11 ms·

Imagine going into an environment suffering some serious performance issues adversely affecting the day-to-day operations of the business. From initial convers

by MrFoof 5y ago

Imagine going into an environment suffering some serious performance issues adversely affecting the day-to-day operations of the business. From initial conversations it seems great. You're asked about how you'd handle, "difficult personalities" a fair bit, but aside from that, seems like you can add a ton of value. In your first days, you exhaustively quantitatively measure the entire operating environment, prioritize a plan of attack based on the data, and go at it. By the end of the week, you have many improvements testing successfully while still producing identical and correct results. In one instance, runtime reduced from 200 minutes ... to 1.2 seconds. You dutifully write up an explanation, articles, all the gory compiler knowledge, etc. Submit pull requests. Your team is chuffed. Result? Someone on another team calls you into a meeting, to railroad and scream at you for, "making them look bad". I mean SCREAM. As if they're trying to kill you with words. You report the incident to who you are directed to report into and are told to, "man up." -- ----- This is when you ensure the termination clause is airtight. You spend 5 minutes drafting a termination letter, print it, and hand it in. Drop the mic. Walk out. Good riddance. -- ----- Scary thing? That's nothing. Ever get hired for performance tuning and then the DBA refuses to create your account, and cusses out the CTO when the CTO asks why? Ever see a developer get punched by someone? Have you been in an environment where there were actual cots set up for people who had to work through the night, because it happened that often? I've. Seen. Things.

bourgwaletariat 5y ago
Yes, this is the problem. Unprofessional, low-quality employees think employment is "king of the hill," when really it's "tides lift all boats." It only takes 1 person in a company of a hundred to completely destroy it. Allow one psychopath into your company and it'll go bankrupt or otherwise defunct within just a couple years. These folks are afraid. They know their performance is substandard. They exist by hiding that low quality work from management. When someone like you goes in there and makes a 3 hour report a real time dashboard, you can be sure management heard all manner of reasons why it took so long and that's just how things are and their expectations are unreasonable if they want it faster, they can try to hire someone, but there's no one who can do it better. Until you. And then it's better and now their lives are worse, so you pay for it. You have to be gotten rid of because you are proof they their work isn't up to snuff. You came in and landed right on top of the hill. You were the king, so they had to knock you off. Welcome to the war on competence.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cbozeman 5y ago
  This literally happened to me today. I left my shitshow of a job because I finally got fed up with the petty favoritism, backstabbing, inability to deal with conflict in a reasonable and adult manner, and just plain poor management. And I legitimately felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
  - justatdotin 5y ago
    congrats.
    - mrslave 5y ago
      Second. My last project from hell was all "let's just get it done," with a deadline that shifted from January to May one month at a time. Eventually I pulled the pin. Pretty sure that subsequently there was a lot of "the last guy really caused us a lot of problems," gossip to the project managers but I don't care. Lots of the staff had terrible attitudes and the management cultivated such.
      - bourgwaletariat 5y ago
        The "last guy" is the scapegoat. In toxic companies, deadlines are the date at which you get a new deadline. The effect is that people hustle to make the deadline, constantly having the rug pulled out from under them by the deadline, only to realize, they have to hustle for another month... and another month... Because the project managers are cowards. Unwilling to tell management they have repeatedly set unrealistic expectations for them and of the staff. Of course they blame the staff for be lazy or slacking. The reality is, they were never able to properly define and estimate the scope. They are folks who never take accountability for their responsibilities. They blame others. Even after they did their best to fix the problems and then got blamed for them all after they left.
- 5y ago
imperialdrive 5y ago
My first day of work many many years ago I did the usual (for me at least) and stopped by each office (before open floorplans were widespread) to introduce myself. The very first office the door was cracked so I knocked and slowly opened it a bit more to give a friendly "hello" and the guy immediately grabbed his desktop inkjet printer (one of those old half dome Epsons) and hurled it at me, crashing at my feet due to cables holding it back... That was one hell of a start. A wild next couple months followed. This post/comment gave me a nice flashback to it! Ty :D
- SonOfKyuss 5y ago
  > the guy immediately grabbed his desktop inkjet printer (one of those old half dome Epsons) and hurled it at me, crashing at my feet Seems odd… what’s the rest of the story?
  - imperialdrive 5y ago
    I shared it below in reply to another comment :)
- amatecha 5y ago
  dude.. what? that's freakin messed up! wow!
- xwdv 5y ago
  This reminds me of the “chair incident” story I read a long time ago. Maybe someone will know what I’m talking about. It was something in the game industry and I don’t remember the details but I know a chair was broken such that one of the legs was broken off to form a “shit your pants” style point and one person held it while two other guys held the uncooperative victim by the arms and leaned him right over it so that if they let go he’d fall and get stabbed.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    Ah, good old Ballmer, I miss that guy... Steve Ballmer, when CEO of Microsoft, was said to have thrown his chair at an employee announcing they would leave the company to work for Google back in the mid-2000s. It is a bit of an urban legend. Ballmer himself denies that has ever happened (https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmer-i-didnt-throw-the-chair-at-th-google-engineer-2017-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmer-i-didnt-throw-...) - but he was eccentric enough (just google "developer dance") that people considered it plausible.
johnchristopher 5y ago
Which country did this happen if I may ask ?
felipellrocha 5y ago
Been there, my friend. Been there.
elSidCampeador 5y ago
1-2 of these employees is enough to sink a department, or worse, an entire company.
- ardit33 5y ago
  no it is not, not managing them properly, is usually the indication of not experienced leadership... bad employees (could be a decent person, but just a bad fit for the team), might affect a team, but they shouldn't affect a whole department if the management team knows what they are doing.
  - jedimastert 5y ago
    If physical assault doesn't lead to termination, you've gone beyond "poor management".
amarant 5y ago
Damn I thought my last workplace was bad, but it was nothing compared to what you describe. I did get told off by the boss for fixing someone's compilation errors(that they had force-pushed to master, deleting a week of my work) but he didn't scream at me.
phibz 5y ago
I've been in a position where my abilities vastly out stripped those of the rest of the team. I was insecurely seeking praise and adoration by fixing as many problems with the code as quickly as I could. The mistake, in my opinion, that I made was that I did it alone. I didn't communicate with team and work with them at their pace. I blasted ahead and did all the work myself. And it didn't win me any friends. They were angry, very angry. They thought I made them look bad and I was being negatively critical of their work. They got defensive and stopped listening to the why and how of my changes. When there's a huge skill impedence mismatch between you and the team of your peers you especially need to consider their feelings. Had I approached the situation by reaching out and explaining my ideas in a way that they understood and guided them along to the solution, I would have had a different outcome. They needed to be part of the solution even if I didn't agree with them completely. I needed to accept and believe in myself and not go looking for praise from them. I needed to recognize that they spent their own time and effort on this work. Maybe they were lazy, maybe they didn't know better, or maybe they were too busy to write a performant solution, but the work was partly theirs and I needed to consider that. The best way to do that was to talk to them and listen. More recently I have been more guiding and taken the team with me to a solution. I've had much better success with this. Sure it's slower. Sure I ended up with work that was good but not exactly how I wanted it. But I gained something I hadn't expected: a stronger bond with the team, knowing they would listen to me and I to them, and that we all respected each other. We also ended up producing better work as a team. I'm not saying any of this to discredit toxic work environments. I've been on broken teams before where everyone is turned against each. Part of the responsibility for this lies with the leadership individuals who matched someone with skills out pacing the rest of the team, placing them as a peer on the team. They should have considered the team dynamics they were creating. You can help reduce the toxicity of your work environment by considering your impact on a team and how you work with them. Being "right" about the work is seldom the only factor to consider and does not absolve you of ignoring the thoughts, ideas, and feelings of others.
- blaser-waffle 5y ago
  > I've been in a position where my abilities vastly out stripped those of the rest of the team. I was insecurely seeking praise and adoration by fixing as many problems with the code as quickly as I could. To paraphrase someone else, you "disrupted the gentle surface tension of the market" by working at a difference pace than everyone else. The team can be slow, or fast, or whatever, but if you're incongruous you're gonna have a bad time...
derefr 5y ago
> You report the incident to who you are directed to report into and are told to, "man up." Given that you also mention further down a dev getting punched, I think this statement was code for “if you don’t like what they’re saying, you should just shut them up.” Machismo-driven cultures are confusing until you realize that everyone is just expecting you to literally physically assault your way to the top, and is just annoyed with you for seeking peaceful resolutions rather than immediately jumping to violence / intimidation. In such societies, (public) peaceful resolutions lower the social status of both parties making them!
- ithkuil 5y ago
  Quitting and chosing a better place to work is a perfectly valid way to claw your way to the top. Your top. Not their top. Changing a job is not easy; it requires strength too. It's not always the right thing to do, but it's not necessarily a sign of weakness; au contraire.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Certainly! I’m just making a statement about their expectations — not about the epistemological value of living up to them. (Probably negative.) Still, if you’re born in a country with a machismo based culture, where “opting out” is much harder, it’s good to be aware of what game is being played!
    - kijin 5y ago
      Not only countries, but also entire industries can be like that. As long as you work in a broadly similar industry, you're likely to quit a bad job only to land in an equally bad job.
    - KronisLV 5y ago
      How would one even figure out which countries, on average, would be more likely to have cultures like that? It's not like one can just Google "countries with machismo culture" and get meaningful results with studies that attempt to quantify it.
lmilcin 5y ago
I had this happen to me. Walked out after 2 months before completing 3 month trial period. I had a boss who said he is best developer in the world and he meant it. He caused major outage when the code he developed and brought to the company as an asset failed. The code was to exchange SMS messages with an SMS gateway for Ukrainian operator. The messages were sent using mails. That was 15 years ago and not his fault, but his fault was that he received the XML messages and instead of using XML parser, he just parsed text by locating substring in a given line number from a given offset to a specified character. So what happened is that they stopped pretty-printing XML messages in the responses. When I pointed (with couple people around) that this is absolutely our fault (I did not say his, but everybody knew this), he started screaming at me that I am incompetent and that he was programming when I was shitting myself in a crib. I left the same day. I left companies suddenly on two more occasions: - when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish). - when my boss charged at me to hit me after I refused to lie to management. He stopped himself with his fist 10cm from my face but that, for me, was game over.
- piva00 5y ago
  > - when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish). As an immigrant in Sweden, this is one of the instances where I'd love a name-and-shame (but it's just wishful thinking, I don't expect or really want you public shaming companies). Simply because I've heard this happening to other colleagues, in different companies, and for some Swedes this sounds almost fabricated. I didn't get that clear message about not raising salaries up to Swedish colleagues but I noticed at some point that I was severely underpaid given my experience and skills, even more after a couple of years and I started to hear from much more junior employees how much they were making.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    I worked there on site for a 6 month (minus one day) contract as a developer with already couple of years of experience. But just before the end of my contract I have learned from couple of guys from support line that I am basically earning less than they earn manning the phone with no education, experience or technical knowledge. So when the end of the contract came I met with my boss who also had ability to make sole decision and sign the contract. He explained that they would like to keep me and they will even give me raise. But when I said the raise basically puts me on level with the phone desk and I suspect engineers earn a lot more he said that this is as much as I am going to get and I should be happy because as a Pole I am not going to get anything more than that. Those were his words. I have not met any other form of discrimination from anybody in the company, peer or manager. It was fun working there and I befriended a lot of people, spent a lot of time being invited to parties, etc. But this one statement sealed it for me and I knew that I would never be happy there. Now, I don't have time to make a shit storm out of this and I am too busy to have any publicity around me at the moment. So I am not going to name the company. I am lucky to be a developer and basically be able to choose where and for whom I work, so this did not cost me a lot. But I understand most people are not so lucky and this amounts to exploitation.
austinshea 5y ago
I hope you have a safe job, now.
Mauricebranagh 5y ago
1 File a written grievance against the other team member 2 File a written grievance against the guy you reported it too. If its assault call the police and tell HR fire them and ill drop the charges "maybe"
genezeta 5y ago
I walked into a weird job environment not long ago. First couple days were not that bad. Not particularly good, but nothing too bad. Like people weren't too friendly but neither too hostile. There was, though, some casual heated discussion here and there. As I met some people more closely I began to see a trend: Everybody hated almost everybody else. One developer openly told me in our first conversation something like "You'll notice few people talk to me... Everyone hates me here.". Then somewhere else some shouting erupted for a few minutes, but nobody seemed to pay too much attention to it. I saw someone get up from their desk, go to someone else and instead of normally asking whatever question they wanted to ask, start shouting their question. "How can it be that something something?!!! This is totally unacceptable!". Nobody even looked up from their screens or anything. It would turn out that was the way they always communicated. We got a meeting with the whole team. Ah, no, not the whole team, just half of it. Why? - I asked. "Oh, we tried that but we can't have the whole team in one meeting because there are... conflicts and we end up not doing anything productive." A few days later, I get called into a meeting with 6 other people, just to generally estimate a few tasks and discuss some of their details. After about two minutes or so, two people are arguing which ones are the tasks that we need to discuss. Things escalate and they are shouting while the rest watches calmly. I don't even know what to do or where to look because none seems to react at all to this. After some 15-20 minutes of this, the meeting is cancelled. People just stand up and return to their desks. I ask one of them if this is normal. "Yeah, pretty much." I tried really hard and stayed there for more than 1 1/2 years. The only thing I have from all that is a lot of awful anecdotes about awful people.
- __exit__ 5y ago
  Wow, 1.5 years of bearing such daily situations, that is something I find impressive given the anecdotes you described. I would probably not have lasted than long in such an environment. Good for you to leave that place at last. Hope you found a much more better environment!
  - genezeta 5y ago
    Thanks. > Hope you found a much more better environment! Ah, we'll see how that goes.
tpoacher 5y ago
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Developers on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched monitors glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to resign.
robjan 5y ago
This happens when a high performer enters an environment of low performers. They know there was a reason for you being hired and feel threatened. In my experience, the best approach isn't to attempt to change the world immediately but to head straight for the most important decision maker and point out the problems with concrete solutions. If it doesn't work, resign. Eventually they will get the picture but a high performing new hire shouldn't have to suffer.
one2three4 5y ago
I'm sorry but I don't share your sentiment here. You were asked a fair bit about difficult personalities. That is you were warned as much as HR could warn you. And then you jump into the role totally oblivious to that aspect and you go about focusing only on engineering. I mean, and it's typical for engineers, there are _always_ way more moving parts in businesses than machines. But you always focus there and take pride of it. Yet, the most difficult challenges are people - not machines. So, you did effectively nothing to detect where the people problem lied and prepare the ground to deal with that as well. And when that blew in your face you just left and say the story like there was nothing you could do about it.
bjourne 5y ago
I've seen it too. Makes me happy that I'm in a business where it often is possible to quit and get a new job. Tons of people have suffered much worse but have to put up with it because for them getting a new job isn't so easy. People deserve to be treated as humans. There should be a law about it.
jdhendrickson 5y ago
I was bitten on my chest by a male co-worker with enough force that if I had not been wearing a shirt he would have bitten a chunk out of my chest. He was not fired or even reprimanded. Like literally bitten. This was while working for Brit Systems. I was so shocked I just froze. I believe every word you wrote because I too have seen some things. That was the worst (and sadly not only) physical assault, some of the mind games and toxic personalities in this industry have to be seen to be believed. Don't even get me started on the founder that would try to break up his first employees marriages so they would move into his house and focus on work because the rest of their life just imploded (he then pulled some chicanery in regard to the stock options right before they vested, clawed most of them back and the people who sacrificed everything got nothing, HE however became a multi millionaire).

by MrFoof 5y ago

bourgwaletariat 5y ago

Yes, this is the problem. Unprofessional, low-quality employees think employment is "king of the hill," when really it's "tides lift all boats." It only takes 1 person in a company of a hundred to completely destroy it. Allow one psychopath into your company and it'll go bankrupt or otherwise defunct within just a couple years. These folks are afraid. They know their performance is substandard. They exist by hiding that low quality work from management. When someone like you goes in there and makes a 3 hour report a real time dashboard, you can be sure management heard all manner of reasons why it took so long and that's just how things are and their expectations are unreasonable if they want it faster, they can try to hire someone, but there's no one who can do it better. Until you. And then it's better and now their lives are worse, so you pay for it. You have to be gotten rid of because you are proof they their work isn't up to snuff. You came in and landed right on top of the hill. You were the king, so they had to knock you off. Welcome to the war on competence.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cbozeman 5y ago
This literally happened to me today. I left my shitshow of a job because I finally got fed up with the petty favoritism, backstabbing, inability to deal with conflict in a reasonable and adult manner, and just plain poor management. And I legitimately felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
- justatdotin 5y ago
  congrats.
  - mrslave 5y ago
    Second. My last project from hell was all "let's just get it done," with a deadline that shifted from January to May one month at a time. Eventually I pulled the pin. Pretty sure that subsequently there was a lot of "the last guy really caused us a lot of problems," gossip to the project managers but I don't care. Lots of the staff had terrible attitudes and the management cultivated such.
    - bourgwaletariat 5y ago
      The "last guy" is the scapegoat. In toxic companies, deadlines are the date at which you get a new deadline. The effect is that people hustle to make the deadline, constantly having the rug pulled out from under them by the deadline, only to realize, they have to hustle for another month... and another month... Because the project managers are cowards. Unwilling to tell management they have repeatedly set unrealistic expectations for them and of the staff. Of course they blame the staff for be lazy or slacking. The reality is, they were never able to properly define and estimate the scope. They are folks who never take accountability for their responsibilities. They blame others. Even after they did their best to fix the problems and then got blamed for them all after they left.
5y ago

imperialdrive 5y ago

My first day of work many many years ago I did the usual (for me at least) and stopped by each office (before open floorplans were widespread) to introduce myself. The very first office the door was cracked so I knocked and slowly opened it a bit more to give a friendly "hello" and the guy immediately grabbed his desktop inkjet printer (one of those old half dome Epsons) and hurled it at me, crashing at my feet due to cables holding it back... That was one hell of a start. A wild next couple months followed. This post/comment gave me a nice flashback to it! Ty :D

SonOfKyuss 5y ago
> the guy immediately grabbed his desktop inkjet printer (one of those old half dome Epsons) and hurled it at me, crashing at my feet Seems odd… what’s the rest of the story?
- imperialdrive 5y ago
  I shared it below in reply to another comment :)
amatecha 5y ago
dude.. what? that's freakin messed up! wow!
xwdv 5y ago
This reminds me of the “chair incident” story I read a long time ago. Maybe someone will know what I’m talking about. It was something in the game industry and I don’t remember the details but I know a chair was broken such that one of the legs was broken off to form a “shit your pants” style point and one person held it while two other guys held the uncooperative victim by the arms and leaned him right over it so that if they let go he’d fall and get stabbed.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  Ah, good old Ballmer, I miss that guy... Steve Ballmer, when CEO of Microsoft, was said to have thrown his chair at an employee announcing they would leave the company to work for Google back in the mid-2000s. It is a bit of an urban legend. Ballmer himself denies that has ever happened (https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmer-i-didnt-throw-the-chair-at-th-google-engineer-2017-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmer-i-didnt-throw-...) - but he was eccentric enough (just google "developer dance") that people considered it plausible.

johnchristopher 5y ago

Which country did this happen if I may ask ?

felipellrocha 5y ago

Been there, my friend. Been there.

elSidCampeador 5y ago

1-2 of these employees is enough to sink a department, or worse, an entire company.

ardit33 5y ago
no it is not, not managing them properly, is usually the indication of not experienced leadership... bad employees (could be a decent person, but just a bad fit for the team), might affect a team, but they shouldn't affect a whole department if the management team knows what they are doing.
- jedimastert 5y ago
  If physical assault doesn't lead to termination, you've gone beyond "poor management".

amarant 5y ago

Damn I thought my last workplace was bad, but it was nothing compared to what you describe. I did get told off by the boss for fixing someone's compilation errors(that they had force-pushed to master, deleting a week of my work) but he didn't scream at me.

phibz 5y ago

I've been in a position where my abilities vastly out stripped those of the rest of the team. I was insecurely seeking praise and adoration by fixing as many problems with the code as quickly as I could. The mistake, in my opinion, that I made was that I did it alone. I didn't communicate with team and work with them at their pace. I blasted ahead and did all the work myself. And it didn't win me any friends. They were angry, very angry. They thought I made them look bad and I was being negatively critical of their work. They got defensive and stopped listening to the why and how of my changes. When there's a huge skill impedence mismatch between you and the team of your peers you especially need to consider their feelings. Had I approached the situation by reaching out and explaining my ideas in a way that they understood and guided them along to the solution, I would have had a different outcome. They needed to be part of the solution even if I didn't agree with them completely. I needed to accept and believe in myself and not go looking for praise from them. I needed to recognize that they spent their own time and effort on this work. Maybe they were lazy, maybe they didn't know better, or maybe they were too busy to write a performant solution, but the work was partly theirs and I needed to consider that. The best way to do that was to talk to them and listen. More recently I have been more guiding and taken the team with me to a solution. I've had much better success with this. Sure it's slower. Sure I ended up with work that was good but not exactly how I wanted it. But I gained something I hadn't expected: a stronger bond with the team, knowing they would listen to me and I to them, and that we all respected each other. We also ended up producing better work as a team. I'm not saying any of this to discredit toxic work environments. I've been on broken teams before where everyone is turned against each. Part of the responsibility for this lies with the leadership individuals who matched someone with skills out pacing the rest of the team, placing them as a peer on the team. They should have considered the team dynamics they were creating. You can help reduce the toxicity of your work environment by considering your impact on a team and how you work with them. Being "right" about the work is seldom the only factor to consider and does not absolve you of ignoring the thoughts, ideas, and feelings of others.

blaser-waffle 5y ago
> I've been in a position where my abilities vastly out stripped those of the rest of the team. I was insecurely seeking praise and adoration by fixing as many problems with the code as quickly as I could. To paraphrase someone else, you "disrupted the gentle surface tension of the market" by working at a difference pace than everyone else. The team can be slow, or fast, or whatever, but if you're incongruous you're gonna have a bad time...

derefr 5y ago

> You report the incident to who you are directed to report into and are told to, "man up." Given that you also mention further down a dev getting punched, I think this statement was code for “if you don’t like what they’re saying, you should just shut them up.” Machismo-driven cultures are confusing until you realize that everyone is just expecting you to literally physically assault your way to the top, and is just annoyed with you for seeking peaceful resolutions rather than immediately jumping to violence / intimidation. In such societies, (public) peaceful resolutions lower the social status of both parties making them!

ithkuil 5y ago
Quitting and chosing a better place to work is a perfectly valid way to claw your way to the top. Your top. Not their top. Changing a job is not easy; it requires strength too. It's not always the right thing to do, but it's not necessarily a sign of weakness; au contraire.
- derefr 5y ago
  Certainly! I’m just making a statement about their expectations — not about the epistemological value of living up to them. (Probably negative.) Still, if you’re born in a country with a machismo based culture, where “opting out” is much harder, it’s good to be aware of what game is being played!
  - kijin 5y ago
    Not only countries, but also entire industries can be like that. As long as you work in a broadly similar industry, you're likely to quit a bad job only to land in an equally bad job.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    How would one even figure out which countries, on average, would be more likely to have cultures like that? It's not like one can just Google "countries with machismo culture" and get meaningful results with studies that attempt to quantify it.

lmilcin 5y ago

I had this happen to me. Walked out after 2 months before completing 3 month trial period. I had a boss who said he is best developer in the world and he meant it. He caused major outage when the code he developed and brought to the company as an asset failed. The code was to exchange SMS messages with an SMS gateway for Ukrainian operator. The messages were sent using mails. That was 15 years ago and not his fault, but his fault was that he received the XML messages and instead of using XML parser, he just parsed text by locating substring in a given line number from a given offset to a specified character. So what happened is that they stopped pretty-printing XML messages in the responses. When I pointed (with couple people around) that this is absolutely our fault (I did not say his, but everybody knew this), he started screaming at me that I am incompetent and that he was programming when I was shitting myself in a crib. I left the same day. I left companies suddenly on two more occasions: - when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish). - when my boss charged at me to hit me after I refused to lie to management. He stopped himself with his fist 10cm from my face but that, for me, was game over.

piva00 5y ago
> - when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish). As an immigrant in Sweden, this is one of the instances where I'd love a name-and-shame (but it's just wishful thinking, I don't expect or really want you public shaming companies). Simply because I've heard this happening to other colleagues, in different companies, and for some Swedes this sounds almost fabricated. I didn't get that clear message about not raising salaries up to Swedish colleagues but I noticed at some point that I was severely underpaid given my experience and skills, even more after a couple of years and I started to hear from much more junior employees how much they were making.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  I worked there on site for a 6 month (minus one day) contract as a developer with already couple of years of experience. But just before the end of my contract I have learned from couple of guys from support line that I am basically earning less than they earn manning the phone with no education, experience or technical knowledge. So when the end of the contract came I met with my boss who also had ability to make sole decision and sign the contract. He explained that they would like to keep me and they will even give me raise. But when I said the raise basically puts me on level with the phone desk and I suspect engineers earn a lot more he said that this is as much as I am going to get and I should be happy because as a Pole I am not going to get anything more than that. Those were his words. I have not met any other form of discrimination from anybody in the company, peer or manager. It was fun working there and I befriended a lot of people, spent a lot of time being invited to parties, etc. But this one statement sealed it for me and I knew that I would never be happy there. Now, I don't have time to make a shit storm out of this and I am too busy to have any publicity around me at the moment. So I am not going to name the company. I am lucky to be a developer and basically be able to choose where and for whom I work, so this did not cost me a lot. But I understand most people are not so lucky and this amounts to exploitation.

austinshea 5y ago

I hope you have a safe job, now.

Mauricebranagh 5y ago

1 File a written grievance against the other team member 2 File a written grievance against the guy you reported it too. If its assault call the police and tell HR fire them and ill drop the charges "maybe"

genezeta 5y ago

I walked into a weird job environment not long ago. First couple days were not that bad. Not particularly good, but nothing too bad. Like people weren't too friendly but neither too hostile. There was, though, some casual heated discussion here and there. As I met some people more closely I began to see a trend: Everybody hated almost everybody else. One developer openly told me in our first conversation something like "You'll notice few people talk to me... Everyone hates me here.". Then somewhere else some shouting erupted for a few minutes, but nobody seemed to pay too much attention to it. I saw someone get up from their desk, go to someone else and instead of normally asking whatever question they wanted to ask, start shouting their question. "How can it be that something something?!!! This is totally unacceptable!". Nobody even looked up from their screens or anything. It would turn out that was the way they always communicated. We got a meeting with the whole team. Ah, no, not the whole team, just half of it. Why? - I asked. "Oh, we tried that but we can't have the whole team in one meeting because there are... conflicts and we end up not doing anything productive." A few days later, I get called into a meeting with 6 other people, just to generally estimate a few tasks and discuss some of their details. After about two minutes or so, two people are arguing which ones are the tasks that we need to discuss. Things escalate and they are shouting while the rest watches calmly. I don't even know what to do or where to look because none seems to react at all to this. After some 15-20 minutes of this, the meeting is cancelled. People just stand up and return to their desks. I ask one of them if this is normal. "Yeah, pretty much." I tried really hard and stayed there for more than 1 1/2 years. The only thing I have from all that is a lot of awful anecdotes about awful people.

__exit__ 5y ago
Wow, 1.5 years of bearing such daily situations, that is something I find impressive given the anecdotes you described. I would probably not have lasted than long in such an environment. Good for you to leave that place at last. Hope you found a much more better environment!
- genezeta 5y ago
  Thanks. > Hope you found a much more better environment! Ah, we'll see how that goes.

tpoacher 5y ago

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Developers on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched monitors glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to resign.

robjan 5y ago

This happens when a high performer enters an environment of low performers. They know there was a reason for you being hired and feel threatened. In my experience, the best approach isn't to attempt to change the world immediately but to head straight for the most important decision maker and point out the problems with concrete solutions. If it doesn't work, resign. Eventually they will get the picture but a high performing new hire shouldn't have to suffer.

one2three4 5y ago

I'm sorry but I don't share your sentiment here. You were asked a fair bit about difficult personalities. That is you were warned as much as HR could warn you. And then you jump into the role totally oblivious to that aspect and you go about focusing only on engineering. I mean, and it's typical for engineers, there are _always_ way more moving parts in businesses than machines. But you always focus there and take pride of it. Yet, the most difficult challenges are people - not machines. So, you did effectively nothing to detect where the people problem lied and prepare the ground to deal with that as well. And when that blew in your face you just left and say the story like there was nothing you could do about it.

bjourne 5y ago

I've seen it too. Makes me happy that I'm in a business where it often is possible to quit and get a new job. Tons of people have suffered much worse but have to put up with it because for them getting a new job isn't so easy. People deserve to be treated as humans. There should be a law about it.

jdhendrickson 5y ago

I was bitten on my chest by a male co-worker with enough force that if I had not been wearing a shirt he would have bitten a chunk out of my chest. He was not fired or even reprimanded. Like literally bitten. This was while working for Brit Systems. I was so shocked I just froze. I believe every word you wrote because I too have seen some things. That was the worst (and sadly not only) physical assault, some of the mind games and toxic personalities in this industry have to be seen to be believed. Don't even get me started on the founder that would try to break up his first employees marriages so they would move into his house and focus on work because the rest of their life just imploded (he then pulled some chicanery in regard to the stock options right before they vested, clawed most of them back and the people who sacrificed everything got nothing, HE however became a multi millionaire).