To be honest, I'm wondering where all these cartoonishly unhealthy companies come from. I've worked in a bunch of companies in my career, and sure, at pretty much all of them at one time or another I may have thought "are you f'ing kidding me?", but that's really just the nature of large organizations.
And perhaps I've just been lucky, but in 25 years in tech I've never seen the level of gross incompetence described in this post. I'm truly envious of the vast majority of senior leaders and execs I've worked with - not because they're geniuses or anything, but because they excel at things that I find very challenging (and I know from my stint in management) and I learned a lot from them. Again, not everyone, but I've certainly had more good bosses than bad.
> To be honest, I'm wondering where all these cartoonishly unhealthy companies come from.
Simply take the norms of one industry, and apply them in a radically different industry.
Take a manager from the construction industry who knows a bricklayer with an assistant can lay 2 tonnes of bricks in an 8 hour shift, and if they didn't it's probably because they took a 3 hour lunch break, and apply it to the software world.
Take a manager from the food service industry, who expects workers to clock in before their shift starts, and that a worker who's even two minutes late is letting down the team and needs immediate attitude adjustment.
Take a manager from precision manufacturing, where Zero Defects is the norm, and "bugs" don't exist, and failing to deliver precisely what was promised is a big embarrassment.
Take a manager from the call centre industry, who thinks if you take a lax attitude to sick leave people will start falsely calling in sick all the time, anyone who calls in sick should be interviewed by HR upon their return.
Take a manager from a paperwork-heavy industry where work is simple but precision is important - like data entry for paper forms, where a worker who makes even minor typos just isn't cut out for the work.
Take a drill sergeant from the army who knows the most important thing in inducting a new employee is yelling in their face and bullying them, thus letting them bond with their peers....
I definitely agree with that. Probably the worst company experience I've had was with senior leadership who fundamentally didn't understand how software development works.
But still, I've never experienced a CTO who was that clueless. Other members of the senior leadership team, certainly, and I've certainly seen CTOs who I thought were poor, but never really CTOs who were as clueless as the one described in this article.
Perspective matters IME. I held both perspectives, this org is dysfunctional and healthy, at the same position, organization and exact same circumstances.
In one I was sure I was right and in the other I entertained the notion I actual might not be and things are not that simple.
Yeah, I've generally had good bosses and colleagues, including some outstanding great ones. (Actually, I had such overall good colleagues earlier in my career, I was totally unprepared the first time I ran into someone dishonest. It took too long to believe they would behave like they did, which ended up extremely costly.)
Despite overall good experiences, I've heard of dysfunction like this article describes, and even worse, in numerous real-world companies. Talking about particular instances can be very delicate when you have insider info. But I think there's enough frequent dysfunction in industry, and some very common tropes that we keep hearing from people at other companies, that senior engineers will tend to be able to immediately recognize some of it.
My experience matches yours. I have had very few bad bosses and almost all teams I have worked on have been healthy. I have been on a few bad teams and groups. They usually failed. They were not bad because they failed but because lying was rewarded, political skill was rewarded, and solving the customer's problem was not valued.
When I see questions like "where are the healthy companies?", I think either the poster has been very unlucky, or the poster might be the problem. When I say the poster is the problem, I mean they typically fall into one of the following buckets:
1. The person is very critical and cannot accept humans for what they are. They demand perfection, demand their coworkers are the best in the field, etc. They may also minimize the positives.
2. They have a very cynical or negative outlook.
3. They do not like their field (computers, sales, accounting, medicine, etc.). As a result, they are always unhappy.
The main point is something inside the person causes them to view every organization as screwed up and awful. This includes organizations which are OK, good, or even outstanding.
4. For myself, I was incompetent as a developer. Therefore I always landed in dysfunctional organizations. I was invested a lot, but in learning the wrong things.
Since I became competent (it was 2006, there were no Youtube tutorials for everything), I work with awesome people. It also means my managers at the time didn’t coach me properly (unsurprising for dysfunctional orgs). Life is much easier when you’re on top of things, and much harder when you’re unlucky. Unluckiness compounds.
Your experience is not a scientific experiment so you also have to consider that you might have been lucky. Perhaps other people have been unlucky.
For example, I could paint your post in a negative light:
"A poster who blames the victim perhaps wants to feel good about the company they work in and ignore the experiences of others, or perhaps they are now in a responsible position and don't want to think that they might be part of a problem."
This would be unempathetic but so is trying to blame the people who describe their bad experiences.
Have you mostly worked for younger tech companies or were they "traditional" businesses who had to be forced to adopt technology? The places I've seen with the biggest challenges are all large old and well established companies. Think insurance, transportation, agriculture or healthcare. Places where the people who managed the entire system out of file cabinets a decade ago now manage the document repositories they don't understand and they are still bitter about it.
The insurance company was known for hiring contractors and keeping them on the bench for months to years just in case they needed them. I also remember while working there a particular Big Three consultant kept showing up in people's meetings and never speaking up. No one could figure out what he did or why he was there, but the agency was billing $500 / hour for his time and no one could figure out how to get rid of him. It was a complete shit show. This doesn't even touch on some of the major technical blunders they made throughout the years. Just a few small personal anecdotes.
The transportation company was even worse. Literally the worst company I've ever spent time at. It only employees around 15k people, so it's quite a bit smaller than the above insurance company. All signs indicate that this company was well run by the founder. But not by his sons who inherited it. They had a driver turnover rate of over 100%. If they needed 100 drivers for the year, they would have to hire 105 drivers throughout the year. They just constantly churn through brand new drivers, train them up and lose them to other companies through incompetence. One of the consequences of constantly burning through brand new CDL drivers is you have higher accident rates. The project I was brought in to consult on was a driver monitoring system. So if the driver braked too hard or swerved too fast it would create an incident and the driver would have to talk to someone after their route to explain what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. I can't imagine why they had turnover problems! Their entire IT org was run in a similar dysfunctional way.
> we can all aspire to work in a company where people wouldn't be outright lying, nor feel that they needed to.
I think you should consider this might be antithetical to the very concept of a company - although don't misunderstand me to mean I think all companies are "dishonest" (even if many are).
"Working" in a "company" implying making some profit, usually implies something proprietary, which implies some secret, or with-holding of information/resources. So then, most, if not all companies, function off of scarcity-of-information/resources, and probably wouldn't be successful without.
Withholding of information or resources, is awfully close to the next step i.e. "lying". In fact, it is frequently requisite to "lie" i.e. tell half-truths in order to conceal/confuse/distort whereabouts, processes, etc. So while the stated goal of many companies may be transparency, this is actually incompatible with their own goals in many ways. And so this can be seen repeated internally, where "resources" usually imply "promotions", "sales leads", "job responsibilities".
This may explain why nearly every company seems to slowly become worse over time...
Many of the top companies you know were that healthy company once. You basically need to be one at that magical inflection point where the growth will crush you if your engineering is not empowered and on point. Especially back when clouds didn't exist, or were far less featureful, so turning dollars into horizontal growth was not a thing.
The dark secret is that being a healthy company is just a moment, not something a company is at all times. Staying a healthy company as you grown when you are actually successful is very hard, and once the health is gone, good luck regaining it, because now you have a lot of people that thrive in unhealthy environments.
Bang on. This is why I find these other comments which amount to "work in an unhealthy company? Just don't!" to be so naive. You're only ever one departure away from a shakeup which can totally change your work environment. If you aren't equipped or prepared to play the big game, then your options are
I have close to 15y of experience now, and I've mostly only worked on healthy companies - I can think of 1 that wasn't. I have worked in ~8 companies give or take.
Not OP, but I have a similar track record. Frequent switches because boredom, better pay (especially the first half of my career), and always searching for that amazing moment of confluence where I'm the dumbest guy in the room and working on an incredibly interesting/complex problem. Two years is about right to tackle something important and deliver, and also feel out if there are other opportunities at the current company. It has mostly worked out for me. You get really good at on-boarding yourself and getting up to speed quickly. I sell my labor as being an expert generalist and have professionally worked with half a dozen different languages, numerous different stacks, in a few different industries, and at big, small and in-between sized companies.
I feel like this approach wouldn't be able to make me truly valuable at any larger company for example, which in this case would be the ones considered unhealthy? Because there's enough complexity that takes years to understand. I think as an engineer your ability to provide value climbs in multiples the more you understand the product and what the company itself exactly values, besides the tech. You can solve meaningless problems using tech, but if you understand what is exactly worth solving, this is when your value can skyrocket, especially the larger the company is. Because you will have the understanding of marketing, leadership and product people while having technical capability to know what can be done.
And also I feel like if it's better to switch companies every 2 years because of better pay, it implies that the current company is not actually healthy, because if they were, they would understand the value you provide, you should be able to provide more value at their company rather than starting from scratch in another company.
While I don't feel my current company is healthy, at least I feel like I've been able to climb through promos and compensation faster than if I were to switch every 2 years. I have been there for 6 years.
Maybe you found a great company from the get go, those exist as well !
My pay bumps went something like: 1.5x, 1.5x, 2x, 2x, 1.5x, 1.5x, 2x (note that I changed countries twice so some of the bumps of 2x were also for a more expensive cost of life )
In only one of the companies I stayed more than 2y and was pretty great, I went from senior to senior manager within 4y. Now I’m at 2y again at my current company and am pretty happy, unlikely that I will change again.
The healthy part described by the parent post was along the lines of healthy work environment, not pay. Apart from my current company I’ve never worked somewhere that would give more then 5-10% increases per year, they were more like 0-5
>Because there's enough complexity that takes years to understand. I think as an engineer your ability to provide value climbs in multiples the more you understand the product and what the company itself exactly values, besides the tech. You can solve meaningless problems using tech, but if you understand what is exactly worth solving, this is when your value can skyrocket, especially the larger the company is. Because you will have the understanding of marketing, leadership and product people while having technical capability to know what can be done.
Yes, exactly. I am lucky that I am auto-didactic and grok things quickly. This is what I meant by complex/interesting problems: those are the kinds of problems that management is interested in because those make money. The more skilled management is, the more able they are to recognize those opportunities and allocate skilled labor to make it happen. The friction and need for finding a new company is when you work for under-skilled management that don't.
>And also I feel like if it's better to switch companies every 2 years because of better pay, it implies that the current company is not actually healthy, because if they were, they would understand the value you provide, you should be able to provide more value at their company rather than starting from scratch in another company.
Those companies only deal with the market reality when hiring new. Yes, it would make sense to retain your valuable people and reward them accordingly in an equitable situation, but when your shareholders are pressuring you to reduce labor costs, it is too tempting to give only CoL adjustments in spite of record profit quarters. They bank on retention through other means besides monetary (inertia, "career progression" cult, etc). To them, labor is a resource that is fungible rather than the core pillar of their business. They simply won't value your labor appropriately without negotiation.
Starting from scratch is really only a limitation if you don't ramp up quickly. And that means building social capital and demonstrating clear wins early.
> While I don't feel my current company is healthy, at least I feel like I've been able to climb through promos and compensation faster than if I were to switch every 2 years. I have been there for 6 years.
And how broad or deep has your experience been in those 6 years? Any serious migrations/rewrites/stack changes/scalability challenges/greenfield? Do you really feel you've been challenged professionally in that time? Being on the new hire cusp, especially for new initiatives is where all the action is and what has management's attention and capital expenditure. Being a backfill hire on a feature factory or vendor implementation team is definitely not where growth is going to happen.
And have you accumulated enough wins to make your next interview process easier? Thing is one of the gigs with the most impact in my career was one where I was able to find new opportunities within the org to deliver value, but it was the confluence of smart, motivated people working on interesting/complex things. If you aren't getting that, your 6 years in one place doing the same thing is working against you because all tech ages and decays.
In the beginning of my career I changed jobs quite often for better pay. That gave me a lot of big increases. In one of them I stayed less than 6 months.
I mean, nowhere's perfect, but I don't think I've ever worked anywhere as dysfunctional as the company depicted in the article. That's really quite bad. If the place you work is like that, consider applying elsewhere; this is not typical.
