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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

#91
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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, tha…

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.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess inkjet printers are good for something after all! Was there any reason...why he did that?

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 fron…

Cool story, but why end it gloating over someone else's misery?

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

#93
post #74
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…

> 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…

isn’t this the definition of toxic masculinity?

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

#94
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…

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.

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

#95
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 thos…

> 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.

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

#96
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 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.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#98
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If physical assault doesn't lead to termination, you've gone beyond "poor management".

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fron…

Cool story, but why end it gloating over someone else's misery?

That’s not gloating.
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