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What you describe was definitely not a common occurrence. Engineering wasn’t toxic for many years until the last 9-12 months or so I would say. Pre-Susan Fowler memo, it was the best company I had ever worked at. From 2017-2019 we sort of stalled because of the internal drama and it didn’t get really bad until the last 9 months, where attrition of our best engineers and vile political maneuvering from the dregs made it too much for me to stick around.

The engineer you describe sounds like they have mental health issues. There may be some teams with terrible managers but all companies have this, and I’ve seen similar or worse situations at Amazon.

Most engineers I worked with were great but there were many engineers that “played the game” in order to get a promotion and more money. It was sickening but if that’s the way the CTO sets the incentive scheme, who can blame an engineer for following it? It’s more on the CTO for setting the terrible culture than the engineers.

Being blind to politics rarely ever means politics isn't going on.

Pretty much every company out there has a concept of 'promotion packet', its basically building a case for one's promotion. Of course in a company the budgets are fixed, and so are promotion cycles(yearly in most places). You miss out a turn, you could lose an year, or even risk losing two. In that case its fairly common for managers to build a list of accomplishments(file/packet), and rival managers to build a anti-case/defence for the same. Stack ranking eventually is all about a combination of merit+advocacy+lobbying+counter-lobbying at so many levels that I'd say the engineer who cried wasn't wrong at all.

This is the case in nearly every company. We just wish to delude ourselves that politics is absent at some places.

This sort of power play comes with the territory in a large people structure.

One thing that has been crystal clear in the past few years is that just because someone has the competence for high-level work like software engineering doesn't mean they can't be immature and crazy at the same time.

And these people are louder and more common now because it's easy to hide criticism and claim accomplishments with all the politics, buzzwords and general sensitivity these days.

> begging me to never say anything critical about his project in a Slack channel again

Because he discourages critical feedback - it leads to 2 major problems:

1) He does not improve [because of lack of feedback].

2) He discourages team around him from improving [because of lack of feedback].

Why not explain that to him (and then if he does not understand - fire him)?

> one of his teammates later warned me that he was keeping a journal of potentially incriminating things that I had said in Slack and a detailed log of every issue that he could find with our team’s project in case he “had to use it against me later”.

That is not cool.

What happened to this person?

His strategies worked at first, at least before he had really delivered anything of value. It started to unravel later when he couldn’t deliver on all (or really any) of his promises.

I think he was operating under the assumption that he could build rapport quickly and then hire a team underneath him to get the work done. That might work at a hyper growth startup that values growth over profit, but we were a mature and profitable company looking to keep headcount reasonable. Most of his plans were so over engineered that they would have take 5-10x the engineers to actually finish on time, so they ended up being half-finished projects that requires constant on-call attention.

That was the tipping point for a lot of us in the old guard. There was an exodus around that time, including myself. It’s not worth fighting those political battles day in and day out while walking on eggshells in every Slack channel.

Sounds like the engineering higher ups turned a blind eye to his antics.

Good on you for exiting.