Ask HN: If you want to send a programmer over the edge...

Schedule meetings every 2 hours, just so that the programmer never gets any flow going. Then ask in the meetings why there isn't any progress.

From my time as a government contractor: show a programmer a problem that causes significant waste, that he knows exactly how to fix and then forbid him from fixing it for nebulous political reasons.

Withold admin rights on their work computer.

Force them to remote into a slow machine on a slow network connection running Windows 98<p>Constantly change the requirements for a project.<p>Insist that they stop work on project A to work on B, C, D, then ask why they haven't made good progress on A.

Require a complex scrum planning process, approval from designers, principal reviews, extensive project financial analysis. Then on day one of the sprint, scrap all that for your personal pet project that has high VP visibility with no justification.

Find out when they come in to work every day. Schedule a daily recurring meeting an hour or 30 minutes before then. (also works if you schedule the meeting right after they normally leave).

Don't pull their pull request when they've put a lot of work into them.

Only take on projects that involve modifying templates from obscure and obsolete CMS's.

Ask a programmer what makes him go over the edge and send him over the edge.

Remap 1 to l, O to 0 and vice versa (but only one out of three times)

Keep them away from HN over a longer period of time.

Ask him to record everything he does ;)

Why do you want to do that?

Use windows.