The Manager Who Mandated Python

The Manager Who Mandated Python

There is a concept in corporate governance called ‘incentive misalignment.’ This is the story of a manager who, in an attempt to optimize his software team, created a perfect case study in it.

The team, proficient in the C-family of languages (C, C++, C#), was tasked with maintaining and developing a large, complex codebase. A new manager arrived. His model of the world was simple: Python is a modern, high-level language. Modern, high-level languages are more efficient. Therefore, we will use Python. The policy was issued with the force of divine revelation: all new work, and eventually all old work, would be in Python. To facilitate this career-altering pivot, the team was offered a generous training plan: they could take classes on their own time, at their own expense.

You can imagine the immediate recalibration of effort. As one commenter, Zoreb1, astutely framed the counter-offer: ‘What if everyone said ‘no’ and just sat around doing nothing?’ This is not laziness; it is a rational response to a unilateral revision of the employment contract’s effort bargain.* Productivity, as the original poster noted, plummeted toward its asymptotic limit of zero. The manager, confronted with the tangible output of his own policy, was shortly thereafter ‘no longer’ a manager.

The episode is a beautiful example of what we might call the Doctrine of Cascading Friction. The manager sought the clean elegance of a single-language stack—a noble, if naïve, goal. He failed to account for the conversion costs, the infrastructure debt, and, most critically, the human capital already on the books. The plan wasn’t to have one person slowly learn the existing stack; it was to have the entire existing stack slowly learn one person’s preferred language. It seems efficient, in a ‘for certain values of efficient’ sort of way.

In the end, the market corrected. The team’s collective ‘malicious compliance’ was simply the invisible hand giving management a very visible poke in the eye.

*This is not legal advice. It is, however, excellent career advice for anyone presented with a similarly upside-down proposition.