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Hey fellow tech folks. We might get asked to do something terrible. I'd like to start a bit of an open discussion about how to deal with such requests.
The first thing I might recommend is enthusiastically agree to do whatever it is then forget about it and do something else. If asked about it in the future, pretend this is the first you've heard about it. Play as dumb as you can for as long as you can.
Now, if you can't get away with delaying by not doing anything anymore then find the absolute most complicated way to do whatever it is. This is actually a great time to use an LLM. Have an LLM write all your code then just run it. Ask the LLM to fix anything that's broken. Take some extra steps to force downgrade or upgrade libraries to incompatible versions. Write all of your own interfaces by hand. Write your own date parsing library. Write all of your own SQL without any abstractions. Add an LLM in the middle some how. Use libraries that haven't been supported for 15 years. Ever want to write code in Python 2.0? Now's your chance! Debug everything with Wireshark, no matter what it is. I bet there's a VB script library to do what you need to do, and if you can just write a C wrapper around that it'll interface perfectly with perl, as soon as you can get that old FoxPro program running in wine. I bet it would be easier without that commit hook that changes every zero to a capital letter O. "I'm getting the craziest error. It works on my system!"
There are a million ways to make things insanely complicated, and most of us have seen people legitimately do these things out of pure incompetence.
Now, if you end up against the wall and think you might get fired package everything up and hand it off to someone else, but make sure you make it clear that you're almost done and it should be super easy to finish. Leave behind some fun puzzles for the next person to figure out.
"How strange...the output changes when I change the whitespace, but not when I change the text. What is that?"
Who's got some other fun suggestions for extremely malicious compliance?
Edit: Since the post I was riffing on is no longer the top trending on my instance, I'm gonna bump it again. We've all been thinking about all kinds of malicious compliance in the case of a hypothetical (or perhaps some of us real) evil. This is a *specific* evil that *is* being asked for right now.
It's worth reading the original post that got me thinking about this, it you hadn't yet:
https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/113866093397576803
@Hex If someone asks me to do something unethical, I will say that it is unethical and not do it. And I will face whatever consequences come with that refusal. That is the ethical thing to do.
@eliotlear "I refuse to personally march folks into camps, but I won't stop you if you want to do it" does not sound like a moral win to me.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
@knack No, that's not what I said. I said that lying is wrong. I didn't say resisting is wrong.
@eliotlear @knack Lying is not only not wrong but an ethical mandate in many situations.
Yes this requires unlearning. It required a lot for me. But the principle that lying is always or even usually wrong is extremely privileged and harms those who are less so.