How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one • Hacker News Board

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#131

Post by phicoh » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:20 AM UTC

Bayart wrote: post #113

lmilcin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

>- 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.

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?

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#132

Post by pengstrom » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #112

lmilcin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> - 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 c…

Treatment of minorities in Sweden is no joke.

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#133

Post by lostlogin » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

Bayart wrote: post #113

lmilcin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

>- 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.

> 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.

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#134

Post by whywhywhywhy » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:22 AM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #51

Thinking you have friends at work is a mistake of youth. It is what it is. Most people will barely have any real friends in life. It’s a job that sustains people’s livelihoods - spouse, children, house, parents, dreams, future ... It’s super unhealthy to be best friends forever with anyone at work when it comes to this, mainly because everyone is playing for high stakes. If you are a true friend, never draw people in…

>Thinking you have friends at work is a mistake of youth. It is what it is. Most people will barely have any real friends in life.

This just isn't true and work is one of the only places most adults will even have the opportunity to make new friends at all.

I'm not saying like treat everyone you work with as a friend but there is no problem with socializing with your colleagues and eventually becoming friends.

All the worthwhile friendships I made in adult life have been through work and there are plenty of people who I worked with 2-4 companies ago that I still meet up with and consider good friends.

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#135

Post by Reflecticon » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #114

georgeecollins wrote: post #104

I really like this emphasis on trust. I have worked on “superstar” teams where people sabotaged each other at every turn. I have seen teams with a real mix of talent, sometimes pretty mediocre honestly, achieve amazing things because everyone just rows in the same direction.

My experience as well. The adage of the team working together being better than the sum of its parts is very true in my career. I've worked in teams with absolutely no superstar, just very decent engineers that cared about delivery, the customer and code quality. We achieve a lot in very short time, very little friction, everyone respected everyone and, more than that, trusted each other to be doing their best on the…

I try to be that guy at my job.

I have no technical background, I'm a lawyer but I like the the IT sector and its people a lot.

Last year, due to Covid, I got fired from my corporate legal job and got the opportunity to become the head of a department in the biggest IT company for legal management software in my country.

My department has the biggest workload in the he company and people work there ranging from5 to 20 years. They are amazing people and professionals but every two months the staff get shuffled around into different departments like it's a shell game.

Some got used to it over time and developed kind of detachment that penetrated the personality. You just see thousands yards stares by sole Individuums in their cubicles.

Upper management is a joke. They never left us alone to show real long-term results. I spend more time building a team than improving people's performances. Sometimes old team members call me up for advice and when they get reshuffled into my apartment again, they glow with energy again.

Managers told me some of my team mates were unmanageable and I couldn't figure out why because if I ask them to do something they'll always comply.

I could tell you more detailed stories about my workplace but it would probably bore you.

Anyways, I hope there is a place for me in this IT world. A company that values the impact a non-tech guy can have on the culture and wiling to learn. I want to build a team that has each other's backs, where you can be personal with your supervisor steam and solve problems in a professional way.

My outcome with that particular company was that I quit three weeks ago. I have no knew job lining up and I'll miss my people a lot but I don't want to become numb and burned out by being a sisyphos.

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#136

Post by 1123581321 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:29 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #106

treeman79 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. O…

Is this satire? Plaqunial is the infamous hydroxychloroquine...

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

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#137

Post by lostlogin » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:31 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #106

treeman79 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. O…

Is this satire? Plaqunial is the infamous hydroxychloroquine...

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#138

Post by piva00 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:41 AM UTC

JackPoach wrote: post #124

piva00 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't worked at many companies (only 4 during my 20+ years from late 90s until now) You admit to this and then asks how you didn't see or hear more about it? I worked for 8 companies in the past 16 years, across 2 different countries. From these 8 I'll exclude 2 of them that were very early-stage startups I joined to help some former colleagues or friends (the experience was great nonetheless but not representa…

That's very interesting, because some of your examples do seem toxic or borderline toxic, but some do not. Let's take verbal and physical abuse. Can you tell me specifically what was said? Same with physical abuse. There's no excuse for getting physical, unless there's a reason why force had to be used. For instance, at one corporate party one of co-workers got really drunk and pushed another co-worker (a woman) duri…

Every instance I described was something done in the normal work environment, during day-to-day operations, not drunk people at parties or after work celebrations.

Verbal abuse as in: a C-level calling one engineer a "dumb motherfucker, lying to my face" and variations of that over time. An IT manager telling his employees (a team of about 6 people) that they should be grateful for having a job, that as stupid as they were it was a blessing they could still work with him and learn. A shouting match between two engineers, banging meeting room doors, shouting across the hall.

Physical abuse, founder of the company slapped an engineer on the face when the engineer refused to implement a feature that wasn't only unethical, it was criminally fraudulent. The engineer raised that concern, they got into a discussion, the engineer called the founder a criminal and got slapped on the face.

You've never seen two competing teams on the same feature become toxic? What about when one team starts to actively sabotage the other? And actively bullying them to further demoralise the team after they started to falter behind due to the sabotaging? I've seen that.

You have 20 years of career, I have 16, we both have been through office politics, needlessly bureaucracy and lots of other unpleasant things that I wouldn't ever consider toxic, so please believe me, there is some really toxic stuff.

I feel you are trying to counter something I've said and I don't understand what, or why.

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#139

Post by bjourne » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:43 AM UTC

MrFoof wrote: post #4

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, prioritiz…

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.

Re: How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

#140

Post by lars512 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:54 AM UTC

phicoh wrote: post #131

Bayart wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- 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.

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?

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.