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Comment by forgottenpass | Hacker News Reader

In the last few years, the metagame strategy of work politicking has evolved to include the act of labeling things "toxic." Article like this are just ammunition in that.

I get that this article is about the trade-off between productivity and a less-easily-quantifiable loss to morale. But only a sliver of the people hearing about the study from this article will be carefully applying the lessons learned in towards their personnel decisions.

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I am of the belief that in many cases if not most cases toxic workers are created and that most workers hired are not initially toxic for that work environment. So the question I have is what are the company's doing that turns people from good workers to toxic workers? How do you turn a toxic worker or situation into a positive one? That seems like it would be cheapest solution.

Best to get ahead of the curve and self-identify as toxic.

The "safe space" work environment will end up becoming the new corporate behemoth style office type, and we'll start seeing 2012 style trendy startups looking for "toxic 10xers" or some sort of similar label. Having that edgy ground floor dev ends up being a new selling point.

I do wonder, if your whole team is made up of these "toxic" individuals, does productivity skyrocket as a result of the constant competition?

On an aside, isn't the end outcome of the article just an office full of mediocrity where no one really sticks out? How do you get natural leaders with that kind of situation?

That tech is already months old. There was even a blogpost on HN yesterday where someone humblebragged about controlling their toxicity in code reviews.

The dose makes the poison, better to self identify as therapeutic

I think thats a toxic article

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