DEV Community: Hezborn Shikuku

When the System Isn't Broken - It's Working as Designed: Corporate Psychopathy Explained

Hezborn Shikuku — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:26:04 +0000

## 🧠 When Dysfunction Works: Psychopathy and Power in the Workplace

Ever worked somewhere where chaos, burnout, and blame-shifting felt baked in — not accidental?

It’s possible the system is not broken.

It’s working exactly as designed.

🧩 Dysfunction as a Feature, Not a Bug

In some organizations, toxic behaviors aren’t glitches. They’re features that protect power, obscure accountability, and reward manipulation.

This idea isn’t just cynical. It’s backed by decades of organizational research and psychology.

Here’s how:

Toxic managers thrive by avoiding blame and projecting confidence.
Turnover and burnout keep the workforce too disoriented to resist.
Blame flows downward, while upper management remains insulated.
Optics (metrics, loyalty) matter more than outcomes or ethics.

As Jackall (1988) puts it in Moral Mazes, middle and senior managers learn to master “moral elasticity” — adapting values to protect themselves, not the organization.

🧠 Corporate Psychopathy: The Research

Studies estimate that 4–20% of executives show elevated psychopathic traits — compared to ~1% in the general population (Babiak, Neumann, & Hare, 2010).

Psychopathic traits include:

Superficial charm
Lack of empathy or remorse
Manipulativeness
Impulsive behavior

These traits can look like “strong leadership” in fast-paced, results-driven environments — especially in tech.

📚 Sources:

Babiak & Hare (2006): Snakes in Suits
Dutton (2012): The Wisdom of Psychopaths
Boddy (2011): Links such traits to organizational decline and toxic environments.
Cleckley (1941): First coined the idea of the “mask of sanity.”

🎯 What the System Really Values

Often, systems prioritize:

Short-term wins over long-term well-being
Loyalty over transparency
Control over collaboration
Stability of power over adaptability

Zimbardo’s Lucifer Effect (2007) and Sutton’s No Asshole Rule (2007) show how cultures normalize these dynamics until they become the norm.

👀 What This Means for You

Most likely, HR or leadership isn’t going to fix this — especially when they benefit from the status quo.

That’s why:

Recognizing the signs of toxic systems is critical to protect yourself.
Supporting emotionally intelligent leadership is essential.
Refusing to normalize dysfunction is a personal act of resistance.

Not all leaders are psychopathic. And not all psychopaths succeed.

Research (Judge & Piccolo, 2004; Goleman et al., 2002) shows that emotionally intelligent, transformational leadership outperforms the quick-fix, optics-first model.

🛠️ TL;DR

If your workplace feels like a recurring stress dream — chaos, fear, and scapegoating on loop — it may not be broken. It may be efficiently extracting value from dysfunction.

👣 Learn the signs.

🛡️ Protect your well-being.

🚪 And if you can, walk away before it costs you more than just a job.

🧾 References

Ashforth, B. E., & Anand, V. (2003). The normalization of corruption in organizations.
Babiak, P., Neumann, C. S., & Hare, R. D. (2010). Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk.
Boddy, C. R. (2011). Corporate Psychopaths, Bullying and Unfair Supervision in the Workplace.
Cleckley, H. (1941). The Mask of Sanity.
Dutton, K. (2012). The Wisdom of Psychopaths.
Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal Leadership.
Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers.
Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership.
Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization.
Muller, J. Z. (2018). The Tyranny of Metrics.
Sutton, R. I. (2007). The No Asshole Rule.
Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect.

Let’s talk in the comments.

WorkplaceCulture #Leadership #Psychology #ToxicWorkplaces #TechLife #CareerGrowth #DevCommunity #MentalHealthAtWork

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Hezborn Shikuku — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 04:29:36 +0000

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Comments 11

8 min read

Ubuntu: Pro or Not?

Hezborn Shikuku — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 09:30:25 +0000

If you're running Ubuntu (or plan to), you've probably come across Ubuntu Pro - Canonical's enhanced edition of the popular Ubuntu distribution.

Whether you're working from a personal laptop or deploying to the cloud, here’s a personal breakdown of the benefits and trade-offs.

👍 Pros of Ubuntu Pro

🔐 Extended Security Maintenance (ESM)

Get security patches for thousands of additional packages (including universe), even after regular Long Term Support (LTS) ends.

💻 Great for Desktop Users Too

Includes updates for widely-used apps like Firefox, LibreOffice, and many Python/Node.js packages - super helpful for devs and researchers.

☁️ Cloud-Ready & Certified

Official support on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud with pre-built certified images.

📜 Compliance-Ready

Includes FIPS and CIS hardening profiles - useful for teams in regulated industries like finance and healthcare.

🆓 Free for Individuals and Small Teams

Ubuntu Pro is free for up to 5 personal machines or 50 machines for organizations - perfect for small teams and solo developers.

⚠️ Cons of Ubuntu Pro

💸 Paid Beyond the Free Tier

Large orgs will need to pay - might not be ideal for schools or small orgs on tight budgets.

📦 Still Ubuntu at Its Core

You're not getting bleeding-edge features - just longer and broader support for what’s already there.

🐢 Patch Lag on Universe Packages

Security updates on universe packages can lag behind rolling distros like Arch or Fedora.

🔒 Deeper Canonical Integration

Tools like Livepatch and Landscape are useful, but might pull you deeper into the Canonical ecosystem.

👨‍💻 My Take?

If you value security, support, and long-term stability, Ubuntu Pro is a solid option -especially in production or daily professional use.

But if you prefer bleeding-edge tech, minimal setups, or more control, sticking with regular Ubuntu (or exploring something like Arch, Fedora, or NixOS) might be more your style.

📝 Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts and do not reflect the views of Canonical or the Ubuntu team.

Have you tried Ubuntu Pro on your desktop or server? What was your experience like?
Let’s talk below 👇

Imposter Syndrome: A Focus on Tech Developers

Hezborn Shikuku — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 07:31:53 +0000

For a developer, experiencing imposter syndrome is almost inevitable; dealing with it is where the real work lies.

How It All Starts

Regardless of expertise, have you ever encountered a challenge that humbles you to the point of questioning the very decisions that led you to your current situation?

Examples:

Working in a Team of Experienced Developers: You're assigned to a project team where everyone else seems to have years of experience. During meetings, they discuss concepts and technologies that you're unfamiliar with, leading you to question whether you belong in the same room. You start feeling like you're the weakest link in the team and that your contributions are less valuable, even though everyone started where you are at some point.
Receiving Critical Code Reviews: You submit your first code for review, and it comes back with numerous comments and suggestions for improvement. Even though constructive feedback is a normal part of the development process, you interpret it as a sign that you're not good enough. Instead of seeing feedback as an opportunity to learn, you internalize it as evidence of your inadequacy, which can further fuel feelings of imposter syndrome.
Struggling with New Technologies: You’re learning a new programming language or framework that feels vastly different from what you’re used to. Despite your best efforts, you find yourself struggling to understand it, while others seem to pick it up quickly. This can lead to feelings of inadequacy, as if you're not "cut out" for development, even though learning curves are normal and everyone progresses at their own pace.
Comparing Yourself to Peers: You browse social media or developer forums and see peers posting about their accomplishments—launching apps, getting promotions, or speaking at conferences. Meanwhile, you’re still trying to grasp the basics. The comparison game can make you feel like you’re falling behind, which intensifies feelings of being an imposter, even though these platforms often showcase only the highlights of others' careers.
Dealing with Unsolved Bugs: You encounter a stubborn bug that you can’t fix for hours or even days. The more time you spend on it, the more you start doubting your problem-solving skills and question if you’re fit for the job. This can lead to a spiral of self-doubt, where every unsolved issue becomes further "proof" that you don’t have what it takes, rather than recognizing that debugging is a challenging part of development for everyone.
Feeling Overwhelmed by Rapid Changes in Technology: You’re trying to keep up with the latest trends and tools in the tech industry, but the pace of change feels overwhelming. You constantly feel like you're falling behind, no matter how much you learn. The rapid evolution of technology can make you feel like you’ll never be able to keep up, feeding into the idea that you’re not a "real" developer because others seem to adapt more quickly.
Struggling with "Simple" Tasks: You’re given a task that seems simple at first glance, but you find it unexpectedly difficult. You worry that this should be easy for you, and the fact that it isn’t makes you question your abilities. This can lead to a disproportionate sense of failure, where you start to believe that you're not capable of handling even the basics, which is a common trigger for imposter syndrome.

The General familiar feeling!

You start to feel out of place, inadequate for the task at hand. The roller-coaster of self-doubt begins. Then, suddenly, you come up with a solution to your problem. But instead of feeling accomplished, you attribute this success to luck or chance. (This isn’t the real issue.)

The Problem

The real problem arises when you face your next challenge, which is likely to be even more difficult than the last (and it usually is). You approach it with the mindset that you somehow "lucked out" the first time. The relief you felt quickly fades, and the roller-coaster of doubt continues.

Reality Check

Here’s the simple truth: first, you need to recognize that many others have gone through what you are experiencing now. You are not alone. Second, there are those who have made it through and those who haven't. Third, it's not about being intelligent or dumb—if you’ve made it this far, you’re neither. It’s all about your emotional resilience.

Light Bulb Moment

Give yourself the credit you deserve. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses; work on the latter by building on the former (I know it sounds like a sales pitch, but it's true). In reality, if you hadn’t persisted in finding a solution to your problem, you wouldn’t have found one. In tech, as much as it may seem like it, coincidences are rare (we can't all be Percy Spencer). The probability of being just "plainly lucky" is very low. You might stumble into tech by chance, but resilience is what will carry you through the daily challenges.

Creating Something from Nothing

Many of the disciplines in the tech industry didn’t exist a few decades ago. This means that much of the tech field is still unexplored. Better yet, you can invent a discipline that suits you and run with it.

Conclusion

The moment you give up on notions of coincidences, luck, impossibilities, and rigidity, your journey towards overcoming imposter syndrome begins. You also learn to live with it, because it’s bound to happen again!