> It was extremely demoralising and demotivating
This rings true to me. And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised. In a work environment you are made to feel powerless to stop bad things from happening. That breaks us.
This rings true to me. And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised. In a work environment you are made to feel powerless to stop bad things from happening. That breaks us.
Yes, I have to hard agree on that. It made me feel as a cog in a very dysfunctional and broken machine, being ground while watching the whole machine work, shaking and losing parts. When I opened up about my feelings (after starting therapy) I got so many messages from people wanting to share similar feelings... Being powerless while raising every flag possible about possible improvements was exhausting.
I think the only thing that kept my sanity for 4 quarters was that I stopped caring and fixed all low-hanging fruits I could find. Until I got passive-aggressively berated for not delivering something on a timeline I didn't agree to at all, that triggered a kind of despair I haven't felt professionally and finally made me jump from the sinking ship.
Cherry on top was getting a veiled threat during my exit interview to not talk about and share my experience with the larger org to "not hurt the ones I loved working with" there. Fuck. That.
Could you share the strategy you used to 1. Look for your next job and ensuring a healthier environment and 2. Talking about that previous job in interviews without lying but also without raising red flags for the recruiter?
Unfortunately I don't think I will have much to help here as I simply moved from the child-org to the larger parent-org (that had acquired said child-org, I was actually hired by parent-org to work on improving the codebase of the acquisition) with the help of some amazing people, the larger org is much much healthier (actually one of the best places I've worked at) so I didn't have to hide anything I went through. The people that helped me had experienced the issues with me and lent me a hand to get out after they did, we still commiserate to this day on it...
> I still don’t feel like I’ll be able to be an employee ever again as a result.
Yeah, it's been taking me a year but I'm slowly getting back to my former self. Still I check out sometimes when things look harder than they should due to some politicking, I got an extreme aversion to any of it, even to the point where I don't try to sell my product or tech ideas because I feel exhausted just by the thought of it. It sucks for my career for now but I'm much healthier than a year ago... There's hope!