Inspired by a two minute video about how the Navy Seals does it
Early in my career I made a decision, and I’m not sure what caused me to do it. It was a hunch, an intuition, and I shared it with people.
I said to fellow entry-level colleagues that my relationship with them was more important than my relationship to the company, and that when put to the test I would choose them over the company. (It was put to the test and there was a dark time that maybe I’ll tell you about in some other edition of this newsy).
BUT! It was the best career decision I ever made. As I was laid off or changed jobs, there would always be a group of people that would join me at the next gig. I would get my new job, then I would call my old friends and say “hey it’s better over here!” And they would jump ship.
Over the course of an entire career this created tremendous value. A few of the people that were entry-level with me are now executives at major companies, and they are the decision makers that chose Kelsus (Timber’s parent and software consulting company) as the one to build their projects.
Now that I’m on the other side of the worker/owner divide, I obviously have to have quite a bit of loyalty to my own company, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t still pass along this advice to the people that work for it. In an all-hands last year I gave Kelsus’s employees the same advice to be loyal to each other before being loyal to Kelsus, and I hope they take it to heart.
Some of the companies that I worked for early in my career had absolutely toxic cultures. There were “work 14 hour days seven days a week or your fired” cultures, there were “belittle you in front of everyone” cultures, and there were “only give promotions to the loyal inner circle” cultures. By bonding directly with my peers and assuring them that I would choose them over the company, we built a small, personal network against the toxicity that extended beyond whoever was employing us in the moment.
As companies like Basecamp burn it all down, I wonder if we have anything to be concerned about. Does Kelsus have a toxic culture? If it doesn’t now will it when it’s twice as large? How do we avoid it? Is just telling people to be loyal to each other enough?
I think it might actually be.
This two minute video gets into it. It’s about the line between talent and trust and how to navigate it as a leader when hiring and promoting. I love it.
It shows that the trust I tried to build with my peers at the toxic companies we worked for is the same trust that management should be asking for to avoid toxicity.
But when it’s flipped from grass roots to management, we give it a different name. We call it “follow through,” but it’s essentially trust.
We’ve built Kelsus on this core value. We want people to do what they say they’re going to do more than we want them to be fast or be perfect. Another way to put it is that following through on what you say you’re going to do is more important than doing what your told. We promote people that demonstrate this value consistently.
Kelsus (and therefore Timber which is a sub-part of Kelsus) is not immune to making mistakes. But I hope that if we continue to build everything on a foundation of trust we can avoid getting to a place where we burn it all down.
BUT! Just in case we do go the way of Basecamp, we can all just go start trading dog money.
Thanks for reading,
—Jon Christensen
Read the original article
Comments
Imagine going into an environment suffering some serious performance issues adversely affecting the day-to-day operations of the business. From initial conversations it seems great. You're asked about how you'd handle, "difficult personalities" a fair bit, but aside from that, seems like you can add a ton of value.
In your first days, you exhaustively quantitatively measure the entire operating environment, prioritize a plan of attack based on the data, and go at it.
By the end of the week, you have many improvements testing successfully while still producing identical and correct results. In one instance, runtime reduced from 200 minutes ... to 1.2 seconds. You dutifully write up an explanation, articles, all the gory compiler knowledge, etc. Submit pull requests. Your team is chuffed.
Result? Someone on another team calls you into a meeting, to railroad and scream at you for, "making them look bad". I mean SCREAM. As if they're trying to kill you with words. You report the incident to who you are directed to report into and are told to, "man up."
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This is when you ensure the termination clause is airtight. You spend 5 minutes drafting a termination letter, print it, and hand it in. Drop the mic. Walk out. Good riddance.
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Scary thing? That's nothing. Ever get hired for performance tuning and then the DBA refuses to create your account, and cusses out the CTO when the CTO asks why? Ever see a developer get punched by someone? Have you been in an environment where there were actual cots set up for people who had to work through the night, because it happened that often?
I've. Seen. Things.
I had this happen to me. Walked out after 2 months before completing 3 month trial period.
I had a boss who said he is best developer in the world and he meant it.
He caused major outage when the code he developed and brought to the company as an asset failed. The code was to exchange SMS messages with an SMS gateway for Ukrainian operator. The messages were sent using mails. That was 15 years ago and not his fault, but his fault was that he received the XML messages and instead of using XML parser, he just parsed text by locating substring in a given line number from a given offset to a specified character.
So what happened is that they stopped pretty-printing XML messages in the responses.
When I pointed (with couple people around) that this is absolutely our fault (I did not say his, but everybody knew this), he started screaming at me that I am incompetent and that he was programming when I was shitting myself in a crib.
I left the same day.
I left companies suddenly on two more occasions:
- when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish).
- when my boss charged at me to hit me after I refused to lie to management. He stopped himself with his fist 10cm from my face but that, for me, was game over.
> - when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish).
As an immigrant in Sweden, this is one of the instances where I'd love a name-and-shame (but it's just wishful thinking, I don't expect or really want you public shaming companies). Simply because I've heard this happening to other colleagues, in different companies, and for some Swedes this sounds almost fabricated.
I didn't get that clear message about not raising salaries up to Swedish colleagues but I noticed at some point that I was severely underpaid given my experience and skills, even more after a couple of years and I started to hear from much more junior employees how much they were making.
By lmilcin 2021-05-079:34 I worked there on site for a 6 month (minus one day) contract as a developer with already couple of years of experience. But just before the end of my contract I have learned from couple of guys from support line that I am basically earning less than they earn manning the phone with no education, experience or technical knowledge.
So when the end of the contract came I met with my boss who also had ability to make sole decision and sign the contract. He explained that they would like to keep me and they will even give me raise.
But when I said the raise basically puts me on level with the phone desk and I suspect engineers earn a lot more he said that this is as much as I am going to get and I should be happy because as a Pole I am not going to get anything more than that. Those were his words.
I have not met any other form of discrimination from anybody in the company, peer or manager. It was fun working there and I befriended a lot of people, spent a lot of time being invited to parties, etc. But this one statement sealed it for me and I knew that I would never be happy there.
Now, I don't have time to make a shit storm out of this and I am too busy to have any publicity around me at the moment. So I am not going to name the company.
I am lucky to be a developer and basically be able to choose where and for whom I work, so this did not cost me a lot. But I understand most people are not so lucky and this amounts to exploitation.
By bjourne 2021-05-0711:09 It's incredibly common. I knew a great Indian developer with years of experience and a degree from a brand name American university. He was making bus driver money. :) Swedish companies are incredible cheapskates. Swedish engineers doesn't make that much money as it is, but it's still too much for them so they have to import engineers from the third world which they know they can pay peanuts. Wage discrimination is illegal and the unions take it very seriously, but for obvious reasons, not a lot of people want to litigate against their former employees.
By hinkley 2021-05-0918:43 One of my regrets was accidentally seeing the salary of my female Vietnamese coworker and not making a stink about it.
Her ESL was not that great but she would just go around fixing bugs. So. Many. Bugs. And in a place full of architectural astronauts, when I say I generally had no issues with the quality of the code in her fixes, that is saying something.
Turned out she was making about the same as our senior QA folks.
We really should just talk about salaries. But that is partly a zero sum game, which requires the people currently winning to take a hard look at rather they “need” that extra 10% or if it’s just going to make retirement easier or sooner.
By pengstrom 2021-05-0710:21 Treatment of minorities in Sweden is no joke.
By benhurmarcel 2021-05-0711:00 > they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues
That's also very common in Switzerland. They know that for recent immigrants, the alternative is going back to their country with much smaller wages, so they can afford to propose less.
>- when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish).
Were you living in Poland or Sweden ? I kinda get that they'd want to pay less if you were living in Poland, considering the cost of living, but in Sweden that'd be scummy as shit.
By lmilcin 2021-05-079:34 I moved to Stockholm for the duration of the contract.
> I kinda get that they'd want to pay less if you were living in Poland, considering the cost of living
Shouldn’t a company pay what a job is worth to them, not based upon what they think the employees costs are?
This gets complicated fast as remote work, work from home etc all changes the equation. Does the end customer get to pay a different amount based on their location? From my experience the remote customer usually pays more, not less.
By benhurmarcel 2021-05-0710:561 reply > Shouldn’t a company pay what a job is worth to them
No, they pay just enough for you to accept working there. If your alternatives are worse than your colleagues because you don't have high-paying local options, you'll be paid less.
By Viliam1234 2021-05-0718:421 reply Imagine a country where most employers would agree that a black developer should be paid only 30% of what a white developer in the same position with the same skills would make. The black developers would have to accept such deal... because it would be the best option they would have.
Now somehow when you replace "black" with "Polish", it suddenly becomes ethically okay.
By benhurmarcel 2021-05-0812:03 It becomes legally ok, which is all that matters to the company.
If companies paid what jobs are worth, they wouldn't make a profit.
The same applies to goods: If you are charged as much as a good is worth to you, why bother buying it?
This isn’t right though. The worker produces something for their company. The company sells it and adds value as they do so. The company offers a track record, a method for getting the goods or services, a policy for returning or fixing the goods. They offer service when the employee is sick or on holiday - continuity. The company adds value to their worker’s work, and for this they can take a margin.
By anoncake 2021-05-0723:13 Without the worker, the company would be making a profit of n€. With them, it makes a profit of n+m€. So it gains m€ of value from hiring them. If they paid that money as their salary, hiring them would have been pointless.
Why would the cost of living factor in? If I move to a place that has a very high cost of living, then I don't get paid more. Why would the reverse be true?
By lars512 2021-05-0710:54 Pay is loosely related to the value you provide, but also to the balance of supply and demand for a role and a place. You simply can't attract a person from a high cost-of-living place without paying them a higher salary.
Companies explicitly factor this into their salary mix, e.g. check Buffer's formula https://buffer.com/salaries
It's not necessarily how I'd wish things, but it seems to be the reality of the job market.
By brabel 2021-05-0711:22 Do you work in Sillicon Valley? Do you think developers working there are just much better than anyone else and deserve earning 300K+ while the rest of us are on 100K if lucky?
By Viliam1234 2021-05-0719:011 reply How difficult would it be to do the following?
- rent the cheapest place (smallest, worst, etc.) somewhere on the edge of an expensive area = this will be your official address;
- buy or rent a nice large place in a cheap area = you will actually live here;
- work from home.
Bonus points if you share the cheap place in the expensive area with your friends (no problem, since no one is actually going to live there).
By pmiller2 2021-05-109:12 Both of those would have to be in the same state for it to work, due to the way taxes are withheld and paid. Otherwise, you're probably committing tax fraud.
By Taylor_OD 2021-05-0714:40 > I had a boss who said he is best developer in the world and he meant it.
He was the best developer in his world.
By imperialdrive 2021-05-074:327 reply My first day of work many many years ago I did the usual (for me at least) and stopped by each office (before open floorplans were widespread) to introduce myself. The very first office the door was cracked so I knocked and slowly opened it a bit more to give a friendly "hello" and the guy immediately grabbed his desktop inkjet printer (one of those old half dome Epsons) and hurled it at me, crashing at my feet due to cables holding it back... That was one hell of a start. A wild next couple months followed. This post/comment gave me a nice flashback to it! Ty :D
I once had a colleague throw his wireless mouse at me because of a windows automatic update during crunch time. Apparently did not expect me to throw it back. We're still friends.
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Also reminds me of the day I picked up an xbox one for my team. We were traveling and it was cause for a little change of pace. We were going to play a zombie shoot em up game. They plugged it in, and first thing the damn thing did was run an update that took 30 minutes. We weren't on a great connection, even by 2014 standards.
They ran the game and it forced another update that wanted to download like 20gigs, even when I made a point to grab the disc. Couldn't cancel. I ripped the thing out so quick and launched it as hard as I could. The xbox smashed against the concrete floor and was in pieces. It caught everybody off guard, but it lead to pretty fun night, nonetheless. They had never seen me like that before, or since.
I got a nice plaque from the team a week or two later with the xbox decal and the message "I just want to shoot some fcking zombies!" :)
By raverbashing 2021-05-076:49 Yeah I think your anger with the game was justifiable
"Yes please let me download the whole game again because the developer is too cheap to use any kind of incremental upgrade and if you're buying an XBox you have the fastest internet connection available right? RIGHT?"
Started a new medication some time back, Plaqunial.
Turns out a very rare side effect is it makes you psychotic.
The kind where sweet old grandma would come at you with a kitchen knife and dance on your grave in glee.
Was extremely angry for months on it, but didn’t realize it was the medication.
Then since it was working so well on my condition, completely life changing. The doctor doubled it.
Was not a good week. Out of a job a few days later.
So not an excuse for tossing a printer, but on that med it was a constant battle to not explode.
By lostlogin 2021-05-0710:31 Can anyone downvoting explain? Toyg appear to be correct on the drug naming and a known side effects include psychosis, hallucinations and paranoia and according to the wiki.
By 1123581321 2021-05-0710:29 Anger and mood swings seem to be a reported side effect, based on a cursory search. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Plaqunial+anger&t=iphone&ia=web
By treeman79 2021-05-0718:05 It is not. I started taking it before pandemic.
It’s an amazing drug. I was in bed 16 hours a day unable to get up. A fews months on it and I was kayaking multiple times per week.
Unfortunately side effects grew worse over time.
Earlier in my career: Some dude got up, smashed his keyboard on the side of his desktop causing a spray of key caps across the open plan office. Picked up his stuff and left. He was back the next day like nothing had happened.
By dijksterhuis 2021-05-079:581 reply This dude is my hero.
By mbrodersen 2021-05-080:591 reply The guy has no self control and he is your hero? What are the chances that he will loose control and lash out when arguing with his girlfriend/wife? I would think pretty high. Self control requires a strong mind. He is clearly weak and the opposite of a hero.
By dijksterhuis 2021-05-0814:02 Cool, have fun with that. I'm going to be over here eating bacon and not beating myself up for not being perfect.
By SonOfKyuss 2021-05-075:111 reply > the guy immediately grabbed his desktop inkjet printer (one of those old half dome Epsons) and hurled it at me, crashing at my feet
Seems odd… what’s the rest of the story?
By imperialdrive 2021-05-077:12 I shared it below in reply to another comment :)
By mjrbrennan 2021-05-075:391 reply I guess inkjet printers are good for something after all!
Was there any reason...why he did that?
By imperialdrive 2021-05-077:062 reply Continued: (Was on-site earlier and didn't have time to type the rest as, crazy enough, this was just the beginning of what turned into years of encounters)
Before I could react to the printer landing at feet (I was frozen) he yelled almost exactly "Don't you ever fucking walk into my office like that again, G T F O" so I slowly stepped out and shut the door. As I said, it (door) was cracked open, and the entire front of the office was a large single pane of uncovered clear glass, so it's not like he was on the phone or I walked in on something.
For certain half the floor heard it, but not a sign of life in the hallway of about 12 other offices. I immediately walked straight to manager/CFO's area and rather calmly (in shock) explained what happened. It was short and sweet as was the experience. He apologized and said to please not worry about it or take it personally, that the person was simply/unfortunately "like that" and best to leave him alone and forget it ever happened, and that he would talk to the CEO about it to have him put in a word. I'm professional, I had worked Hollywood for long enough to know of his type (first time experiencing anything like that though) so I remained calm and treated this like a test and said "no problem, never happened."
The story made its way around the office and people simultaneously joked about it while saying they were sorry about the experience too, and echoed my manager's advice to leave him alone. Fast forward about a year and one day he was gone. No one talked about it. I'm guessing the company finally got enough on him to terminate without worry of blowback. He was a partner and probably had a decent contract in place.
Now, something like 5 years after that (I had moved on to greener pastures) I was out front of a community volunteer bike shop chatting with the team. They were sticking around after-hours to let a metal salvage person take away some old/rusted inventory. A beat up old van with metal junk piled on the roof parks nearby and who walks out and over to us?? It's the guy, I recognize him instantly and as his eyes meet mine I say with a big smile "firstname-Fuckin-lastname, how the hell are ya!" and this time he is frozen, turns right on a dime, and starts power walking back to the van. I follow saying something like hey hey, come back, no hard feelings, but he must be so embarrassed he runs the rest of the way and jumps in the van and peels off. I heard he never came back to that shop again. He went from partner at a well funded firm to east LA metal salvage work. It was such an amazing feeling. I do feel for him though. As someone pointed out in comments he very likely had a mental or drug related issue. What a wild world.
Signing off.
Why don't we mandate Huxley's Soma for everyone so all anger is suppressed at all times? Really, this obsessive hunting for displays of anger and ruining people's lives over it and the Schadenfreude makes me wonder who the actual psychopaths are.
By underwater 2021-05-0711:111 reply The psychopath is the one who threw the printer. Someone who can't refrain from violent unprovoked outbursts is unstable. People shouldn't have to put up with threats and such because that's "just they way they are".
By ianai 2021-05-0711:26 People definitely shouldn’t put up with threats. Period.
But psychopaths turn their emotions on and off. They would have a violent, unprovoked reaction if it fit some goal of theirs. Thats the opposite of someone who can’t contain a violent outburst. Just to go on a tangent.
> obsessive hunting for displays of anger and ruining people's lives over it
The man ruined his own life by being an absolute maniac. He has nobody to blame but himself, and to make it out to be a witch hunt is at minimum obtuse and at worst acting as an apologist for dangerous behavior. If throwing a printer at someone who's pleasantly introducing themself seems reasonable to you, please, I beg of you, never work anywhere. It's for everyone else's safety.
By twman 2021-05-086:55 No one said that throwing printers at someone is reasonable.
However, I've seen many witch hunts that engage in libel, so the story might have been dramatized. How about:
Office worker X carried a printer when Y entered the office without knocking. X turned around, startled, and dropped the printer near Y's feet in surprise. X curses "Don't you ever effing sneak up on me like that".
I absolutely know psychopaths who'd turn that into a defamatory story, which is easy nowadays since everyone is searching for aggressions of all sorts.
By toomanybeersies 2021-05-0716:28 > Why don't we mandate Huxley's Soma for everyone so all anger is suppressed at all times?
We tried that with oxycontin and alprazolam, didn't work out so well in the end.
By snovv_crash 2021-05-0711:30 It's the feeling of vindication that perhaps there is some justice in the world.
By louwrentius 2021-05-0711:052 reply Indeed, if you hurl printers at people, there is something so wrong with you mentally, the only fair response is compassion and pity in my view.
Really? You think the rational and common reaction is to express compassion and pity for the person throwing the printer?
I wouldn’t throw printers at people. For one thing, they might throw it back. For two, I don’t violently attack people…
By toomanybeersies 2021-05-0716:271 reply Normal people don't throw printers at other people, because they're aware it's against social convention and liable to get them fired (or worse).
By kbelder 2021-05-0717:13 And because it might hurt somebody. Actually, that's the main reason people don't do it.
By louwrentius 2021-05-0715:35 Don’t you understand how terrible things must be for you in your head to get to a point where you can’t resist throwing printers at people?
By em-bee 2021-05-103:19 depends on the angle the object is coming at you. with a heavy object that's being hurled at your feet the chance that it flies high enough to pass over your head and back if you duck is low.
By heavyset_go 2021-05-0717:371 reply There are plenty of assholes who do shitty things because they're just entitled. There's no need to pathologize shitty people.
By louwrentius 2021-05-0722:211 reply That's such a convenient and easy answer.
By heavyset_go 2021-05-0820:001 reply Shitty behavior is just evidence of shitty behavior. "Throwing things at coworkers" isn't a symptom of any mental illness, and without evidence of actual mental illness, pathologizing such behavior is conjecture at best.
By louwrentius 2021-05-0919:20 That's such a convenient and easy answer.
> He went from partner at a well funded firm to east LA metal salvage work. It was such an amazing feeling.
I read it as such. Any specific reason that you disagree?
By ianai 2021-05-0711:18 It probably fits an exact definition of gloating “X experienced Y, and I felt amazed.” But it’s a pretty minimal statement. Gloating, real gloating, requires a bit more verbiage. OP just related what would have otherwise gone known by the reader but unsaid. No one should be held to pure stoicism - especially not when a printer is thrown at them.
OP even later expresses compassion for the person. That’s far from gloating. And before someone intones that that is itself gloating - again, you still need more.
By moistbar 2021-05-0713:23 It's hard not to gloat over the misery of someone who, guaranteed, caused at least as much misery to multiple other people.
This reminds me of the “chair incident” story I read a long time ago. Maybe someone will know what I’m talking about.
It was something in the game industry and I don’t remember the details but I know a chair was broken such that one of the legs was broken off to form a “shit your pants” style point and one person held it while two other guys held the uncooperative victim by the arms and leaned him right over it so that if they let go he’d fall and get stabbed.
Ah, good old Ballmer, I miss that guy...
Steve Ballmer, when CEO of Microsoft, was said to have thrown his chair at an employee announcing they would leave the company to work for Google back in the mid-2000s.
It is a bit of an urban legend. Ballmer himself denies that has ever happened (https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmer-i-didnt-throw-...) - but he was eccentric enough (just google "developer dance") that people considered it plausible.
By Jefff8 2021-05-0921:41 Well, he threw something else at somebody I know, so there's that.
By amatecha 2021-05-075:18 dude.. what? that's freakin messed up! wow!
> You report the incident to who you are directed to report into and are told to, "man up."
Given that you also mention further down a dev getting punched, I think this statement was code for “if you don’t like what they’re saying, you should just shut them up.”
Machismo-driven cultures are confusing until you realize that everyone is just expecting you to literally physically assault your way to the top, and is just annoyed with you for seeking peaceful resolutions rather than immediately jumping to violence / intimidation. In such societies, (public) peaceful resolutions lower the social status of both parties making them!
Quitting and chosing a better place to work is a perfectly valid way to claw your way to the top. Your top. Not their top.
Changing a job is not easy; it requires strength too. It's not always the right thing to do, but it's not necessarily a sign of weakness; au contraire.
Certainly! I’m just making a statement about their expectations — not about the epistemological value of living up to them. (Probably negative.)
Still, if you’re born in a country with a machismo based culture, where “opting out” is much harder, it’s good to be aware of what game is being played!
By KronisLV 2021-05-0718:08 How would one even figure out which countries, on average, would be more likely to have cultures like that? It's not like one can just Google "countries with machismo culture" and get meaningful results with studies that attempt to quantify it.
By kijin 2021-05-0711:23 Not only countries, but also entire industries can be like that. As long as you work in a broadly similar industry, you're likely to quit a bad job only to land in an equally bad job.
By smsm42 2021-05-087:20 > to literally physically assault your way to the top
I don't think that's the expectation. I think if the author would punch the lights out of the screamer, he wouldn't be congratulated and promoted, but probably fired on the spot and maybe also arrested and sued. In those kinds of companies, the shit usually flows only one way. Some people are "just this way" and you're expected to treat them specially, but you don't get to be "this way".
By iovrthoughtthis 2021-05-077:472 reply isn’t this the definition of toxic masculinity?
By derefr 2021-05-0718:45 It has overlap, but it's not a 1:1 mapping. Genpop in most women's prisons has a machismo-driven culture, despite there being little masculinity involved.
Machismo is kind of just an expected output of certain game-theoretic conditions.
Street gangs, for example, are effectively corporation-like entities enacting machismo as an output of the organization — where the public face / "PR department" of the gang enacts domination/intimidation tactics upon symbolic representatives of other gangs in a way that can only be described as "machismo-driven." The same Nash equilibrium that gives rise to street gangs, also makes it so that it's [economically] Pareto-optimal for them to interact with each-other this way.
And this is despite no individual member of the gang necessarily being machismo-driven themselves. Gang members can "give rise to" corporate machismo entirely dispassionately, as an output of "just serving their role", in the same way that employees of a corporation can "give rise to" corporate profit-seeking entirely dispassionately, as an output of "just doing their job." No cog in the machine necessarily approves of what the machine as a whole is doing, but the machine does it all the same.
By ianai 2021-05-078:10 If it’s not it’s at least a functional basis one.
I've been in a position where my abilities vastly out stripped those of the rest of the team. I was insecurely seeking praise and adoration by fixing as many problems with the code as quickly as I could.
The mistake, in my opinion, that I made was that I did it alone.
I didn't communicate with team and work with them at their pace. I blasted ahead and did all the work myself. And it didn't win me any friends.
They were angry, very angry. They thought I made them look bad and I was being negatively critical of their work. They got defensive and stopped listening to the why and how of my changes.
When there's a huge skill impedence mismatch between you and the team of your peers you especially need to consider their feelings. Had I approached the situation by reaching out and explaining my ideas in a way that they understood and guided them along to the solution, I would have had a different outcome. They needed to be part of the solution even if I didn't agree with them completely.
I needed to accept and believe in myself and not go looking for praise from them. I needed to recognize that they spent their own time and effort on this work. Maybe they were lazy, maybe they didn't know better, or maybe they were too busy to write a performant solution, but the work was partly theirs and I needed to consider that. The best way to do that was to talk to them and listen.
More recently I have been more guiding and taken the team with me to a solution. I've had much better success with this. Sure it's slower. Sure I ended up with work that was good but not exactly how I wanted it. But I gained something I hadn't expected: a stronger bond with the team, knowing they would listen to me and I to them, and that we all respected each other. We also ended up producing better work as a team.
I'm not saying any of this to discredit toxic work environments. I've been on broken teams before where everyone is turned against each.
Part of the responsibility for this lies with the leadership individuals who matched someone with skills out pacing the rest of the team, placing them as a peer on the team. They should have considered the team dynamics they were creating.
You can help reduce the toxicity of your work environment by considering your impact on a team and how you work with them. Being "right" about the work is seldom the only factor to consider and does not absolve you of ignoring the thoughts, ideas, and feelings of others.
By blaser-waffle 2021-05-0715:00 > I've been in a position where my abilities vastly out stripped those of the rest of the team. I was insecurely seeking praise and adoration by fixing as many problems with the code as quickly as I could.
To paraphrase someone else, you "disrupted the gentle surface tension of the market" by working at a difference pace than everyone else.
The team can be slow, or fast, or whatever, but if you're incongruous you're gonna have a bad time...
I've seen this scenario happen at other companies too.
I think this is where a code review process helps. You can submit changes, but you have to work with the team to review them. This way they have buy in on the changes that you make. You'll find developers can get upset if changes were made and they weren't aware of them. In addition to ensuring the code is of high quality, code review also acts as a medium to communicate changes within the team.
By phibz 2021-05-1022:30 Code review is not enough. Especially when you're dealing with a culture of "rubber stamped reviews."
Good code reviews are a net positive but may not always be in place. Getting them on a team that isn't doing them is yet another point where you need to communicate with them.
You've got to talk, whiteboard, engage much sooner.
By jdhendrickson 2021-05-0714:13 I was bitten on my chest by a male co-worker with enough force that if I had not been wearing a shirt he would have bitten a chunk out of my chest.
He was not fired or even reprimanded. Like literally bitten. This was while working for Brit Systems.
I was so shocked I just froze. I believe every word you wrote because I too have seen some things. That was the worst (and sadly not only) physical assault, some of the mind games and toxic personalities in this industry have to be seen to be believed. Don't even get me started on the founder that would try to break up his first employees marriages so they would move into his house and focus on work because the rest of their life just imploded (he then pulled some chicanery in regard to the stock options right before they vested, clawed most of them back and the people who sacrificed everything got nothing, HE however became a multi millionaire).
By tpoacher 2021-05-079:17 I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Developers on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched monitors glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to resign.
By bourgwaletariat 2021-05-074:274 reply Yes, this is the problem. Unprofessional, low-quality employees think employment is "king of the hill," when really it's "tides lift all boats."
It only takes 1 person in a company of a hundred to completely destroy it. Allow one psychopath into your company and it'll go bankrupt or otherwise defunct within just a couple years.
These folks are afraid. They know their performance is substandard. They exist by hiding that low quality work from management.
When someone like you goes in there and makes a 3 hour report a real time dashboard, you can be sure management heard all manner of reasons why it took so long and that's just how things are and their expectations are unreasonable if they want it faster, they can try to hire someone, but there's no one who can do it better.
Until you. And then it's better and now their lives are worse, so you pay for it. You have to be gotten rid of because you are proof they their work isn't up to snuff. You came in and landed right on top of the hill. You were the king, so they had to knock you off.
Welcome to the war on competence.
This literally happened to me today. I left my shitshow of a job because I finally got fed up with the petty favoritism, backstabbing, inability to deal with conflict in a reasonable and adult manner, and just plain poor management.
And I legitimately felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
By justatdotin 2021-05-076:171 reply congrats.
Second. My last project from hell was all "let's just get it done," with a deadline that shifted from January to May one month at a time. Eventually I pulled the pin. Pretty sure that subsequently there was a lot of "the last guy really caused us a lot of problems," gossip to the project managers but I don't care. Lots of the staff had terrible attitudes and the management cultivated such.
By bourgwaletariat 2021-05-0718:34 The "last guy" is the scapegoat. In toxic companies, deadlines are the date at which you get a new deadline. The effect is that people hustle to make the deadline, constantly having the rug pulled out from under them by the deadline, only to realize, they have to hustle for another month... and another month...
Because the project managers are cowards. Unwilling to tell management they have repeatedly set unrealistic expectations for them and of the staff.
Of course they blame the staff for be lazy or slacking. The reality is, they were never able to properly define and estimate the scope.
They are folks who never take accountability for their responsibilities. They blame others. Even after they did their best to fix the problems and then got blamed for them all after they left.
By Griffinsauce 2021-05-076:591 reply Your comment relates it all to bad performance. That doesn't cover the "brilliant asshole" problem though, do you think we should allow such behavior for people who show good (personal..) results?
By bourgwaletariat 2021-05-0718:38 "Hey, you're great at what you do, but you're causing some strife on the team because ... to be honest, folks think you're a brilliant asshole. I know it might sound silly, but you hurt their feelings and it makes them not want to work with you. They need to be encouraged and supported more often than they need to be disrespected. Keep doing what you're doing, except for the asshole part. You're leading the pack right now, what we'd like to see is you help others succeed as well and that benefits all of us, including you, the most actually. There's a great place for you here if you can do that. Can you do that?"
Unprofessional, low-quality employees think employment is "king of the hill," when really it's "tides lift all boats."
Very few people believe teamwork is a rising tide because very few companies do.
A perf improvement that takes something from hundreds of minutes down to 1.2s does make the person who did the original implementation look bad. Questions will be asked why it was so much worse before, especially if those minutes came with an associated cost like build minutes or something, and doubly so if the original author has been claiming any improvement is impossible.
Those people may be concerned that they've been knocked down the hill, but they're also probably concerned they'll be seen as incompetent and a liability, and could be fired (rightly so in this case).
A company will often see an improvement a new hire makes less as making something better, and more as fixing the existing employees' mistakes, with absolutely no consideration given for why those mistakes were made.
By mrslave 2021-05-077:54 > A perf improvement that takes something from hundreds of minutes down to 1.2s does make the person who did the original implementation look bad.
But does it have to? I've worked at both ends of the spectrum, from quick-to-pounce (what you describe) to mature assessments (e.g. "This product is important and makes us profitable, but there's still some rough edges. Glad you had the resources & capability to improve it!") Fortunately my present team & entire company is closer to the mature end.
I also agree that most teams in a large company will reflect company-wide values.
By smsm42 2021-05-087:32 > A perf improvement that takes something from hundreds of minutes down to 1.2s does make the person who did the original implementation look bad.
Yes, it does. An adult in this situation says "dude, did I write a shitty code! Thanks for fixing it, good job!" A manipulator starts to refer to the code "the code I initiated with X's improvements" or just "our code". An idiot starts screaming so everybody remembers about his failure and tells about it to strangers years after. It's hard to be an idiot.
By bourgwaletariat 2021-05-0718:57 So then fire them. Not only did they mess up. They lied. They were too incompetent to know better, then they bullied the person who was.
Gone. Period. Zero tolerance policy on bullying and harassment.
It's never good. Ever.
I walked into a weird job environment not long ago.
First couple days were not that bad. Not particularly good, but nothing too bad. Like people weren't too friendly but neither too hostile.
There was, though, some casual heated discussion here and there. As I met some people more closely I began to see a trend: Everybody hated almost everybody else. One developer openly told me in our first conversation something like "You'll notice few people talk to me... Everyone hates me here.". Then somewhere else some shouting erupted for a few minutes, but nobody seemed to pay too much attention to it.
I saw someone get up from their desk, go to someone else and instead of normally asking whatever question they wanted to ask, start shouting their question. "How can it be that something something?!!! This is totally unacceptable!". Nobody even looked up from their screens or anything. It would turn out that was the way they always communicated.
We got a meeting with the whole team. Ah, no, not the whole team, just half of it. Why? - I asked. "Oh, we tried that but we can't have the whole team in one meeting because there are... conflicts and we end up not doing anything productive."
A few days later, I get called into a meeting with 6 other people, just to generally estimate a few tasks and discuss some of their details. After about two minutes or so, two people are arguing which ones are the tasks that we need to discuss. Things escalate and they are shouting while the rest watches calmly. I don't even know what to do or where to look because none seems to react at all to this. After some 15-20 minutes of this, the meeting is cancelled. People just stand up and return to their desks. I ask one of them if this is normal. "Yeah, pretty much."
I tried really hard and stayed there for more than 1 1/2 years. The only thing I have from all that is a lot of awful anecdotes about awful people.
Wow, 1.5 years of bearing such daily situations, that is something I find impressive given the anecdotes you described. I would probably not have lasted than long in such an environment.
Good for you to leave that place at last. Hope you found a much more better environment!
By genezeta 2021-05-089:14 Thanks.
> Hope you found a much more better environment!
Ah, we'll see how that goes.
> I tried really hard and stayed there for more than 1 1/2 years
Was it worth it? Do you regret not quitting after the first 2 months?
By genezeta 2021-05-089:11 It's kind of hard to tell, actually.
On the one hand I did need a job and I'm at that age where it's not always easy to find one. On the other, ah, maybe I regret it a little, but not too much.
I mean, I'm usually pretty calm myself and I have worked previously with difficult people, so while it was truly a horrible place, it didn't affect me too much[1]. And then again, I did achieve some things. It was a really old project with old code and people with little and outdated knowledge, and I managed to clean up large parts, teach some things to the two or three receptive developers there, and write detailed but practical documentation for all the things I did. So all in all, at some level I do feel like I accomplished something.
But then again... There were other, much larger problems with the team, the project, management, etc, which were just insane. I ended up quitting when, after meeting with management once more, they simply answered that they didn't care and they wouldn't change a single thing at all.
----
[1] I do confess there were days when I thought about quitting, and just this once, on my second-to-last day, I did get angry at someone.
By robjan 2021-05-079:35 This happens when a high performer enters an environment of low performers. They know there was a reason for you being hired and feel threatened.
In my experience, the best approach isn't to attempt to change the world immediately but to head straight for the most important decision maker and point out the problems with concrete solutions. If it doesn't work, resign. Eventually they will get the picture but a high performing new hire shouldn't have to suffer.
By elSidCampeador 2021-05-076:261 reply 1-2 of these employees is enough to sink a department, or worse, an entire company.
no it is not, not managing them properly, is usually the indication of not experienced leadership...
bad employees (could be a decent person, but just a bad fit for the team), might affect a team, but they shouldn't affect a whole department if the management team knows what they are doing.
By jedimastert 2021-05-077:59 If physical assault doesn't lead to termination, you've gone beyond "poor management".
By bjourne 2021-05-0710:43 I've seen it too. Makes me happy that I'm in a business where it often is possible to quit and get a new job. Tons of people have suffered much worse but have to put up with it because for them getting a new job isn't so easy. People deserve to be treated as humans. There should be a law about it.
By amarant 2021-05-076:30 Damn I thought my last workplace was bad, but it was nothing compared to what you describe.
I did get told off by the boss for fixing someone's compilation errors(that they had force-pushed to master, deleting a week of my work) but he didn't scream at me.
By Mauricebranagh 2021-05-078:48 1 File a written grievance against the other team member 2 File a written grievance against the guy you reported it too.
If its assault call the police and tell HR fire them and ill drop the charges "maybe"
By johnchristopher 2021-05-074:59 Which country did this happen if I may ask ?
By felipellrocha 2021-05-075:40 Been there, my friend. Been there.
By austinshea 2021-05-078:26 I hope you have a safe job, now.
By one2three4 2021-05-0710:16 I'm sorry but I don't share your sentiment here. You were asked a fair bit about difficult personalities. That is you were warned as much as HR could warn you. And then you jump into the role totally oblivious to that aspect and you go about focusing only on engineering. I mean, and it's typical for engineers, there are _always_ way more moving parts in businesses than machines. But you always focus there and take pride of it. Yet, the most difficult challenges are people - not machines. So, you did effectively nothing to detect where the people problem lied and prepare the ground to deal with that as well. And when that blew in your face you just left and say the story like there was nothing you could do about it.
By gabereiser 2021-05-074:465 reply Oh man, the worst are those that pretend to be benevolent but end up firing you after a vacation. The one who writes memory-bloated code, who keeps state around, that loves to cross types has the gaul to do a single performance review after 8 months to criticize your code quality and fire you. (Recent experience)
Or how about the one guy that shouts at people when they ask ANY question on why things work that way, responding with things like "NO!! It's not how we do it" and berating newer employees with their lack of legacy knowledge.
I've seen a grown man, extremely well educated, data scientist make a fellow data scientist cry. I've. Seen. Things.
I also made a conscience decision to focus on people, co-workers, and foster those relationships where I can. Sometimes I have to leave those behind when drastic life changes happen, but ultimately I'll always be there should they need me. Kudos to the OP for including the Sinek clip, love that guy.
By giantandroids 2021-05-075:143 reply I am very much working class / (blue collar) in my upbringing. Raised by single parent in a very run down area with a fair amount of poverty. I luckily found an early love and curiosity for computers and eventually found my way into software engineering. If this had not have happened god knows where I would be, when I look at where my friends have ended up. I learned quite early in my life, that if someone picks you out , then you need to immediately front up to it or it will just escalate from there and you're in for a bucket load of torment and bullying. I am not presenting this as any sort of solution , it's far from ideal. I can misread situations / emails and feel fight or flight come on (and my ego insists it needs to be fight 'don't let them walk all over you'). This means i ALWAYS I clash with the arseholes whenever our paths cross. It's made me quite popular with co-workers as I confront them everytime, but I don't think its doing my career any favours.
By gabereiser 2021-05-076:07 Dad? lol, you basically describe myself as well. I have zero tolerance for brilliant jerks or arrogant assholes when all I want is to solve a problem. Like you I came from a very blue collar upbringing and I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for my complete and utter obsession with computers in the early 90s. Confrontation doesn't have to be destructive. It's also a great way to gauge another person's motivations and desires. Just remember to treat everyone (even your enemies) with respect.
By robbintt 2021-05-075:21 You are right that it’s always good to discuss these feelings and events immediately. Try out the book ”Nonviolent Communication” if you haven’t.
By cyberpunk 2021-05-0715:36 Meh, it depends. If you’re in the right then responding to assholes in this way is acceptable, at least in the UK. I’ve found this doesn’t translate to German companies tho which have a kind of “the emperor is always right” attitude. ;)
By bourgwaletariat 2021-05-074:552 reply I actually had my friendships with the folks there used against me. If I thought something was wrong or shouldn't be done, my boss would say, "You like your friends here, don't you?"
W.T.F.??
There's really no correct thing to do. I lost so much sleep just trying to come up with something that wouldn't be turned against me.
It's a form of learned helplessness. They force you into a no-win situation, so you'll stop winning. They can't win on merit or competence, so they force you into no-wins. Impossible deadlines. etc. etc.
It's the opposite of "Hire people smarter than you and get out of their way." Their strategy is more like... "Hire people smarter than you, get them to do your job, make their life hell, so they quit, then take all the credit."
Psychos.
By amatecha 2021-05-075:48 Yeah if your team/org is forcing you into no-win situations, my advice is to update the resume and find a place that treats you better. Teams that treat ppl like that don't deserve the staff they have. Your life will be so much better not dealing with that BS.
By hda111 2021-05-0814:26 I know the situation you describe. It’s debunking when they say they only hire competent people (make the incompetent people feel competent). I mean it’s true that they prefer competent people but they will destroy their mental health, make them quit and then, as you say, take all the credit.
>I've seen a grown man, extremely well educated, data scientist make a fellow data scientist cry. I've. Seen. Things.
Data scientists seem to be on a level of their own when it comes to disrespecting colleagues. I've been surprised by this recently.
By goatinaboat 2021-05-076:273 reply Data scientists seem to be on a level of their own when it comes to disrespecting colleagues. I've been surprised by this recently.
Pretty much every developer, when brought in as a replacement, will bad-mouth their predecessor, say their code is junk and needs to be totally rewritten, etc. Managers love it and encourage it, to them it's a divide and conquer tactic. Data scientists just take it to the next level, that's all.
By whywhywhywhy 2021-05-079:52 I call it The Eternal Refactor. Gets completely absurd if you're at the same company over 5 years or so and have seen 3 or more groups of devs blame all the issues of the software on the previous tech choices and their preference will solve all the issues and a rewrite is the only way forward yet every time when the rewrite is done and the thing is maybe 10% better at best but has new issues from the rewrite the team begins to cycle out and the process begins again.
I do that too, but the code I work with is objectively shit - I can provide the daily WTF with months of wtfs. Maybe I should, but if the previous guy finds it I may be in trouble (I think he's still a shareholder?).
The first thing my colleagues did after he left was replace all the code he wrote in the C codebase (I work on the front-end, there's a few years worth of work yet to rebuild it).
I'm talking stuff like 15K LOC files with 4-5 times nested switch/case/if/else blocks; string concatenating XML to a global variable, then at the end converting it to JSON; string concatenating HTML with embedded JS and CSS in a JS function inside of a PHP file; using a semicolon-separated value in a database column instead of a simple foreign key (more fun when there's an extra value attached to it, separated with a colon).
It's already not an easy domain or a simple application (thousands of fields across dozens of models), but the lack of coding practices only made it worse.
By cyberpunk 2021-05-0715:37 My eyes! Kudos for sticking with it that sounds like a write off heh
By rxhernandez 2021-05-077:39 For swe, I've rarely seen it happen except with junior engineers and end-of-career engineers.
By paganel 2021-05-076:21 > are those that pretend to be benevolent but end up firing you after a vacation.
This happened to a close friend of mine relatively recently, both the "benevolent" and the "firing after the vacation part". I cannot understand such tactics.
In the end it was much better for said friend the way things turned out for him, but right when it happened it was a shitty situation to be in, because you just don't understand why that is happening to you.
By username90 2021-05-0718:291 reply You can see each vacation is like a trial firing, if they miss you then you get to come back.
Still puzzles me. Businesses are all about relationships. Building a business based on this level of hostility must be exhausting. The level of staff turnover and overall churn due to trust issues must be huge and they must haemorrage employees continuously. So much bad will being created for short term gains. They then complain when they get bad employees or can't find good ones.
So strange. But not unexpected. Its obviously profitable, right?
By gabereiser 2021-05-092:40 Conditioning. The US job market is conditioned to fear vacations.
> how to survive a toxic workplace
Don't! Cut your losses and move on. Life is too short to spend any significant amounts of time around toxic people, no matter the context.
You won’t always have that option. In ‘02 I ended up taking a job as I had been out of work for 9 mos, it paid 1/2 of what I was earning previously, and that was just the start.
But, I had no other options at the time. It took 2 years to gtfo, and the next place was minimally better (I got ptsd from pager noises there).
So, yeah, learning to survive a toxic work place is a good thing.
I have some health problems now that I blame on the stress.
By ryandrake 2021-05-075:56 I did the same thing. During the ‘08 to ‘10 recession, took a job that I probably shouldn’t have, but had to because I was financially at the end of the rope. At least I identified it as toxic pretty quickly and took the first life raft a recruiter threw to me once hiring picked back up!
By manmal 2021-05-074:36 I think there is still value in developing a coping mechanism, or the few days spent in this culture will change your worldview for the worse, even if it’s just a bit.
I spent years in a toxic primary school - things were tried to improve it, but some kids were still being bullied constantly. Back then, private schools in my area were hardly an option, and other schools were a legal hassle to switch to. Sometimes you need to learn to cope.
By dingaling 2021-05-074:44 Ironic that you write that a few days after Montana announced that it is cancelling unemployment benefit to force people into jobs.
Few people have the luxury of SV-style job agility, so having a basic survival guide is useful. It might just keep them sane until they can make a change for the better.
By peterburkimsher 2021-05-075:20 Most foreigners have visas that require them to continue working for the same company, or leave the country.
Even if the problem isn't immediate deportation, changing jobs might reset a time counter which is needed for other visas. There's often a requirement of 2 to 5 years continuous relevant work experience. In such circumstances, the only remaining option is to shut up, sit tight, and turn the other cheek.
By diragon 2021-05-075:54 If you advance in your career steadily, at some point you will be at a place where you are responsible of fixing toxicity if it exists/appears.
