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Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

"Toxic" is so overused that it has become meaningless.

If you lean back in you armchair, get out of your feelings for a moment and think about all the great leaders, inspirers and creators, every single one of them would be considered by today's standards to be "toxic".

No wonder company culture is generally "toxic".

Toxic is wanting results.

Toxic is requiring structure.

Toxic is firing someone who is not performing.

Toxic is requiring sales.

Toxic is requiring profit.

Toxic is requiring your employees to be replaceable because guess, what -- they can resign (Example in the great resignations happening now) at any time.

Toxic is requiring evidence over feelings.

You know what's funny. All the people resigning from their jobs and starting their companies are going to be ending up "toxic" eventually.

Welcome to the club.

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None of those things are toxic. Those things are what toxic people THINK others mean because they want to pretend their actual toxic behavior is required for those things, when in fact their toxic behavior hurts those goals.

Toxic behavior is screaming at people in meetings. It is belittling coworkers work. It is allowing the louder people to dominate the conversation even when their ideas are worse. It is making decisions through intimidation and politics rather than merit.

A toxic work environment is somewhere where toxic behavior is rewarded instead of stopped.

Toxic people like to believe they get their way because their ideas are better, but they aren’t.

My point is that to generally start a company, most people (NOT ALL) are toxic in nature.

It takes a certain personality to do the things that start up a big enterprise that actually supports the families and lives of "normal" non-toxic people. That's what we have to get.

We may not like it. And I certainly don't. But history has proven that is that it usually takes.

> My point is that to generally start a company, most people (NOT ALL) are toxic in nature.

Very much untrue. Perhaps to build a cult of personality one needs to have eccentric tendencies. But to build a successful business toxicity is not required.

I would be curious to know why you feel history, versus your general stereotype of founders, justifies your point.

Most successful companies aren’t started by toxic people. You can be driven, and demand a lot from your employees, without being toxic.

Now, I agree that some of the toxic behavior I mentioned is over-represented in people who are very driven. However, the toxic people who successfully create a business do so in spite of their toxic behavior, not because of it.

The article clearly defines what "Toxic" is.

> Nearly 1 in 3 people who quit their jobs in 2021 did so to escape a toxic company culture, characterized by discrimination, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and poor work-life boundaries.

Take Basecamp for example, a third of their employees quit because they couldn’t spend all day trolling each other about politics. Hardly toxic.

Well at least for me it isn’t. I know for that 1/3rd it’s unbearable oppression that they are expected to work when paid ridiculous salaries.

Devs have practically the best jobs ever invented. There’s insanely great pay, reasonable hours, stock options, work tools are paid for by the company, zero risk of death at the workplace, zero chance of injury besides maybe carparal tunnel syndrome. Etc.

One of the things I’m most appreciative about is starting off my career in a warehouse. I’ve never really understood the litany of issues and everyday is kind of like, what I’m getting paid how much? To sit at a keyboard and type… Even doctors and lawyers get paid less and work far longer hours.

The article says that, but from what they show of the survey questions they seem to have just presented respondents with a checkbox labeled "toxic culture" as an option for why they quit. Maybe they did clarify the definition better in the survey itself, but there's no way to know. If they didn't, then "toxic" is up for interpretation and OP is right.

They don't show any details about the survey, as far as I can tell. So we can't tell either way. This is sloppy, since it invites interpretation based on preconceived notions rather than facts.

Yep, and that sloppiness in reporting has me suspicious that the survey itself was sloppy.

>discrimination, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and poor work-life boundaries

Let's play SAT. Which one of these doesn't belong with the others?

Ding! Expecting someone to work after hours isn't anywhere in the ballpark of discrimination, sexual harassment or verbal abuse. This is a common manipulation tactic. It's like saying most drug arrests today are for heroin, crack, meth and pot. (Pot being about 80%). It's trying to make something look worse than it is. The more you know.

The first Google result for "toxic workplace" [0] specifically lists "A Toxic Workplace Often Has No Work-Life Balance". But one random listicle aside, I would say a lack of work-life balance can be a hugely toxic. As an example, people had mental breakdowns and went AWOL at Bioware so often because of the insane unpaid overtime that they coined the term "stress casualty" [1]. And since game studios so often contract out work (with being hired full-time held out as a carrot), if you don't go along with this soul-crunching practice, you're probably not going to do much more work for them.

I should note that Bioware is not unique in destroying its employees with crunchtime, they're just the ones that stand out most in my mind specifically because they coined that term. It's quite common in the industry, sadly. I also know that Rockstar [2] and CDPR [3] are also very much guilty of this practice.

Edit: It's so common in the video game industry (and also somewhat unique to it) that there's a wikipedia article dedicated to the practice [4]. Insane.

[0]: https://www.careercontessa.com/advice/toxic-work-environment...

[1]: https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

[2]: https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1...

[3]: https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-re...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games)

I agree with you but it's not the same level as discrimination, sexual harassment and verbal abuse IMO. You presented the probably most extreme toxic example, now think of the most extreme examples of discrimination, sexual harassment and verbal abuse.

I don't think when people say their workplace has poor work-life balance, it's not typically to the extreme you mentioned, it's more mild, like boss calling on weekend, after hours work, etc. I don't think you can have mild discrimination, sexual harassment or verbal abuse. Perhaps verbal abuse.

Sometimes though, you get real winners like Blizzard with all of the above recently. I know enough to never work in the video game industry.

I would consider work-life balance to be more of a problem than just being pestered to do unpaid overtime. For instance, companies which frown on taking time off or banking your leave to take one long vacation are fairly toxic IMO since they expect you to put the company first, even during your leisure. And that's ignoring places where it's expected that you be available on vacation, even if it's just to answer emails.

Some companies also require your work-life balance be broken down in order to advance. This is usually an unwritten requirement, and failure to participate makes you "not a team player," "a poor fit for the company," etc. I remember my father left a job because him going to see his father in the hospital after work instead of grabbing a beer (or a golf club) and shmoozing with the higher ups all but guaranteed he would never make partner at the firm. "Yeah, you might have kids to raise and your dad might be dying and all, but maybe join us instead so we can get to know you better and discuss your career ambitions" is one of the most disgusting attitudes I've ever heard, and yet many law firms still act like old boys' clubs, and a failure to suck up early on will impose a hard cap on your career. I would consider this to be a toxic workplace, both because of the "we're all family here (which means your family comes second)" attitude, and the implicit "if you bring in tons of business but don't fit in with our culture, you might as well start polishing your resume unless you're happy staying an associate."

Toxic is perfectly meaningful. I've worked places that are toxic. I've worked places that are not toxic. Every conversation I've had with people about workplace toxicity has been understandable to all participants.

Those conversations have had very little to do with the list you have put forward.

If anything, a lack of accountability gives cover to toxic people.

>Toxic is perfectly meaningful.

You have about 15 and counting different people's opinions on what toxic means. It's pretty subjective, therefore not really meaningful outside an emotional way.

Toxic just means not sustainable essentially. You can’t last for very long when it’s toxic, unless you become toxic yourself

In my experience the highest performing teams and organizations are invariably the ones that don't tolerate toxic behavior, at all, and vice versa, the poorest performing teams and organizations are the ones where toxic behavior is rampant. So that flies in the face of whatever point you're trying to make.

I think, ironically, you are further extending the definition of "toxic."

I’m not entirely sure I agree. Toxic is simply demanding irrational behavior from your employees.

For example, a toxic workplace could be one that just wants people to return to the office despite great productivity while working from home (or vice versa, this is just an example). Something like this would be irrational because maintaining the current state doesn’t hurt the business, while the new required state (returning to the office) only exists to subordinate employees and ICs. It’s completely toxic behavior by management for do something like this.

In an ideal workplace, the only thing that matters is results (within the confines of civil society and the law). So demanding anything other than that is toxic behavior.

I don’t think anything you listed is inherently toxic, or even seen that way by Gen Z. However, any of the things you listed could be used to demand irrational behavior from employees. Behavior that intentionally keeps those employees from delivering results. This happens when a manger is more worried about his or her own status in the company than actually doing anything good for the company.

No way. I'm all for functioning businesses and getting things done. One of the (early) values of a company I worked at was "Make More Money" and it was awesome. MMM.

There's a lot of artificial and unnecessary stress produced by managers, produced by clients. When a deadline slips because estimates were wrong, managers can violate everyone's work life balance. Or they can scrum it and figure out what they can ship, or what new information came to light, and re-prioritize what to work on.

> managers can violate everyone's work life balance. Or they can scrum it

The Agile Manifesto is clear that there are to be no managers. Developers are expected to work directly with the business people (and each other) to understand the business needs of the project. As Scrum exists to detail how to carry out the values of the Agile Manifesto in a practical way, you can't both have managers and Scrum. They are at odds with each other.

I expect that is why it always seems to fall apart in the real world. A lot of developers don't want to be involved with the business. They just want to focus on the tech and let someone else do the bridgework between the two. Likewise, the managers doing the bridgework don't want to give up their job. It takes a really special team who are all interested in the business aspects as much as the tech, along with being free of existing managerial structure in the organization, to make it work.

So, if you have managers, "scrumming it" isn't going to happen.

my experience about what is "toxic"

- bad organizational skills

- bad tooling

- fuzzy objectives

- mediocre hierarchy

- insisting in micro managing and having "stats" instead of fixing the obvious problems

now the rest is more subjective:

- antiquated silo-ed work, people become moron knowing only their boring chore, they also don't understand what is happening outside their cubicle, can become paranoid, jealous, resentful (because grass is always greener). this leads to a subpar, if not sad, nash equilibrium of low motivation and mediocre human bond

All of those things are orthogonal to workplace abuse.

That's exactly OP's point. If the only thing the survey presented was a "Toxic Culture" checkbox under the question "Why did you resign from your previous job?", then we know almost nothing about what respondents actually meant by that.

Without a copy of the survey, it's hard to know what respondents saw, but the way they present the data suggests that "toxic" was left wide open to interpretation.

The article does say what the survey defined toxic as:

> Nearly 1 in 3 people who quit their jobs in 2021 did so to escape a toxic company culture, characterized by discrimination, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and poor work-life boundaries.

I read that, but it doesn't specifically say that definition was on the survey. That reads more like their interpretation of the term.

If they provided the full text of the questions and answers in the charts (which is good form when reporting survey results), they didn't provide that definition to respondents. If they didn't provide the full text in the charts, then there's not a lot that we can do with this data because we don't know what questions they were asking.

It would seem that reading the actual article is toxic to the OP.

> Toxic is requiring your employees to be replaceable because guess, what -- they can resign (Example in the great resignations happening now) at any time.

This is self fulfilling. The more you work to make them replaceable, the more they realize

1) They themselves are not needed, as anyone else can do their job

2) They are not obligated to stay, just as you are not obligated to keep them

None of the things you’ve listed are inherently “toxic” by most people’s standards. A workplace becomes “toxic” when employees are abused to meet those goals (for example: with long hours, non-constructive feedback, limited pay, unsafe working conditions, etc.)

> Toxic is requiring evidence over feelings

I’ll concede some of the things you listed could simultaneously be considered both toxic and “good business,” but you got out over your skis here

> All the people resigning from their jobs and starting their companies are going to be ending up "toxic" eventually.

At least they'll be doing it on their terms.

Yes! You are 100% right. The people who we label as toxic started their companies on their own terms.

So it is good that they fled what they considered to be toxic.

Toxic is overbroad and overused, but I don't think any of the examples you gave are associated with common understandings of what it means. A "toxic" environment is just one where some people mistreat each others in some way.

IMO a toxic place is where you feel you are not appreciated for the work you have done.

I think you have a good point--there are shifting goal posts, and unreasonable cultural requirements from many angles. But could it also be true that we, as a society, are discovering that there are better ways of meeting human needs (esp. psychological), and so past "standard behaviors" of capitalism are less acceptable in light of that?

I think this is a really valid point.

I've been in the software development industry for over 25 years now, and things that were acceptable, even encouraged, 20 years ago would get you written up with HR today, maybe even fired.

Is that better or worse? I'm sure there would be opinions on both sides, but it is what it is. Cultural norms change all the time.

I personally think that we are now leaning towards being nicer to each other, and trying to provide opportunities to more people, and perhaps that comes at the cost of "sales" and "innovation" and "hustle", but as I get older I realize that I am 100% ok with that.

If a minority of people make less millions or billions and more people get to work in an environment that doesn't stress them out or make them feel uncomfortable, that's a great trade.

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