
My experience with toxic teams - rbanffy
https://dev.to/geekgalgroks/my-experience-with-toxic-teams-6fk
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spery
Dancing Sign up button is really off-putting.

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crooked-v
Yeah, I saw that and closed the page immediately.

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andbberger
What I don't understand is why this is so persistent. Irrational markets, I
guess.

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sneakernets
This article was passed around in a FinTech slack channel I frequent. The
major response to it was "Well, that sounds just like FinTech."

tl;dr: Toxic teams come from lack of vision from an equally toxic management.

To be precise, toxic teams always develop from an overworked, understaffed
workplace, on a vision-less project, thrown together so fast and so
haphazardly that it cannot tolerate any degree of failure, with no fallbacks
implemented due to cost and time. This profile fits every failed "disruptive"
startup or company I've worked at over the past decade, especially in FinTech.

No one uses vacation time or sick leave since no one can fill in for you.
Having any sort of redundancy is seen as "bad", in all circumstances. If one
employee is going out for a week, and his or her part of the project breaks,
that's going to stay broken for a week if that person leaves. Employees are
told they can start "living it up" just as soon as sales "hooks the big one",
then they'll hire more devs, and it'll all be fixed, surely!

If you insist on taking vacation, they'll expect you to be "on call". In my
personal experience, I saw a manager give a sales rep an employee on
vacation's cell number with the instructions "if they call in about
[component], throw her on the call." There is no escape.

It's always crunch time because planning anything in advance beyond the next
fiscal quarter isn't possible, due to, well, crunch time. This one feeds on
itself. Startups and FinTech darlings think they can be a 1-year-old vineyard
selling 10-year-old wines to 100-year-old clients who see right through this
BS.

The priority of the day shifts to whoever is screaming loudest because, as
we've discussed before, the project was thrown together so fast and so
haphazardly that it cannot tolerate any degree of failure, and something
crucial just broke, or in the case of one startup I worked at, "the laws of
physics got in the way."

Socializing with other teams is frowned upon because talking with other teams
gets people fired. It's a paranoid (but completely justified) mentality that
discussion with other teams may reveal someone from one team is better at
solving a problem than a person on another team - which can alert managers,
who then tell their superiors, who then tell the better employee to move to
the other team. And the poor guy he bested? "It's his last day, and now two
teams are angry at you because you opened your mouth."

The communication you _do_ have has been reduced to some trendy iteration of
IRC with half-baked teleconferencing built-in. Teams cannot see other teams'
chats, for reasons unknown. Miscommunication is always dismissed as "Oh, we
already discussed that in our team channel." The people who need to be on the
chat app, which is pretty much all of management, never use the chat app.
E-mail doesn't work, because no one checks their e-mail anymore. E-mail
inboxes are where excuses from the CFO for that terrible last quarter go to
die. There is only despair and automated messages in the inbox.

Never expect documentation. Ever. If the software is too crucial to let rot on
the vine, and too complex to maintain if the maintainers are laid off, you
won't find a shred. Writing good documentation means that someone with a
certain level of technical competency can follow it, someone who the suits
could pay a lot less than they do you.

If a company suddenly requests thorough technical documentation on a product,
the poor soul's days are numbered. Many are directed "on a whim" to write
exhaustive documentation, only to be laid off the week after said
documentation is finished and announced to management. The system is then
thrown to a team of contractors elsewhere. Yeah, one could argue that the
system must have not been too important, but no one deserves to be treated
this way, knowing you're basically writing your job away, one keystroke at a
time, for several months.

There is little or no recognition of good work because "the work is never
done". Everyone can rest when the project is done, which never happens because
either the money runs out, or the project is abruptly cancelled (the money ran
out).

Check-ins are constantly skipped. If there is a check-in, it's a cover for the
actual intent of the meeting - layoffs, or announcing that people have been
laid off. Ergo, no check-ins is a good thing.

Project-stopping roadblocks are ignored because that would implicate to
management there was no proper planning ever involved, which everyone knows
damn well there was no proper planning ever involved. If the remedy is a
third-party service, suddenly there is enough money for said service,
especially if the person (if any) responsible for clearing the roadblock is
paid more than that third-party service costs.

Insults abound in the workplace, but they are crafted in a way to appear
superior to management, who see the pecking order as "structure". Complaints
are shrugged off by HR as "banter". If it's any consolation, these same people
doing the pecking are being pecked at by someone higher than they are.

It isn't safe to fail because the company never had any money to afford
failure in the first place. That doesn't stop them from acquiring other
companies in a desperate attempt for growth, though! Yes, there should be
safeguards to prevent failure from being catastrophic but that safeguard is to
have a product that actually solves a problem, rather than having a product to
solve a "problem" created simply for the product's solution to solve. It's the
tech equivalent of a Seen-on-TV gadget.

The saddest part about all this is that everyone on the team feels the same
way. No one benefits from this, and it's only prolonging the inevitable, when
everyone has to pack their stuff in a box and leave the premises by lunch.
It's a miracle if you still get severance. Am I jaded? you bet!

