's patriotic and heroic to look for the harder work!) To get away with postponing, you need an excuse:

• other supposedly urgent work;
• whoever needing this thing not having reminded you;
• or even you having sincerely underestimated the difficulty and hence, regrettably, having postponed it too much – you're so sorry. (This last excuse has the drawback of you having to admit an error. But to the extent that urgency will make the scope smaller, the error will become smaller, too.)

One thing you want to prevent is people learning to remind you earlier. The way to accomplish it is being very nice when they come late. If people feel punished for reminding too late, they'll come earlier next time, and in a vengeful mood, so with more needless tasks. But if they're late and you eagerly "try to do the best under the circumstances", not only do you put yourself under the spotlight as a patriotic hero, you move the forgetful culprit out of the spotlight. So they'll form a rosy memory of the incident, and not learn the value of coming earlier – precisely what we want.

One thing making the postponing gambit relatively safe is that management is shocked by the very thought of people playing it, as can be seen in the following real-life conversation:

Babbling management consultant: A lot of organizations have a problem where they only work on urgent things at the expense of important, but less urgent ones.

Low-ranking evildoer manager (in a momentary lapse of reason): Why, of course! I actually postpone things to get priority around here.

Higher-ranking manager (in disbelief): You aren't serious, of course.

Low-ranking evildoer (apparently still out to lunch): I am.

Higher-ranking manager (firmly): I know you aren't.

Low-ranking evildoer finally shuts his mouth.

See? Sometimes they won't believe it if you say it to their face. So they're unlikely to suspect you. (Do people reporting to me play the postponing gambit? Sometimes they do, and I don't resent them for it; their priorities aren't mine. But at the worst case, you should expect a lot of resentment – it's practically high treason – so you should have plausible deniability.)

Conclusion

To a very large extent, your productivity is a result of what you choose to work on. Keep things perceived as easy out of that list. When you can't, postponing an "easy" thing can make it both "harder" and smaller.

Happy evildoing!