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>it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people

>it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust my wife or friends. My company is hardly some "golden child", but it generally does right by its staff, and the staff, more or less, does right by the company. Things aren't perfect, but I would say the amount of inter-office trust is about as close as anyone would reasonably expect. Problems pop up, but with a healthy amount of addressing things head on, those problems don't rot and fester. Need someone to be honest with you about the deadline of an upcoming project? Done. Need to get a hold of someone off-hours on a three day weekend? Alright, as long as it's something important and time sensitive. Need realistic feedback about a presentation you're working on. Sure. It all revolves around mutual respect, camaraderie, and clearly defined roles. When I see an upcoming issue with an area I have nothing to do with, I don't feel the need to fix it "because no one else will", but, I also don't leave it to blow up in someone else's face either. I let the right people know, or tell my boss if I'm not sure who should be involved. If I had to take a guess, maybe you work for one of those larger corporate type companies with lots of middle managers, office politics, etc.? I'd encourage you to look at getting away from that if it's weighing heavily on your ability to trust others. It's something that I dealt with for a length of time, and once I moved onto a smaller shop, the ability to trust and genuinely rely on others improved quite a bit.

jmbwell 4y ago
Fair comments. I’m not at a huge org, but I am in an industry not known for its optimism. I myself am not particularly optimistic lately. Maybe I should be!
- registeredcorn 4y ago
  Dang, sorry to hear that. I do hope things improve for you! :)
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
I started out work in a shop with a terrible, toxic work environment. Micromanaging, power-hungry, abusive management begat gossiping, uncaring, deceptive, and selfish labor... you learned to just keep your head down and let the shit slide off your shoulders like water off a duck's back. Keep your wits about you when something went behind schedule, though, because the blame game was about to get serious. I took to taking long walks on my lunch break - 28 minutes out, plan for 28 minutes back for some breathing room, because you were entitled to a 1-hour lunch break and would get shouted at for punching in and out with a 61-minute lunch hour - just to clear my head. Now I'm at a shop that's miles better than the first. Management probably cares too much, treating labor better than a lot of parents treat their own children. Honesty and transparency are the defaults, a problem doesn't result in blame being passed around, the 5 whys are extended to 6 whys if they seem to point to "this trusted human made a human mistake." We're our vendors' favorite customer - we just got a valued salesman/apps engineer back who'd had his territory switched, he covers most of the region starting 30 minutes south of us but also negotiated a key account exception to keep us on his account. We're also one of our customers' favorite suppliers, they'll happily pay extra because they know we'll build them the Cadillac of machine tools with integrity and quality at each step of the build, and not nickel-and-dime them for support after the fact or ignore them when the machine is out of warranty. The scary part about this, though, is that the accumulation of loyalty, trust, and social capital that's been very slowly built up over decades could be quite effectively and profitably plundered in an acquisition or by a change in the board or management. They could probably turn the screws and push profit into the stratosphere for 4-8 quarters before our abnormally low turnover turned into abnormally high turnover and customers realized that our culture had changed.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Yep, unfortunately it’s incredibly hard to put value on those intangibles. And what’s worse, being a hard nosed asshole is expected behaviour from executives, even if it’s uncalled for or actively harmful to the company. I knew a guy fresh out of MBA school who proudly told everyone I worked with that if they didn’t like what he asked them to do, he’d sack them. Despite the fact that these people had specific training, were good at what they did, and understood how best to do their jobs. His attitude really made me think about the value of individuals in a company - and showed me exactly how not to do things in the future.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I worked for most of my career, at an "old-fashioned" Japanese corporation, and the level of Personal Integrity in the company was phenomenal. It was not "touchy-feely" nice, but people were honest (when they were yelling at you), and weren't playing games. Everyone was focused on creating great stuff. I just took it for granted, but that environment was a bit of a "silo." When I left that company, and started to interact with today's tech culture, it was ... quite a letdown. It seems that most executives are fairly sketchy people, these days, and they set a culture that is mimicked by the folks that work for them. I guess that it's always been like that, but it seems a lot worse, these days.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
Oh, sure. Me too. And then someone I trusted utterly fucked me over. Like six figure fucked me over. So consider that your trust, your opinion, is based on the past, and you have no actual idea what will happen in the future, or tomorrow even.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

jmbwell 4y ago

Fair comments. I’m not at a huge org, but I am in an industry not known for its optimism. I myself am not particularly optimistic lately. Maybe I should be!

registeredcorn 4y ago
Dang, sorry to hear that. I do hope things improve for you! :)

LeifCarrotson 4y ago

I started out work in a shop with a terrible, toxic work environment. Micromanaging, power-hungry, abusive management begat gossiping, uncaring, deceptive, and selfish labor... you learned to just keep your head down and let the shit slide off your shoulders like water off a duck's back. Keep your wits about you when something went behind schedule, though, because the blame game was about to get serious. I took to taking long walks on my lunch break - 28 minutes out, plan for 28 minutes back for some breathing room, because you were entitled to a 1-hour lunch break and would get shouted at for punching in and out with a 61-minute lunch hour - just to clear my head. Now I'm at a shop that's miles better than the first. Management probably cares too much, treating labor better than a lot of parents treat their own children. Honesty and transparency are the defaults, a problem doesn't result in blame being passed around, the 5 whys are extended to 6 whys if they seem to point to "this trusted human made a human mistake." We're our vendors' favorite customer - we just got a valued salesman/apps engineer back who'd had his territory switched, he covers most of the region starting 30 minutes south of us but also negotiated a key account exception to keep us on his account. We're also one of our customers' favorite suppliers, they'll happily pay extra because they know we'll build them the Cadillac of machine tools with integrity and quality at each step of the build, and not nickel-and-dime them for support after the fact or ignore them when the machine is out of warranty. The scary part about this, though, is that the accumulation of loyalty, trust, and social capital that's been very slowly built up over decades could be quite effectively and profitably plundered in an acquisition or by a change in the board or management. They could probably turn the screws and push profit into the stratosphere for 4-8 quarters before our abnormally low turnover turned into abnormally high turnover and customers realized that our culture had changed.

doctor_eval 4y ago
Yep, unfortunately it’s incredibly hard to put value on those intangibles. And what’s worse, being a hard nosed asshole is expected behaviour from executives, even if it’s uncalled for or actively harmful to the company. I knew a guy fresh out of MBA school who proudly told everyone I worked with that if they didn’t like what he asked them to do, he’d sack them. Despite the fact that these people had specific training, were good at what they did, and understood how best to do their jobs. His attitude really made me think about the value of individuals in a company - and showed me exactly how not to do things in the future.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I worked for most of my career, at an "old-fashioned" Japanese corporation, and the level of Personal Integrity in the company was phenomenal. It was not "touchy-feely" nice, but people were honest (when they were yelling at you), and weren't playing games. Everyone was focused on creating great stuff. I just took it for granted, but that environment was a bit of a "silo." When I left that company, and started to interact with today's tech culture, it was ... quite a letdown. It seems that most executives are fairly sketchy people, these days, and they set a culture that is mimicked by the folks that work for them. I guess that it's always been like that, but it seems a lot worse, these days.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

Oh, sure. Me too. And then someone I trusted utterly fucked me over. Like six figure fucked me over. So consider that your trust, your opinion, is based on the past, and you have no actual idea what will happen in the future, or tomorrow even.

deleted 4y ago
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