What terrible treatment have you seen in the workplace?
Without calling out the identity of any companies or coworkers, I'm curious what bad treatment other engineers have seen in the workplace
On the beginning of the 7th week, i had a twitch in my eye and i could smell death. I broke and handed in my notice, my ceo refused, then accepted after he spoke to the manager. The manager had a word with me, and told me that they were going to fire me anyways. What a nice guy.
I've seen bosses gang up on a 50 year old employee, seemingly to get rid of him. Where I live it's very hard to fire someone unless you give them three written warnings.
This senior 3rd line tech was well on his way with two before he found a better job and quit himself.
Both warnings were completely unfounded, but I only remember the details of one. The last one was due to consultants in another office, in another city, registering an internal certificate on a personal e-mail address. So it wasn't renewed and cost the client some revenue in downtime. Since my senior tech was responsible for operations of the environment he got blamed and got a written warning.
Now that I think back, the first warning might have been about when he replaced disks in a failed disk array and the array crashed as a result of the replacement.
Either way, me and several other younger techs got the impression that they were trying to get rid of old blood and get new blood in. We work for a very large telco concern where employee numbers are regulated from the top. So you can't hire anyone new unless someone old quits. Or unless the mother company approves expansion.
Edit: For some perspective, younger techs have made bigger mistakes and gotten off with verbal warnings.
Boss: "We're not meeting our schedule, so the team decided we need to come in tomorrow for a half day.
Me: "The... team?"
Boss: "Don't worry, I'll throw in lunch."
Me: "I really need a day off. I had to buy underwear yesterday because I haven't had time to do laundry."
Boss: "It's just until we get version 1.3.7 out. After that we'll all have a chance to catch our breath."
So we'd come in on Saturday, and of course after a half day nothing was working, so he'd extend, and then ask everyone to come in Sunday "so we can catch up and not have to do this any more."
It got so bad people started taking Fridays off under the theory that a single day of vacation plus some mumbling about being out of town was good for three days off, and you could always tell when someone got his green card, because that would be his last day.
This is the company that sent a team to a customer site "for a few weeks", and that team was still there working around the clock months later. So the wives of the employees in question got together and somehow found them new jobs. The entire team quit on the same day and flew home, leaving the company scrambling to explain (by which I mean "lying their asses off") what was going on and trying to pull people in from related projects to salvage that install.
Heh... I once worked somewhere that they promised to get us healthcare in 6 months, every 6 months. Their refrain was, "soon we will be the Google of Healthcare!" (I quit 2 years ago, they still don't offer health insurance, but according to my poor schmuck friends who still work there they still claim it is just around the corner).
This company also had friends of the owners come in and fake sit at the desks and pretend they were working when potential clients would walk through so it looked like we were full staffed at 50 people when in reality there were only 20 of us.
I am using a throwaway account and withholding some tech info as this may uniquely identify people involved.
I joined a high-profile machine learning research team within Amazon. On my first day, I knew something was off immediately -- the manager literally gave me a laundry list of micro-tasks to do with an exceptionally strict timeline. Of course, the list was unrealistically ambitious to make him look good. This is a research team -- most research attempts simply aren't successful at first tries. But he wanted to push with his "perfect" schedule. I frequently stayed after midnight to meet the schedule. When this schedule wasn't met, I was publicly humiliated in front of other team members.
He loved to micro-manage, and he insisted on literally sitting behind me for hours to see each word I am typing into the terminal. I worked at several companies before this, but this level of micromanagement was not something I had seen before. This certainly was not a pair programming session (which I normally enjoy actually), as he was not actively contributing to the problem at hand. It was just...watching me work for hours in a small room.
One time, a friendly team member saw the difficulties and kindly offered to give some technical tips. This manager came to us and started to raise his voice how ignorant people should shut up [his words]. This was in the middle of large office. I got dragged into a small room after that, and I was verbally abused for an hour because he thought I made him look bad (technically incompetent) by talking another team member for technical tips. He was so upset that he was red and almost crying.
After surviving this environment for a while, I decided to leave. I told the manager and the senior manager politely that it was not a good fit. Of course, they can't just let me leave voluntarily -- they have to "fire" me or reject me otherwise so that it would be them finding a fault in me, not me in them.
The sad thing is, as I was told, how this is normal at Amazon.
That being said, I really hate my Costco Cap One card, anything over $300 gets flagged & SMS approval doesn't ever work (despite getting a confirmation back saying it will go thru).
I've heard some pretty bad stories from the people over at EMC, they share a joint office here in Seattle with Capital One.
If I spoke up about a new technology or method, I was told sarcastically that "oh you're so smart". I have been told that the work I am doing isn't rocket science.
Micromanagement has been the norm lots of digging into the details of the project by managers who don't even know the difference between Java and Javascript.
Nothing is in writing so managers frequently will bring up issues about things not getting done or taking a different direction. The politics are rotten.
As you can guess, we routinely lost admins and female engineers who were generally solely hired on attractiveness and not talent, knowledge or skill.
Defending it just because most of you are 'mates' in/out of the workplace is not acceptable.
At least that's my perception as an outsider from another part of the country.
This same place also expressed a significant preference for hiring H1B workers because 'they get locked in for 5+ years while waiting for their residency'.
Hiring you people or people that are married with children so he can pay less and they wont leave as easily.
It was very disappointing when i heard that.
Really sickening to see though.
There was one response that I wish I'd bookmarked. They basically said that there is a sociopathic kind of leader who actually derives much of their feeling of success from being "above" their workers.
That one comment really changed my view on the subject. One tends to assume that leaders are rational and will optimise for the success of the company. I've started to think my old assumptions weren't true, there's actually a type of person that derives their self-worth from being "alpha" and will even act against the interests of their company in the pursuit of this feeling.
So I think perhaps these people don't even realise how bad it sounds when they're bragging about unethical behaviour. To them it's part and parcel of being "successful".
It's utterly alien to me, but viewing the actions of managers through this new lens has helped to make sense of some of the apparently irrational decisions I've seen in the past.
...there's actually a type of person that derives their self-worth from being "alpha" and will even act against the interests of their company in the pursuit of this feeling."
I was a senior BA (contract) on a govt project for about $22 million (not a big deal in the scheme of things). The tech lead, looking back, was the classic narcissist (CN) and probably on the sociopathic scale - incompetent, bullying when questioned, believed his crap and had got away with it for years. One unfortunate day I deigned to question this guy's pronouncement of take all the low hanging fruit from the design and do them first. There was no thought of future impact to infrastructure or scale. And disappointingly, the PM, BA, Dev & Test teams didn't stand up to him - only bitched behind his back.
Cut a long story short, from then on he ghosted me in meetings and after spitting my coffee (in what I discovered was my last meeting) at more of his bs, I was told on the Friday I had 'negative feedback' and had to work my two weeks notice and finish up. I asked his pet PM how that worked as they obviously had no confidence and crickets followed - I never returned.
The project failed and made a couple of paragraphs in the papers, I was interviewed by the minister's team months down the track, explained why the project failed and watched the carpet get lifted up and $22 million of tax payers cash get swept under it.
CN is still there as it's next to impossible to fire govt employees in this country, but apparently he has little or no responsibility now. Small mercies for the tax payer I guess.
I have many other stories from two decades in this game, but this is the most recent and the first where I didn't finish my contracted time.
More like leaders are rational and will optimise for their own personal success which may or may not involve optimising for the success of the company. Of course we all do this to a certain extent just that, from what I've seen, senior leadership types of large companies tend to be much more obviously dedicated to personal success at all costs.
A while back I worked at a multinational and, being fairly senior, was directly exposed to the whims of the executive class - which frequently seemed rather odd (to say the least). When a colleague explained how bonus compensation was linked to their decision making things became much clearer!
I tend towards the evolutionary explanation. In primitive times, when people lived in small bands it was beneficial if everyone helped each other to make the group strong to survive. Perhaps some men found it more beneficial for them to humiliate all their male peers so that they would become the alphas of the groups and the females would mate with them instead...
He laughed as he told me it was all bollocks as he wanted a new Aston Martin. I explained in four letter words what I thought of him and left. What was bizarre was he kept calling and texting afterwards, which I ignored - but in retrospect, I was the only friend he had left who knew him before he became the 'big shot'. Somewhere in that head of his, he maybe felt he'd lost the connection to the part of himself who started with next to nothing and wasn't a self centred, greedy, lying c*nt in an expensive suit, posh mini-mansion and a 4 year old Aston.
Sorry, rant over... it's sad to lose a long time friend, but fuck him.
http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
Lots of people misunderstand their unethical behaviour as naughtiness.
In the example given if you make your customers pay on delivery or pay 30 days after month end of invoice date, and you can pay your suppliers 60 or 90 days after month end of invoice date you've given your company a cashflow advantage. For unethical people if 60 days is good 365 days is obviously better.
When I interviewed for a job, the owner, who we'll call Frank, seemed like a pretty decent guy. He was definitely quite smart, and knew what he was doing on the telco side. I got the job after like 5 minutes of interview and started the next day.
What Frank failed to tell me in the interview was that he was a completely batshit crazy sociopath. Within a couple of days, there was a fair bit of yelling and swearing about my mistakes, then progressively more and more, followed by genuine emotional abuse and even flipping lit cigarettes at us and throwing other things when we screwed something up.
I'm only 16 and an idiotic 16 year old at that, so I actually stay there like 6 months before I start to realize this isn't normal. One day, a few of us just get up and walk out. About a month later, I heard (and saw evidence as I was walking by) from a friend who was still there, that after hours, someone had shot up the back windows of the office (4th story office in Chicago, so it's pretty unlikely it was random).
Anyway, I manage to forget about it and move on with my life. 20 years later, I look him up to find he had served 3 years in the federal pokey for threatening a judge who had ruled against him in a tax case. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Pro tip: you don't get a warning when you threaten to kill a federal judge via email. You go straight to prison. Do. To pass go; do not collect $200.
I saw him berate a coworker whose mom lost her job at the main office because she "wasn't doing her job." I personally have no opinion on whether it was an acceptable firing, just that an unrelated divisions boss shouldn't have that conversation and much less in front of his coworkers. Who would argue with him?
We had a full-time keg in the office which of course we all enjoyed in copious amounts. But you couldn't quit drinking there if you tried. He would constantly pressure employees into drinking with him at 11am when he showed up with bloody mary mixes.
He was more than happy to tell you about why we shouldn't let immigrants into this country because they are fundamentally flawed compared to US citizens. His argument was that bribery was an innate part of them and their culture. Once again, who would argue with their boss over this?
He would brag about the loaded gun he keeps in his desk drawer at the office. This may have been part of the culture, there were at least 4 people with concealed carries at a 10 person office.
Once, while discussing the hire of a female intern (we were an all male office) he "joked" that it didn't work out and that we would find some diversity someday. He followed that up with maybe we could even hire a nr.
On a business trip he disclosed medications that a coworker was taking in an effort to discredit him with me. He also claimed to be reading that employee's text messages on a company phone. I still don't know if this was true or not, only that he wanted me to believe it was true so that I would trust what he was saying.
It was my first job, then something similar happened in my second job, but there I told my bosses that it'd be better idea to hire someone based on their knowledge and not on looks. I got scolded but stood my ground on this (even though in this job my coworkers were supportive on only hiring hot women). Now I've decided never to work again in this shitty country and I'm a freelancer earning 10x more money.
That is the textbook behavior of a jerk. Anyone behaving consistently like that is a cultural liability that needs firing immediately.
Some behaviors are jarring because of mismatch of personal styles, not because the person intends to be disrespectful.
First the person needs to made accountable for their actions. This is the first cop out of incompetent managers - rather than hold a person accountable by pointing out their lapses - and giving them the opportunity to improve - they just fire them.
There is a possibility that the reprimandee will apologize and improve, thus leaving everyone feeling better. On the other hand, he might not.
Then, imagine that person does well, gets promoted, and once in a position of power goes full jerk again. Then your company implodes.
I was wondering, what could interns even say if they have answered the phone... They didn't even know about the project we had with that customer.
Can I name and shame?
Adulate the customer, make empty promises and lie about the whereabouts of the responsible people, implying they're busy working to fulfill their specific requests. And generally avoid passing the impression that people leave early (read: "are slackers", from the customer's perspective).
Not that the reaction was appropriate, mind you. It's hardly reasonable to expect interns to know how to "service the account", as Carlin put it. I've been answering clients for a few years and I'm still quite junior at it.
It was a regular occurrence to see people, both male and female, in tears being berated by one of their managers (one of their managers was termed "The Terminator" by one of my colleagues due to his warm and friendly manner).
Almost made me feel sympathetic for recruiters.
That happened.
Sharing experience with others, realize that what you're going through didn't work for others, or is not commonly viewed as acceptable. Humans have very strong abilities to build justifications for what they are going through, in an effort to cope with bad things. However, sometimes, acceptance is detrimental.
Sharing such stories and discussing with people out of the company is an efficient way to prevent toxic cultures from emerging or continuing.
Workplace harassment in any form is bullying, and needs to be stamped out.
Pans left empty on a active gas jet, heating the handles up deliberately.
Casual sexisim in relation to wait staff.
Of course homophobia as well.
Screaming at new workers(always young), for not having something perfect when they were improperly shown.
Luckily I'm experienced enough now that I run the kitchen and can fire those idiots.
I think if its the latter it would be a disservice to hide the name of the company and protect them. I understand for the need to stay anon though.