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That's a great story of sticking through a really tough situation and figuring out how to make it work. Honestly most of these stories end with "it sucked and t

That's a great story of sticking through a really tough situation and figuring out how to make it work. Honestly most of these stories end with "it sucked and then I quit". Which, fair, but not as interesting

smackeyacky 2y ago
Most stories end that way because that is the only logical thing to do. Trying to fight an organisation with a terrible culture is a sisyphean task that consumes time and energy that could be spent making stuff. Some organisations (like the one I'm working for) seem to be run like a dystopian daycare. Stay in your box, be "respectful", don't complain about your terrible manager, don't complain about the hoops you have to jump through to get even the most simple or meagre of resources. The internal communications are heavily monitored and that has a chilling effect on cross-team collaboration. They have even weaponised their "culture" in a way that coddles the offending teams in the structure and still direct blame for missing deadlines at the victims rather than the perps. There is no fighting this. My small team are all aggressively looking for new jobs which is a shame because they are a tight crew with great skills who have now been beaten down as far as they will go. A great loss to the organisation when we walk too, all that institutional knowledge gone.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  Different strokes. For some people, the desire to “build stuff” extends to building (improving? refactoring?) the organisation. For some people, tech problems that are just tech problems is, creativity wise, like eating meatloaf through a straw. Myself included.
  - tonyarkles 2y ago
    Yeah, that definitely played a part in it. I was employee #2 and had built an absolutely amazing culture in the team that I ran. I stuck it out in large part because I loved how well we worked together. The project was cool, too, which helped, but not wanting to abandon the team of fantastic young engineers I'd pulled together was the thing that kept me fighting. I semi-jokingly-but-not explained to them what a Shit Umbrella was and that while all of this was going down I regretted not being as available to them as I had been, but that I was doing my best to give them an environment where they could keep doing the amazing work they'd been doing without getting dragged too much into the bog with me.

smackeyacky 2y ago

Most stories end that way because that is the only logical thing to do. Trying to fight an organisation with a terrible culture is a sisyphean task that consumes time and energy that could be spent making stuff. Some organisations (like the one I'm working for) seem to be run like a dystopian daycare. Stay in your box, be "respectful", don't complain about your terrible manager, don't complain about the hoops you have to jump through to get even the most simple or meagre of resources. The internal communications are heavily monitored and that has a chilling effect on cross-team collaboration. They have even weaponised their "culture" in a way that coddles the offending teams in the structure and still direct blame for missing deadlines at the victims rather than the perps. There is no fighting this. My small team are all aggressively looking for new jobs which is a shame because they are a tight crew with great skills who have now been beaten down as far as they will go. A great loss to the organisation when we walk too, all that institutional knowledge gone.

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
Different strokes. For some people, the desire to “build stuff” extends to building (improving? refactoring?) the organisation. For some people, tech problems that are just tech problems is, creativity wise, like eating meatloaf through a straw. Myself included.
- tonyarkles 2y ago
  Yeah, that definitely played a part in it. I was employee #2 and had built an absolutely amazing culture in the team that I ran. I stuck it out in large part because I loved how well we worked together. The project was cool, too, which helped, but not wanting to abandon the team of fantastic young engineers I'd pulled together was the thing that kept me fighting. I semi-jokingly-but-not explained to them what a Shit Umbrella was and that while all of this was going down I regretted not being as available to them as I had been, but that I was doing my best to give them an environment where they could keep doing the amazing work they'd been doing without getting dragged too much into the bog with me.