How to build toxic software teams
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How to build toxic software teams
1–10 of 102 posts
Re: How to build toxic software teams
#2Remember that if one of your team members has a good idea about how to improve the codebase or the process that you should acknowledge that it's a good idea and tell them how much you like it. Then you should always remember to tell them that it's "not the right time" so you can then move on to demand status updates on features.
Re: How to build toxic software teams
#3It's easy. Hire one bad narcissist. Keep praising and promoting them.
Re: How to build toxic software teams
#4Seems like David Tate has had a rough go.
Re: How to build toxic software teams
#5Hire some Product Managers. EOM.
Re: How to build toxic software teams
#6It's easy. Hire one bad narcissist. Keep praising and promoting them.
Not so fast, it’s easy to start but you really need to invest in a long term plan to hire their poorly behaving friends from past jobs too. They’ll never let you forget that they are all high performers, how bad everyone else that works there is, and how lucky you are to have them save you from yourself.
Re: How to build toxic software teams
#7I do wonder if people have any experience around doing root cause analysis that doesn't just end up in blame games? I've worked for three companies in a row that claim to have blame-free cultures, and all of them did put work into it (structuring the documents to not assign an individual's name to any given misstep and telling people to be kind and understanding). But in every case, you can feel it in the air that everyone still understands that the RCA is a blame document/process and that management is keeping track of the individuals at fault and it still matters on their end of year eval.
With the industry wide layoffs this feeling has only gotten worse now that there is a decent chance that accepting blame (or your manager deciding the blame is on you) will be the difference between having a job or not in 6 months.
Maybe this is unavoidable given that these processes only kick in when something goes wrong, and you can only screw up at your job so much until you get shown the door?
Re: How to build toxic software teams
#8It's easy. Hire one bad narcissist. Keep praising and promoting them.
Narcissist has become exponentially more abused over the past couple years.
I've ended up leaving it for people who are attention-seeking, in common culture it is reduced to "people I have conflict with who I don't think care about other people", which has some irony, that's how a narcissist would perceive many interactions.
Re: How to build toxic software teams
#9Do a daily stand-up
Make sure to monitor your team every day and force their performance first thing in the morning. Focus on the daily grind to ensure meaningful change can never occur.
Hire randomly
Never put in the work to identify potential candidates based on their contribution to the industry or relevant projects. Always rely on blind applications to a job ad then make the applicants perform grueling and humiliating coding tests until they've successfully demonstrated their pain tolerance and allegiance.
RTO
Make your developers as uncomfortable as possible and force them to move to the most expensive real-estate market possible. It's important to remind individual contributors of their position on the social hierarchy. Home ownership and starting a family is for execs only.
Re: How to build toxic software teams
#10I do wonder if people have any experience around doing root cause analysis that doesn't just end up in blame games? I've worked for three companies in a row that claim to have blame-free cultures, and all of them did put work into it (structuring the documents to not assign an individual's name to any given misstep and telling people to be kind and understanding). But in every case, you can feel it in the air that ev…
I really don't know either. When it works for me though, I think it looks like people going out of their way to point the finger at themselves, and nobody going out of their way to wag a follow-up finger at them. I'm not sure hiding it would be helpful, but I haven't tried that.