[beloch]

22. Hire antisocial self-declared "rock star" employees who can't stand other human beings.

23. Encourage sociable, pleasant employees to read Machiavelli and Sun Tzu.

24. Peer reviews and stack ranking!

25. Stress that everything must be done in-house. If your employees want a wheel, they must reinvent it themselves.

26. Play video games in your office during crunch-time or, heck, just take the day off. You deserve it!

27. Survey your employees to find out what extracurricular activities everyone enjoys. Then, ignore that data and hold a mandatory weekend game of your own favorite sport pitting your employees against those of a personal rival. If your team loses, throw your hat on the ground, jump up and down on it, and swear never to do this again. Repeat once or more annually.

28. If, after doing all this, you still have payroll to burn, hire somebody at twice the salary of anyone else, anonymously leak salary information for your department, and be sure to give this new employee absolutely nothing to do except twiddle their thumbs.

[api]

29. Absentee management. Set no goals and assign nothing, yet give people the vague sense that they are always behind. Combine slack with a sense of foreboding.

30. Advertise a position as advanced and interesting -- quant work, machine learning, GPGPU, distributed systems, etc. -- then hand your new hire a 15 year old heap of stinking web CRUD written in Perl and 1990s-style JavaScript to maintain.

(Both from my own personal experience.)

[civilian]

Therefore a wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then they will always be faithful to him.

Niccolo Machiavelli "The Prince"

[luch]

Most people associate Machiavelli with a devious, twisted mind when he was actually simply a pragmatic. He is labeled as an amoral guy since he admits that violent or cunning methods are sometimes useful.

Also, as an software contractor, his thesis on private forces/ paid forces is quite enlightening.

[civilian]

Link for reference: http://www.bartleby.com/36/1/13.html

[philsnow]

> Peer reviews

I've had nothing but positive experiences from years and years of peer reviews. It's not even that I've had "nice" / overly-charitable peers who don't call me out on things: I've gotten good, actionable feedback that improved my career.

It's a pain in the ass to write them but I always put in a good effort because of the benefits I've received from them.

[hawkice]

I think the problem with most peer reviews in practice is that they typically are not actionable or even concrete. I used to have monthly 1:1's where I got feedback that wasn't "keep it up" less than 10% of the time. Not a negative experience, very positive actually, but a huge waste of time that seemed to exist just so the person I reported to could see he was in-charge.

[lsc]

>23. Encourage sociable, pleasant employees to read Machiavelli and Sun Tzu.

Oh boy. I worked one place where they handed out copies. It did not occur to me that this was a warning sign at the time, but... yeah.

[psaintla]

With #22 I really believe that you should be careful. Introverts can easily be confused as anti-social. Now if they're a dick to everyone for no reason that's a different story.

[Already__Taken]

Is asocial free for coining?

[Someone]

No, but feel free to use it (it already has the meaning you intens to give it. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asociality)

[AnimalMuppet]

I think Robert Heinlein used that term in one of his stories. (Another character applied it to Lazarus Long.)

[ciriarte]

Sadly, I've seen all of these points happen. Even 26 and 28.