When the "R" goes missing from R&D (2021)
Workers in software and R&D roles describe how “work-to-rule” behavior — doing exactly what is specified and no more — often emerges when management punishes initiative, ignores “glue work,” or optimizes performance reviews around narrow, quantifiable metrics. Commenters argue that this erodes true research, experimentation, and cross‑functional collaboration, leading to bad UX, brittle internal tools, and reactive corporate overhauls that further separate design, engineering, and product thinking. Many see a broader pattern in large organizations: as bureaucracy and hierarchy grow, genuine innovation, accumulated know‑how, and enabling roles become invisible and are first to be cut, undermining long‑term capability even when each individual decision seems reasonable.
Work-to-rule, “Italian strike”, and malicious compliance
- Many comments map “doing exactly what’s asked, and nothing more” to work-to-rule / Italian strike / “malicious compliance.”
- Seen as a tool to expose bad rules or arbitrary punishment for “glue work,” not just laziness.
- Distinction from full strikes: strikes are dramatic, visible leverage for big issues (pay, benefits); work-to-rule is subtler and better for fixing specific bad policies or enforcement.
- Risk noted: done broadly, it can quietly kill an organization rather than drive change.
Incentives, glue work, and performance reviews
- Several stories of engineers shifting from coordination/helping others to pure ticket-chasing once performance metrics ignored glue work.
- Performance rubrics and “company values” often push people toward visible, quantifiable outputs (tickets, lines of code, overtime) and away from collaboration or long-term improvement.
- Some advise “follow destructive rules exactly” to force management to notice and revise them.
What counts as Research in R&D
- Many “R&D” roles are mostly development or “discovery” (figuring out what stakeholders want), not genuine research.
- Genuine research is described as open-ended, self-directed problem exploration (e.g., moonshot teams, data science), poorly served by backlog/scrum approaches.
- Some struggle to balance research and rapid prototyping, fearing “research hell” versus under-researched solutions.
UX, design, and management choices
- One faction blames the R&D team for bad, user-hostile UX that provoked management’s overreaction.
- Others argue the real issue was missing design expertise; expecting engineers to do UX without training is unrealistic.
- Critique of moving UX into a distant silo instead of embedding design skills in the team.
Cutting research, metrics, and invisible work
- Accounts of organizations winding down “R” (chemists, physicists, long-horizon projects) and focusing on roadmap-driven “D.”
- Firing people with “no output” is seen as risky: metrics often miss accumulated know-how and enabling roles that unlock others’ productivity.
- Loss of internal R makes it harder to judge or integrate external innovation later.
Bureaucracy, org design, and regression to the mean
- As companies grow, bureaucracy, hierarchies, KPIs, and turf wars expand while actual productive work shrinks.
- Explanation offered: early survivors are exceptional; rapid scaling forces hiring average talent, which in turn drives more process.
- Some suggest competing semi-autonomous groups or “micro-organizations” as a partial antidote.