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At the risk of a tremendous backlash, I have to say that with the vast majority of these I was left looking for the punchline. There were clearly some very ups

At the risk of a tremendous backlash, I have to say that with the vast majority of these I was left looking for the punchline. There were clearly some very upsetting situations, but in nearly every case I could potentially see both sides of the equation. It was hard for me to consider these examples of poor treatment. Rather sometimes just examples of poor judgement (also from the developer's side -- for example not leaving the premises after being dismissed). This stuff is hard. In my experience you have to cut people some slack and be understanding of difficult situations. If you are able to succeed at that, you should find opportunities to help. This will, in turn, make you more valuable to your employers and also make you much happier. Of course, it's hard to give good advice from the other end of a comment box. I wish you the best of luck in your current endeavours!

koolba 11y ago
> There were clearly some very upsetting situations, but in nearly every case I could potentially see both sides of the equation. Nearly, sure but not all. From the article (emphasis mine): "A new big shot executive joined the company as our new CTO. He had no agile background and our company was transforming and pushing for a lot of agile principles at the time. Two weeks into his new appointment, the new CTO published an internal document titled “Controlled Chaos”. After reading the document everyone immediately realised that he was describing waterfall. The document was shared as a Google Doc and was open for comments, so people started asking hard questions. Weeks later, many of us who were vocal about his document were let go." Asking for feedback and shooting the messenger(s) is pretty up there on the "How to make sure you never get honest feedback again and screw things over the long term" scale.
- chasing 11y ago
  Or you could interpret it as: The development team at the company was a hot mess. The company brought in a CTO who stumbled a bit out of the gate, and a few developers made it very clear that they were uninterested in working with him or following his lead. Because the company felt it needed to go in a new direction with the development team, they had to let most of those developers -- who were clearly a bad fit at this point -- go. Because there's almost no detail in that story.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  Yeah, it's hard to say. I can share one particular horror story from my past (because it is fun ;-) ). I worked on an internal tools team and did not get on terribly well with my manager. I was very critical of him when he made mistakes (which he did fairly often -- some of them really serious ones). When my yearly review came up, I submitted a list of all of my accomplishments for the year. He said, "Ordinarily if someone gave me a list like this, I would give them a very good review. However, I just don't like you." And he gave me the worst possible rating. I actually hung around at that job for several months (I was young and stupid). We had a reverse review system for our managers and our team of 9 developers gave our manager the worst rating in the entire company (a company of 100K employees!!!). My manager was incensed and locked us up in a meeting room for an hour to lecture us on how disappointed he was in his review. At one point he said, "The thing I am most disappointed in is that I had no idea things were this bad. Why didn't anyone tell me?" I replied, "I've been trying to help you ever since I got here. That's why I keep yelling at you. Nobody else will open their mouth because they see how you treat me." We looked at each other and I like to think that we both learned something very valuable. I quit my job soon after that and I heard that he improved as a manager (at least a little bit). After a lot of soul searching I realized that "helping" someone when they can't understand what you are saying is quite a bit like stomping on their face ;-)
  - tristor 11y ago
    > After a lot of soul searching I realized that "helping" someone when they can't understand what you are saying is quite a bit like stomping on their face ;-) Thanks for this. Put in this context and thinking back it makes some things in my past career clearer to me. I have often been the person "helping" and getting penalized for it as well. It's often difficult to bridge the divide between the factually correct and the politically? socially? correct.

koolba 11y ago

> There were clearly some very upsetting situations, but in nearly every case I could potentially see both sides of the equation. Nearly, sure but not all. From the article (emphasis mine): "A new big shot executive joined the company as our new CTO. He had no agile background and our company was transforming and pushing for a lot of agile principles at the time. Two weeks into his new appointment, the new CTO published an internal document titled “Controlled Chaos”. After reading the document everyone immediately realised that he was describing waterfall. The document was shared as a Google Doc and was open for comments, so people started asking hard questions. Weeks later, many of us who were vocal about his document were let go." Asking for feedback and shooting the messenger(s) is pretty up there on the "How to make sure you never get honest feedback again and screw things over the long term" scale.

chasing 11y ago
Or you could interpret it as: The development team at the company was a hot mess. The company brought in a CTO who stumbled a bit out of the gate, and a few developers made it very clear that they were uninterested in working with him or following his lead. Because the company felt it needed to go in a new direction with the development team, they had to let most of those developers -- who were clearly a bad fit at this point -- go. Because there's almost no detail in that story.
mikekchar 11y ago
Yeah, it's hard to say. I can share one particular horror story from my past (because it is fun ;-) ). I worked on an internal tools team and did not get on terribly well with my manager. I was very critical of him when he made mistakes (which he did fairly often -- some of them really serious ones). When my yearly review came up, I submitted a list of all of my accomplishments for the year. He said, "Ordinarily if someone gave me a list like this, I would give them a very good review. However, I just don't like you." And he gave me the worst possible rating. I actually hung around at that job for several months (I was young and stupid). We had a reverse review system for our managers and our team of 9 developers gave our manager the worst rating in the entire company (a company of 100K employees!!!). My manager was incensed and locked us up in a meeting room for an hour to lecture us on how disappointed he was in his review. At one point he said, "The thing I am most disappointed in is that I had no idea things were this bad. Why didn't anyone tell me?" I replied, "I've been trying to help you ever since I got here. That's why I keep yelling at you. Nobody else will open their mouth because they see how you treat me." We looked at each other and I like to think that we both learned something very valuable. I quit my job soon after that and I heard that he improved as a manager (at least a little bit). After a lot of soul searching I realized that "helping" someone when they can't understand what you are saying is quite a bit like stomping on their face ;-)
- tristor 11y ago
  > After a lot of soul searching I realized that "helping" someone when they can't understand what you are saying is quite a bit like stomping on their face ;-) Thanks for this. Put in this context and thinking back it makes some things in my past career clearer to me. I have often been the person "helping" and getting penalized for it as well. It's often difficult to bridge the divide between the factually correct and the politically? socially? correct.