Our New “No Assholes” Policy
Or: why paying us doesn’t buy you the right to be cruel.
We don’t talk about this stuff much in our industry. We probably should.
Resolve Technology is what’s called a Managed Service Provider — an MSP. In plain English: we’re the outsourced IT department for a few dozen organisations, mostly law firms, healthcare providers, and other professional services businesses. Our engineers run the servers, secure the email, fix the laptops, and answer the phone at 2am when something breaks.
Hundreds of individual humans relying on us to keep their working lives running.
A quick note on what we actually do, because it matters for everything that follows. We don’t write Windows. We don’t write the updates that periodically break Windows. We don’t manufacture the laptop it runs on, the printer that won’t talk to it, or the cloud service that just had an outage in another hemisphere. Our job is the layer above all of that: keeping the whole stack working together, anticipating the failures, and fixing things quickly when they happen anyway.
The scale of what’s underneath is genuinely staggering. Modern Windows is estimated at 50–100 million lines of code, and the Linux kernel alone crossed 40 million in early 2025 — and that’s before you count the firmware, drivers, applications, and cloud services stacked on top. When something breaks at 9:47am on a Tuesday, the cause could be in any of a dozen layers built by a dozen different companies, and untangling that is most of the actual work.
And when we do screw something up — because occasionally we do, we’re human — we’ll put it right, quickly, and own it.
Today we’re making something explicit that has, until now, lived as an unwritten understanding inside Resolve Technology: we don’t tolerate abuse or bullying of our staff. Not from prospects. Not from clients. Not from anyone.
We’re calling it our No Assholes Policy. The name is deliberately blunt because the behaviour we’re describing is blunt, and dressing it up in HR-speak has historically given it more room to thrive than it deserves.
What this is actually about
Most of our clients are wonderful. Genuinely. We have working relationships measured in years and, in some cases, decades. People who treat our engineers like colleagues, who say thank you, who understand that the person on the other end of the ticket is a human being with a brain, a family, and a finite supply of patience.
This policy is not about them. They’ll never notice it exists.
This policy is about the small but persistent minority who believe that a monthly invoice is a license to:
- Scream at engineers on the phone over things that aren’t their fault
- Send rude, demeaning, or contemptuous emails
- Threaten staff personally during outages
- Treat our team as servants rather than skilled professionals
- Make sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory remarks
- Demand work outside scope while abusing the people who decline
Paying us money does not entitle anyone to behave like a spoilt brat. It never has. We’re just saying so out loud now.
A wider observation
Here’s the uncomfortable thing about this kind of behaviour: it almost never confines itself to the supplier relationship.
If someone treats their MSP this way, we’re going to assume — with a fairly high degree of confidence — that they treat their colleagues, their direct reports, their assistants, and the junior staff in their own firm the same way. People don’t usually keep one persona for vendors and a different, kinder one for everyone else. The contempt is the contempt. It just leaks out wherever the power gradient lets it.
There’s a phrase we’ve started using internally for this: monetised cruelty. It’s what happens when an organisation quietly decides that someone’s revenue, billings, rainmaking, or seniority is worth more than the dignity of the people they’re hurting. The maths is implicit but unmistakable: this person generates X, the cost of their behaviour is Y, X exceeds Y, therefore the behaviour gets absorbed. Junior staff get burned out. Assistants quit. Suppliers get screamed at. The firm shrugs, quietly settles the occasional claim, and keeps banking the revenue.
Around that core sits something broader and harder to name: a permissive culture of enablement. It’s the partner who rolls their eyes when their colleague’s name comes up but never has the conversation. It’s the HR team that documents incidents and then files them. It’s the office manager who reroutes calls so the receptionist doesn’t have to deal with him today. It’s the supplier who writes off another abusive call as “just how he is.” Every one of these is a small kindness offered to the wrong person — a tiny act of accommodation that, multiplied across years and dozens of people, builds the scaffold the behaviour stands on.
Nobody sets out to enable cruelty. It accretes. One avoided conversation at a time, one “let’s not make a scene,” one “they had a stressful week.” And then one day everyone in the building is organising their working life around managing one person’s moods, and nobody can quite remember when that became normal.
Some industries — ours included, at times — have let this go on for years. Sometimes because the person doing it makes a lot of money for the firm and nobody wants to touch the golden goose. Sometimes because they sit high enough up the org chart that the people they’re harming have no real recourse. And sometimes, honestly, because nobody around them has been brave enough to have the hard conversation.
We’re not here to fix anyone’s internal culture. That’s not our job. But we are willing to be one more data point in the conversation, by declining to absorb the behaviour ourselves and by being clear about why.
Why we’re writing it down
A few reasons.
Because our team deserves to know we have their back. When an engineer is being ground down by a contemptuous client, the worst possible message we can send is silence. Writing this down — publicly — tells our staff that the company will choose them over revenue when push comes to shove. That’s not a small thing in our industry.
Because clarity is kinder than ambiguity. A clearly stated policy gives everyone, including the occasionally difficult client, a chance to course-correct before things get ugly. Most people who behave badly under pressure don’t realise how they’re coming across. A policy gives us — and them — a vocabulary for the conversation.
Because the work is hard enough already. Running infrastructure for legal, healthcare, and professional services clients is high-stakes, often urgent, sometimes thankless. Our engineers turn up at 2am for outages. They troubleshoot through screaming Friday afternoons. They hold a lot of complexity in their heads. Adding “and absorb personal abuse” to that list is not on.
How it works in practice
We’re not pretending this is complicated.
If a client crosses the line, we’ll raise it directly with whoever the appropriate contact is. Calmly, professionally, in writing. Most of the time, that conversation is the entire intervention required — people apologise, things reset, life goes on.
If the behaviour continues, we’ll have a more serious conversation about whether the relationship is working for either of us.
If it continues after that, we’ll part ways. Cleanly, with proper notice, with full handover support to whoever they choose next. We’re not interested in being punitive — we’re just not interested in subsidising someone’s theatrics and childhood trauma at the expense of our team’s wellbeing, while exposing our business to a personal grievance claim.
A note for prospective clients
If reading this makes you uncomfortable, we’re probably not the right MSP for you, and that’s genuinely fine. There are plenty of providers who’ll wear whatever you throw at them in exchange for the money — because they, too, are enabling this and part of the culture. We’re not one of them.
And — said with as much care as bluntness allows — if the way you treat people in pressured moments is something you recognise in yourself here, the most useful thing we can offer isn’t a contract. It’s a gentle suggestion: talk to someone. A good therapist, a trusted friend, a priest, whoever fits. The constant low-grade contempt, the need to control, the stress that spills sideways onto everyone in range — that’s not a personality trait, it’s a wound. It’s worth tending to. Your colleagues, your family, and frankly you yourself will thank you for it.
Perhaps this is a wider conversation that needs to be had in your industry too — about the actual causes that have allowed these behaviours to grow, and persist, and become normalised. We find sunlight is the best disinfectant.
If reading this makes you nod along — welcome. You’re our people, and you always have been.
Simon Falconer
Director, Resolve Technology Ltd
