The war of the hidden motives

Sometimes systems don’t work because people have a vested interest in keeping them broken

Three years ago, I landed what I thought was a dream job. I had been working as a freelance Web developer, and my impressive portfolio proved useful when the largest newspaper publisher in my South American country advertised a vacancy in the Web department.

The company’s print publications had driven good traffic to its online counterparts; about 40 percent of the whole country’s news-related traffic was ours. Nevertheless, in the eyes of this enterprise, the Internet was nothing but a necessary burden.

I saw it as a diamond in the rough, and I couldn’t wait to polish it. My first step was to improve and redesign all the obsolete technology in use.

I discovered that the hierarchy I worked under was not standard or even logical — most of the things my department did went unsupervised, and most of our requests were not approved. I learned quickly that our job was to exist and do as little as possible.

My direct boss didn’t help matters much. She was a newscaster with a megawatt smile and no training in any type of technology. There was no way to perform upgrades or includes features because nobody could approve any changes. And they all seemed to like things that way.

Demoralized and aged by the months with no progress, I decided I was going to leave, but not before I did something to shine up that diamond.

I began coding upgrades by moonlight and making changes without authorization. With nobody to approve changes, there was hardly anybody to stop them, either. Every now and then, my newscaster boss would realize that an entire section of the site had been improved. I’m convinced to this day that she thought it was magic.

Visitors were enjoying the changes, too. When the praise started coming, I couldn’t hide my hobby anymore and had to tell the team about my efforts. Soon I was allowed artistic freedom as long as I didn’t raise too much dust.

In the months that followed, I created applications to simplify our tasks, expanded features, nearly doubled our daily site visits, and drastically improved our search engine ranks. Nobody in my line of command knew what was going on exactly, but everybody was pleased — until I started trying to fix too many things.

We were having problems with our host provider, but my requests for an in-house hosting solution were always politely rejected. We were getting hacked every other Tuesday, running on tight storage and bandwidth, and being ridiculously overbilled by the host, a man whose only means of contact was a Hotmail address.

Shortly after I started making too much noise about this host situation, the technology department head began tracking my every move. Virtually everything I did was banned by company policies, and even though I and my supervisors had a tacit agreement about that, he had built quite a file on me and my egregious activities (such as installing a programming IDE on a computer without authorization and coding applications on my own time to benefit the company).

Suddenly, I was in the middle of a war — but it had almost nothing to do with my activities. Turns out my newscaster boss and the head of the technology department had a personal vendetta against me that never was explained to me. And our host provider, “MarioDaBigPlayaaa@hotmail.com,” was someone’s friend or relative. Other parties also divulged various equally ridiculous and personal reasons why the Web department needed to stay as mired in problems as it always had.

The war dragged on for a week, but finally, I and my supporters won. I realized two things: I wasn’t trained to play their game, and it was time to pursue other activities. I went to the top of the organization, told him all claims against me were true, that the system was a mess, and that it was impossible for me to keep fighting it.

I learned a valuable lesson: In business, people act for many reasons that are usually not the ones they claim.