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>“important to the company” work that has to be done and your own manager always going along with it.

I've worked in some highly political large companies and one of the best managers I had would basically say "I know this is basically BS but there is lots of visibility on this so we have to show something." He'd then work with us to find the bare minimum we needed to do to to make it seem like we did a lot more.

It's a lot easier to tolerate crap if people just admit it's crap and your job is to shovel it. It's awful when a bunch of managers hand-wave and act like you're smelling roses instead of crap. Then they make you work 10X harder then you need to just so they can show their boss you are growing roses, not shoveling crap.

I work at a company where tech is an unrespected cost center. There is also a ton of useless bureaucratic and middle management crap that impedes actual work getting done. My boss handles all of that and does his best to shield the team from all that stupidity so we can get our work done. He's one of the best managers I've worked for.

I still don't like the company and work environment, but when I do leave this place, I'll genuinely miss my boss.

> Make sure all managers are spineless and won’t fight for their employees.

> If somebody notices that the checkout page crashes every time someone uses PayPal, just ignore it.

Oh my god. So much these - especially the combination of the two. It's not hard to identify with the customer when building a service (especially if you use the product yourself.) It really angers me when I encounter a customer-facing problem, try to fix it, but instead I get shut down by my manager, who explains that it's not one of the company's OKRs this quarter.

Other things that lead to people leaving:

Cut total compensation without cutting salary. A favorite cut is to reduce the quality of the insurance (and the cost to the company). The unilaterally changed your compensation without telling you let alone negotiating a new contract.

Pay people the minimum instead of what they are worth. The guy who can walk to work from his house - you know he's not going to leave if you underpay him.

Even something as small as switching to a new (crappier) 401(k) custodian can be seen as a demotivating compensation cut. Yay, we saved $5 per employee, but lost two key contributors who were finally fed up. Probably not a good trade-off.

EDIT: One of the classic texts on this is Steve Blank's "The Elves Leave Middle Earth" [1] which describes how small seemingly innocuous benefits reductions can serve as a "wake up call" for content employees who never really thought about looking around for a new job.

1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

> tie their bonus to hitting some kind of OKR even though that goal may be put on the back burner halfway into the quarter

Been burned by this a couple times. Especially infuriating after all the effort that goes into crafting "acceptable" OKRs every three months. Mandatory training sessions, the stress of identifying metrics that are both measurable & meaningful, multiple one-on-ones with management to review them, acknowledging and signing copies, and then toss it all in the trash because we're changing priorities. But it's the core of your performance review and tied to compensation. The hell.

How common is this nonsense?

> How common is this nonsense?

*raises hand

I don't know if it's common, but I've had the same experience and so have many friends.

A good old fashioned "corporate re-structuring" will also suffice for #4. While you are at it, cut pay by some percentage that just barely keeps the workers at their job and force budget cuts that systematically strip people of the tools that they need to do their work.

My current place suffers from all of that!! But our retention is very high, and you can guess the reason.

They pay _just_ well enough and with _just_ enough benefits to keep anyone from leaving? They're capable of weathering the pandemic for N years largely unscathed? Both?

Have you ever heard of "the culture code?" it's a pretty good outline of what truly matters, and that's extreme belonging.

We give out all sorts of signals and most in the tech industry are ambiguous, toxic and uncivilized.

Learn to read the signals and you'll break through to what matters most: culture.

What are these signals? Which ones are not ambiguous, toxic, or uncivilized?

They appear to be tools used by their inventor, a marketing consultant, to sell copies of his book. Whether they have value beyond that I don't really care to pay to find out.

You get what you pay for.

We give off all kinds of signals in our behaviour, from how we dress to how we breathe to how we show up.

A lot of the signals are cold, aloof, passive aggressive, disgruntled, dismissive, insincere, immodest, fake, insecure, uncultured, ignorant, insensitive, etc. That's just the human condition. Even if we don't mean them as such they can be interpreted as such by other insecure, insincere, imposter syndrome types.

Put a bunch of people in a room and the signals get amplified, it's the basis of reality television.

Combined, the signals whisper "you don't belong here."

Your manager is giving you a signal by wearing running shoes to your 1:1. What does it mean? How can you interpret it?

Your founder is giving a signal by walking in with a coffee. Again what does it mean?

Your VC is giving a signal by his haircut. Your project manager is giving a signal by her exposed skin. Your developers are giving signals through their man boobs.

All of these signals are wretched and don't entice quality people to stick around because they stink of belligerence.

In an honest open and transparent environment the signals align with the values and people don't need to wallow in cognitive dissonance until their minds crack under the pressure to conform, because fundamentally people will do almost anything to be accepted by a group, and when your job depends on fitting in the company has a lot of leverage over you to essentially milk you for your efforts in exchange for keeping you around.

Downvote if you are triggered by man boobs.

In the not-to-distant future, this might actually play out IRL considering the direction some people want to take things...you sound like a thought leader who is ahead of their time and therefore may I suggest posting to LinkedIn meanwhile if you have not already and just get the ball rolling already because there are those out there who want to believe.

Ha! You're too kind. To be honest I have been battling it out on social media trying to get the idea straight in my own head. This is the closest I've ever gotten. It's very kind of you to make the effort to read and reply to it. Hearing your voice means the world _curious_

I'm going to echo the other commenter who said you're a "thought leader," because this is a whole lot of words not saying much of anything. Scantily clad female PMs are wretched? Fat developers are belligerent?

I'm trying to comment more substantively but you're not giving me anything to work with.

I like to disguise my brilliance in a patina of filth so I can confuse literalists while evoking deeper thoughts in lateral thinkers.

Obviously I threw you off the scent by triggering your sensibilities.

But I'll have you know I've worked with PM's who had very distinct physical traits that attempted to buck the conventions. One woman worked exclusively in athleisure and halter tops, even in winter. Another guy had piercings all over his face and ears. This other nitwit wore the same exact orange hoodie abomination every single day for four months. My favorite is the guy who wore tiny golf shirts so I could see his underwear on top of his jeans. This is a grown man, with a beard! He should have gone into military service to learn something about personal grooming and had no place in the organization no matter how brilliant. His very presence was a sector stating "abandon hope all ye who enter here" as in you have zero chance of seeing a real client now get back to your coerced agile workflow.

These signals are impossible to ignore and reek of bougie decadence and cause people like me who want to invest their whole lives to something more than an unfair exchange of time for money to die a little inside and seek the comfort of strangers to air our grievances only to get downvoted, therefore reinforcing the trauma.

Plus I like to disguise my modesty in an utter lack of respect because this industry is a cockroach infested nest of groupthink if you ask me with everyone copying everyone's signals until only clones remain. Then we argue about diversity and scratch our heads as to why none of the girls want to play with us.

The reference to man boobs is in relation to grown men signalling like middleschoolers wearing printed T's from guardians of the galaxy and star trek while they get progressively more corpulent on a diet of chicken wings and lunch specials and pints of shock top. Oh and pizza. Always the dry pizza left over from those two pizza meetings.

I'm not sure what to say other than yikes.

Hey it's good of you to read the depraved rantings of a code lunatic. If I could tell you about my journey through software you'd maybe understand where I'm coming from.

And I'll tell you one more thing. Everyone one of us is so quick to defend never judging a book by its cover. Yet we judge it by the words it contains? Why don't we look past the words as well in the same fashion?

There's this myth that brilliant people are supposed to be anti social, but only to a point? Look how antisocial I am, at least on the surface.

I'm actually using this forum as a testing ground for my fevered ideations. Any substantive meaning you may extract is all in your own mind.