How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
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How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
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Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
#2There is nothing like "surviving a toxic workplace". I have been there, and it was a nightmare.
Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
#3There is nothing like "surviving a toxic workplace". I have been there, and it was a nightmare.
Please share your experiences, also, how do you think(/know) it all started?
Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
#4Imagine 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.
Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
#5The gist is, be the trusted person who has the backs of the other team mates. Don't have to be the best performer, but be loyal to your team. Be the person who can be trusted with the project work, but also off the team too, like with someone's spouse and money, heh.
But, that's not how to survive a toxic workplace, that's how to get a job somewhere else once you're axed.
The only way, really, to survive a toxic work place is to either be a bully or a target. There's no one else. You're a bully, or you're a target. Pick one.
My advice, just start compiling the instances of bullying. Report them to HR on the record. If HR refuses to do something about it, then depending on your jurisdiction, you might have a legal case. Be sure to have lots of documentation over the course of several months to a year at least.
The probability of that goes up if you are a full-time employee outside the USA, or a member of a protected class if you're inside the USA. Otherwise, don't bother with the documentation, just start looking for another job and save your sanity.
If you cannot quit or find another job for whatever reason, you'll likely need to intentionally bifurcate your psyche. If you're a genuine person with integrity and a focus on improving the quality of life at a company, you have to remember: You're alone in this effort. It'll take heroic effort and probably fail.
Separate yourself from your employee-ness. You care about your employer, the other folks there do not. They will ask you why you care so much. They won't care that you care. You caring is reason enough for them to make your life miserable.
Your conversations will devolve to single word responses. Yes. No. Or... deflect to "ask [insert coworker]."
Do not give real answers, they will only be ammunition against you. They will justify whatever action they wanted to do anyway with, "Well [you] said whatever." It does not matter what you actually said. Having said anything at all to someone to whom the answers don't matter, only their unknown political agenda, will harm you and your career.
If you say, "That's not what I said." They'll say, "Yes you did."
If you can say, "No I didn't, all I said was 'Ask [insert coworker].'"
Of course they can say, "Well why didn't you know?"
Remember, there is no escape. There is no right answer. There is nothing right you can do. All mistakes are your fault.
They will drive you insane.
Get a counselor. Talk to someone who has been through it or can understand.
You caring is your problem. I encourage you to not stop caring. That's no good for anyone. If there are 2 or three or 4 people there who are toxic, it's too late. Management has failed. Work on your exit strategy.
Remember, toxic work places are the result of absent management. Management does not care. Management itself might be toxic.
Don't become toxic yourself. Just separate your work self from your actual self outside work.
Frankly, I can't do that. I work. That's all I do. That's what I love to do, so I can't be the person who just stops caring and so if you're like that to, I get it.
You're probably just going to have to find another job -- or create your own.
Consider entrepreneurship. Try saving up enough money while you're there to break off and do your own thing.
Depending on your employment agreement be careful about working on another idea outside work. They might own that too and come after you.
Sometimes your toxic dealings with a company don't end when you leave. An extraordinarily toxic boss will continue to harass you until long after you leave. Demand you work on things. Demand you fix bugs he created after you left. Without pay of course. Lie to his management. Get the corporate lawyers after you for whatever reason.
Been there. God help ya if you have one of those. It's a nightmare.
I guess you could survive it, but ... it's just not worth it. Just go somewhere else. If you're in this industry and you're the kind of person who is being attacked like that because you care, like... really, just think about that for a second. They hate you, because you care and they don't.
Find a team that cares. Join it. Be happy.
Or do your own thing.
Save your sanity.
Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
#6There is nothing like "surviving a toxic workplace". I have been there, and it was a nightmare.
Please share your experiences, also, how do you think(/know) it all started?
My anecdote is that it's all employee #1: the fish rots from the head.
The gist of it is that one guy founded a company, company A, bootstrapped it, then disappeared to found another company (company B) and was busy with it for about a decade. In the meantime, company A had a non-owner CEO and went from 10ish people to 60ish and grew revenues many, many times over.
Meanwhile company B got huge (though never really got anywhere close to the $-per-headcount that company A did), got a real board, went public, and eventually the board forced the owner out of the company completely. He then came back to company A.
Mind you, we didn't know he was forced out of B. He came back complaining that he was tired of board meetings and corporate stuff. Fair enough, we thought. But a few people were still left from that original 10-ish and went: "uh oh".
Turns out the owner is a grandiose narcissist, and highly racist and sexist. Just an amazing mix. Over the next two years, he managed to turn over 70% of the existing staff and YoY turnover went from exactly 10% (they would do a stack-rank 10% cut to reach the target turnover each year) to 30-50% depending on the year. Incoming hires were suddenly a revolving door (2 batches of 20 were hired twice, of those 40 roughly 5 stuck around longer than one year). He mentioned at lunch one day that he wouldn't hire a non-white, non-male programmer (as the only Asian programmer had just quit recently). Some of us noticed that the only woman who was hired who wasn't blonde was the one who was a family friend.
On a technical level, suddenly nobody was allowed to work on anything that wasn't his idea. And his ideas weren't good. Our tech lead did a good job of shielding the developers from this, and lots of cool ideas were kept out of the owner's line of sight.
Anyway, I ended up leaving because of ^^^ once I got enough experience to switch without a large pay cut. (This job paid unusually well for the geography). The company I switched to has problems too, obviously, as do all companies. But they're much more fixable. Company A's primary problem is fundamentally unfixable: the person who owns 100% of the shares and commands the puppets on the board is honestly one of the worst people I've ever had the displeasure of knowing.
Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
#7> 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.
Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
#8Imagine 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, prioritiz…
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.
Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
#9Can someone name companies that aren't like this? I've worked at 3 places and feel like I'm doomed.
Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one
#10Imagine 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, prioritiz…
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