
Tech Friends, Let's Get Rid of Workplace Bullies - VuongN
http://www.vuongnguyen.com/tech-friends-lets-get-rid-of-workplace-bullies/
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kwillets
There seems to be a real push towards homogeneity in teams, and I've seen it
lead to bullying of people with different skills.

At one point I was working with a guy who had a prototype of a complex
clustering algorithm. He did a great job prototyping it in MatLab, but the
company decided to have him implement a distributed version of it in C, and
they pushed him unreasonably hard. I tried to convince them to leave him
alone, since I and others had the skillset to get that part done, but they
kept after him, and eventually killed the project and fired both of us.

This was at Autonomy; we all had a "now I get it" moment when the fraud news
came out.

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VuongN
Doing tech, especially tech startups for a while and some day you wake up
thinking to yourself: if we pool all our skills together, we could build the
world we ought to have by the end of next 'sprint'\--But why are we all stuck
building sand castles after sand castles? Yeah, when the hivemind takes over
and everyone is afraid to speak up, that's when we can no longer innovate.
It's great to find like-minded team mates, it's not so great when people are
afraid to speak their minds due to fear of being an outcast.

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palsumitpal
Excellent - Like the author, I was a victim of Bullying too at the same place
- but, I retaliated when the bully was directed to me and the line was crossed
- spoke up defended myself from the bully

In the workplace - lets have a conversation not a confrontation

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VuongN
Absolutely agree with you on starting conversation. Both you, me and a lot of
our tech friends can use our skills as armors and shields. Unfortunately, many
of our colleagues are a little more vulnerable especially since most startups
often do not have a full-fledge and empowered HR department. I hope that we
can start speaking up more and coming into defense of these colleagues sooner
to prevent workplace bullying from taking shape in the organizations we're a
part of. Thank you again for speaking up, my friend!

