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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

#41

Post by mjrbrennan »

imperialdrive wrote: post #10
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…

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 t…

I guess inkjet printers are good for something after all!

Was there any reason...why he did that?

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

#42

Post by felipellrocha »

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…

Been there, my friend. Been there.

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

#43

Post by pm90 »

For people that aren’t good socially (especially those that don’t fit it in the culture quickly) having a group of people that you try to work with is sorta useless advice.

Speaking anecdotally: It took me a long time to understand how to be a good listener and pick on social cues and not be constantly worried about appearing like an idiot. While I was cordial with coworkers I tried not to engage with them after work: I’ve always wanted to keep those 2 worlds separated. I do hang out with coworkers when eg it’s crunch time, or in celebrating a successful launch. But that’s it.

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

#44

Post by ipaddr »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #27
burkaman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they would do a stack-rank 10% cut to reach the target turnover each year Does this mean leadership would rank all employees once a year and fire the bottom 10%, so they could hit a statistic? And that was before the owner came back? Obviously your story is insane and I'm sorry you had to go through that, but I can't get over this part. I think the concept of a terrible person owning a business is less shocking to…

Thats a really popular idea, I think it came from Jack Welch at GM. Microsoft used to be famous for it. https://www.jaywren.com/20-70-10-employee-stack-ranking/

It is an idea based on you have some method of determining the best employees and you select the most productive which sounds fair.

What happens is people make choices that put them in that 10%. Some by increasing odds by hiring awful in purpose. Some will target others work. Selecting the right group becomes more important than doing good work.

I believe you should hire or fire based in objective numbers. If 50% are bad fire them now. If none are bad keep them and give them a raise.

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

#45

Post by treeman79 »

mastrsushi wrote: post #9

Can someone name companies that aren't like this? I've worked at 3 places and feel like I'm doomed.

People can be legitimately afraid of revenge by a company or specific people.

Certainly met a few characters that enjoy going out of their way to hurt others.

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

#46

Post by procombo »

imperialdrive wrote: post #10
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…

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 t…

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.

------

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!" :)

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

#47

Post by treeman79 »

bourgwaletariat wrote: post #5

The 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 wor…

Most places that I’ve seen that are toxic, the HR either ignores it or joins in. One explained to me that he would love to quit in disgust but HR managers are a dime a dozen.

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

#48

Post by amatecha »

bourgwaletariat wrote: post #23
gabereiser wrote: post #19

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, re…

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 wi…

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.

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

#49

Post by diragon »

gabereiser wrote: post #19

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, re…

>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.

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

#50

Post by yosito »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #6
joddystreet wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

> He mentioned at lunch one day that he wouldn't hire a non-white, non-male programmer

Holy crap! I'd like to think I'd notice that someone is that terrible before I start a job, but if I heard that from a boss, I'd quit on the spot. And I'm a white male programmer.

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