
I tried to fix it, and failed miserably - weinzierl
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/03/04/annoyed/
======
commandlinefan
> The people who can leave... do

I left the first job I got out of college because the place was so horribly
broken. The code was awful, impossible to debug, broke almost randomly, and if
a customer asked for a feature - even one that didn’t make sense - they were
promised they’d get it in a few days (which meant we’d be working nights and
weekends… again).

I stuck it out for about a year - after a year I was the only person left who
was there when I started. I followed one of the other exiting programmers to
my second job. I was hoping it would be better. It wasn’t. Similar problems:
nobody could describe what they wanted, but they knew they wanted it by the
end of the week. Just a year out of college, I was saddled with a huge legacy
codebase and nobody else to help.

I stuck it out for another year before the constant criticism and ridiculously
long hours got to me. But this was the late 90’s, jobs were easy to find. I
found another one. It was somehow worse than the first two. I had managed to
refine some of my people skills and learned how to avoid a few of the
landmines that the “business people” laid for unsuspecting programmers, but
this third place had the same high turnover the other two had and in no time I
was maintaining undocumented software whose intended function nobody even
fully remembered.

I moved on to my fourth job in as many years. It was no better. We put
together a desktop application and it worked pretty well, but they wanted us
to port it to Citrix so that they could distribute it. They expected that to
happen in a couple of weeks. Everybody but me quit.

It was then that I realized one of two things were true: either every software
organization is ridiculously unreasonably dysfunctional, or the types of
software organizations that would hire me were ridiculously unreasonably
dysfunctional.

~~~
subhobroto
> It was then that I realized one of two things were true: either every
> software organization is ridiculously unreasonably dysfunctional, or the
> types of software organizations that would hire me were ridiculously
> unreasonably dysfunctional.

... or you never invested enough effort to look for your right team.

There is more than one team out there thats exactly what you're looking for.

It might take time and effort on your part to find them, but with enough
effort you will.

There absolutely are people who want to build a solid business.

Part of building a solid business is building solid relationships

------
sombremesa
Two cents - do vent in public, and do share salaries. These things actually
help other engineers, though I'm sure they don't help career directors and
VPs. Let's not pretend to be stupid when we aren't.

~~~
igor47
Doesn't help your own career, though.

After leaving a certain well known tech company, I also wanted to reflect
honestly on the experience of working there. I tried to be honest, in a blog
post you can probably find, about the problems with the place as well as
moments when I wasn't at my best and could've done better.

Later, when I decided to go back to work, a prospective boss found the post
and basically didn't hire me over it.

In this case, I felt fine about it. I could stand by what I wrote, and this
person's not getting it was a signal for me that he wouldn't be a great boss.

But if I had written a rant and dropped some f bombs, I might have felt more
silly.

Great respect for Rachel, I love her blog and she's clearly an amazing person
and I wouldn't presume to tell her what to do. But, other readers, you're not
Rachel. Consider your actions.

~~~
rachelbythebay
This is going to sound cliched, but I'm doing this in part for the people who
can't do this. I have the flexibility to do this, and I kind of figure "from
me, according to my ability". If it improves the situation, then I've
succeeded to some small extent.

Everyone else: if you can't stick your neck out, DON'T.

(Also, some people want to hire you because you're a straight shooter and you
don't stand for bullshit. It's not burning bridges, it's finding the ones that
weren't worth a damn in the first place. The good ones will still be there,
and will be even stronger for it.)

~~~
ncmncm
And... if you are thinking maybe you should leave a job, leave yesterday!
Those of us who solve problems solve them by stubbornness, by not giving up.
But problems with a toxic workplace can be solved only by giving up.

If everybody suffering also left, the problem people they are all supporting
would drop right through the floor.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Don't just leave; take every decent coworker you can with you.

~~~
subhobroto
In my experience it does not come to that.

Your (ex)coworkers will just apply where you happen to currently work. It
happens organically without any suggesting or prodding.

------
chasingthewind
I believe this highlights a very important reality of office politics. Most
ICs, even Principal Engineers, are just not in a position to fix significant
technical-cultural problems...you just won't have enough influence.

If your goal is to influence the big picture at a corporation then your title
probably has to be Sr. Director, VP, SVP, or something similar. Even then it
won't be easy. Political and cultural inertia will conspire to prevent change.

~~~
Gibbon1
I had a boss in a big corp. He couldn't fix the techno-cultural problems but
he could and did hold an umbrella over his team. It'd be raining down shit and
we were dry.

------
alexeiz
I'd take this with a grain of salt. The problem she was trying to "fix" is
describe very generically on purpose, so that you'd never guess what the
actual problem is and whether it's a problem at all. Then, it looks like
"problems that don't get fixed" is a pet peeve of hers (I found this talk she
gave: [https://youtu.be/rJJAxQjZ-uE](https://youtu.be/rJJAxQjZ-uE)). There is
always two sides of the story. We're hearing one side, and not even a good
version of it.

------
fistfucker3000
This article is showing an important lesson: no matter how valuable you are as
an IC, changing the culture at a toxic company is very difficult alone. The
one thing that has been proven to work for these situations is collective
action by employees. One IC is replaceable, a team of ICs quitting is a
disaster, the threat of such action is enough to make any manager/director
shit their pants. You don't even have to come out guns blazing and do a full
union right away, creating a simple demand on paper with all members of a team
signing that demand is often enough to make management scared.

------
cafard
I'm glad that some of her options vested, and that she didn't have to pay back
any of a signing bonus.

------
mattbillenstein
Two cents - don't vent in public.

~~~
hfdh434535
This person had a terrible experience at work, and you telling them "don't
vent" is condescending. Our industry has a problem with toxic work
environments, and we need to talk about it.

~~~
tinus_hn
It is a risk to do so. I guess she’ll be fine though, she typically is a
controversial figure.

