How Malicious Compliance Saved a Company

I once worked at a place that built electronic gadgets — water leak detection equipment, to be exact. Black boxes with a lot of connectors. Each gadget had a built-in webserver: you type in the gadget's IP address, and the user interface appears. This was in the stone-knives-and-bearskins days, and the entire webserver was hard-coded. You know, HTML strings in the C source.

So the CEO and the VP of marketing decided that they didn't like the UI (user interface, essentially the look and feel of the webpages) in our biggest moneymaking product. It wasn't our flagship product, but it had the biggest slice of the revenue pie chart and a delicious profit margin.

Yeah, so anyway, CEO and VP locked themselves in a conference room for a couple of days and came out with a new UI design. They had designed the whole thing in PowerPoint. They told the firmware engineer (not me, but a co-worker that I admire the heck out of) to reprogram the UI and make it exactly like the PowerPoint slides.

FW Engr had a lot of credibility in the company and wasn't afraid of getting fired, so he proceeded to tell them all the reasons that it was a bad idea and wouldn't work and the customers wouldn't like it. They yelled at him and gave him the "We're the CEO and VPMktg and we know what the customers want" and the "just do your job" speeches.

So, knowing that it was doomed to fail, but since they had demanded it, and knowing that he would get paid no matter what he did, he set aside his current project and went to work. He totally rewrote the HTML so that the UI looked and performed exactly the way the PowerPoint slides said it should. CEO and VP loved it, and gave him the "see? that wasn't so hard, was it?" speech. FW Engr went back to what he was really supposed to be doing.

Just as he had predicted, customers hated the new UI. Existing customers who upgraded their firmware couldn't find things anymore. New customers who had just bought the box couldn't navigate it without a GPS and a Ouija board. Tech support got multiple calls a day complaining about the UI and asking for help.

And on top of everything, it was ugly. It looked like a PowerPoint presentation, not a leak-detection system.

Our tech support guy went to the FW Engr and told him about the dozens of complaint calls. FW Engr told him to have the customers enter a slightly different URL: instead of "ip.address", type in "ip.address/classic" , and the old UI would magically appear. He hadn't deleted the old UI code; he had just hidden it deep inside the gadget's memory, because he knew that this was exactly what would happen.

Tech support went away happy. Customers were happy. The firmware engineer had saved the company's cash-cow-golden-goose, and probably saved the company. I don't think anybody ever told CEO or VP Mktg. They were totally oblivious to what the firmware engineer had pulled off, right under their noses.