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> there was a Fight-club-style "rule"

How did this rule maintain itself when essentially no one supported or agreed with it? (except the two 'leaders') Why wouldn't people take advantage of opportunities to push back against it, when for instance, the CEO asks what's the problem?

Sorry if I didn't make it clear: the junior developer did take advantage of it when CEO asked.

Also it was only really enforced during Sprint Retrospectives.

Not raising obvious problems with the process sounds just as dysfunctional as the pairing idea that created the situation in the first place.

Oh, yes, you're absolutely right.

In the end it's all just part of a much bigger issue within the whole company.

Sounds like they were working in an environment will little / no psychological safety

This sounds awful.

It's amazing how workplaces can get in these kind of darkly comic places

This was a very strange workplace. Its atmosphere was half frat-like and half cult-like.

There was literal chest beating and shouting motivational stuff during sales meetings, an incredibly amount of beer (which isn't necessary an issue, but in this case it was), sometimes drugs (which led to some people being fired whenever it became public), lots of sexual harassment complaints (which also led to some surprise firings).

The cult-like part was the CEO fancying himself some Steve Jobs type, doing two-hour long presentations on random topics like his favourite economic ideas, or presenting a treatise against post-modernism. I of course knew which youtube videos he was plagiarising.

It really felt like a Silicon Valley parody when I finally got out.

I'm glad you got out!

I find that CEO level bosses (I used to be a teacher so am including heads/principals here) love to pontificate about stuff not related to the job. I've often wondered why. It's sometimes harmless, and clearly,as in your case, sometimes harmful. I do wonder what causes it though.

A profound terror of their own personal insignificance and mortality?

True! I think deep down we all want to be influential. They're just trying to cheat their way into it.

People who have power over others begin to believe that the positive feedback they get from their employees (simply because they control a person's financial and career success) equates to them being a person of actual interest. They believe the attention means they are smarter, funnier and more charming than they actually are. Tie this to people with narcissistic traits, and you get a strong feedback loop where they never hear dissent, or critique so they fall further into this pattern of behaviour.

This is part of the reason why I left management. I really do feel that the positive feedback loop was getting to my head.

You could reverse the statement and say that someone with overly high confidence, an inflated ego and an affinity for preaching is more likely to climb the ladder to C-level. That tracks.

> The cult-like part was the CEO fancying himself some Steve Jobs type, doing two-hour long presentations on random topics like his favourite economic ideas, or presenting a treatise against post-modernism. I of course knew which youtube videos he was plagiarising.

Amazing. So ”Michael Scott from The Office”-type people really exist out there.

To stay on "The Office" universe, that specific CEO was more of a Robert California.

A bit creepy, intimidating, but still able to impress gullible people. He invited employers he thought were "winners" for diners (although the term the company used was "champions"). Instead of being fascinated by Sesame Street he was fascinated by DC Comics, though. I'm actually surprised at how fitting the comparison is.

All without the James Spader charm, of course.

EDIT: In person, however he was a great guy. I just don't think he behaved in a proper way as CEO.

Oh yes. I can't even watch The Office because it's too real.

This sounds almost like the intentionally absurd example scenario described in Meditations on Moloch [1]:

> Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.

> So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

> There was an awkward moment where a junior dev was trying to answer but a tech lead was trying to tell him "don't break the rule".

Funny, that would be the easiest way to get me to stand into a desk and make a "liberating speech", then drop the mic and leave the company.

That is not a development practice, it's a cult

that sounds exhausting.. holy fk, i could pair maybe half of the day, and at most like 1-2 weeks at a time