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Comment by wiredone | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, while I believe a lot of the perspective shared, there always seems to be a huge lack of objective assessment of options for these folks.

In tech there are many incredibly high paying jobs - taking control over your situation has a low bar.

if you don’t like your manager, taking the view that if you escalate a formal complaint to HR (in doing so lose all trust you manager and HR may have in you), you’ll be vindicated and live on happily ever after… it’s a fairytale. Go work somewhere that makes you happy. Leave toxic environments - it’s not your job to fix them/right wrongs.

There are certainly real victims in these environments.

There are also in my personal experience a lot of people who make noise/complain about immaterial incidents in the hope of claiming some group control over their situation or with some sense of justice around fixing things. This thrashing can create a toxic environment for those around in itself.

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> if you don’t like your manager, taking the view that if you escalate a formal complaint to HR (in doing so lose all trust you manager and HR may have in you), you’ll be vindicated and live on happily ever after… it’s a fairytale. Go work somewhere that makes you happy. Leave toxic environments - it’s not your job to fix them/right wrongs.

Know where it's not a fairytale? Unionized workplaces. Source: I know several people who work at such places—raising all sorts of issues and having them addressed reasonably-fairly is downright normal at them, and a manager trying to retaliate for that kind of thing is likely in for a bad time.

My first job was at a unionized workplace. I ended up doing more work to cover the guy that was loafing around under the protection of the union. Who protects you from the protectors? Rational or not, since that time, I am suspicious of the personal work ethic of those arguing for unions.

I'd rather work with lazy people than bullies, YMMV.

It’s not either/or.

You think the parent was covering for the loafer because he was so friendly and kind?

I think the reality is that lazy people and bullies tend to end up in the same organizations (and are with some regularity the same people). The places that I've seen the least of both was in a privately owned company.

Why didn't you just not cover for him?

For real. This problem exists independent of unions.

If the one guy didn't get fired you probably wouldn't have either.

I didn't know better and after experiencing the consequences of my father loafing through life, I was determined to work hard. I was 18 and working my way through college (couldn't get loans or family aid). I grew up in right-to-work states, but went to college in a union state, so I wasn't really familiar with the dynamics.

It's true, you never have to wonder about the work ethic of the unskilled and de-unionized worker. They have so little job security these days you can practically get the whip out on the poor, desperate little plebs.

I get your point, but it sounds like you forgot where you were commenting. Most of the people here work in tech and are very-high earners. Your overwhelmingly-non-unionized audience are hardly “poor, desperate little plebs.”

Seems like you were doing more to protect that guy than the union was.

Why would you cover for someone who wasn't doing their job? Unions don't make it impossible to fire a bad employee, they just require normal things like documentation and giving the employee a chance to improve.

If I started doing someone else's work making it impossible for the bad employee's boss to know there was a problem that's not really a issue with unions.

Lol

I've been in three different unions and never saw anything like that happen.

Mostly I saw things like rampant sexual harassment and nepotism at every level. Anyone who so much as squeaked about things being wrong saw management and the union reps team up to screw the person for fucking with the status quo. Heck, at my last job like that, they were cousins/roommates.

Unionized workplaces can be just as toxic as any other workplace.

> Anyone who so much as squeaked about things being wrong saw management and the union reps team up to screw the person for fucking with the status quo... Unionized workplaces can be just as toxic as any other workplace.

This is true, but unlike any other workplace, if your union is filled with corruption and nepotism you can vote to change your union leadership or even to disband it entirely and replace it with a new union under entirely different leadership, operating under new rules written to specifically address the problems with your old union.

Unions at least give you the option of improving the situation if the vast majority of union workers agree that there's a huge problem.

Good luck with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa

Face prison and death? No thank you, no job has ever been worth that.

Thinking that you're going to fix deep corruption via democratic process... You realize that this doesn't work in mainstream politics either, right? Only in the movies.

I don't think most worker's unions are filled with Mafia members these days so you probably wouldn't have to worry about prison/death.

As for corruption, a strong democracy is highly effective against it which is why corrupt states try so hard to weaken or eliminate Democracy where they can. Democracy is absolutely a threat to corruption.

The US does seem to have slipped some (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index) and there's no surprise that there have been some very worrying efforts to weaken our democracy recently. Most Americans think our democracy is in danger. This would probably be a good time to fight for a stronger democracy so that we're better able to deal with corruption.

"Cut and run" doesn't work if you're on a visa, if you've already had to do that once or twice in the last couple years, or if you don't have enough of an emergency fund. It also doesn't work if you're not a tech worker - remember that discrimination affects HR reps and program managers and mechanical engineers and fabrication technicians and research scientists just as much as it affects SWEs.

Yeah, as someone who has been in one of these situations before and was unable to speak out, I am incredibly grateful for those of my coworkers that did speak out.

One of the reasons people in power can behave so terribly towards specific groups is because they can't "just leave" like you suggest. You think the bully's going to choose the strongest person as a victim?

I try to pay the favor forward by speaking out and supporting folks who are treated badly by shitty leadership whenever I can.

You're a good person.

One other thing that is great for your mental health in any job, is treating it as a job and nothing else. Something you do for 40h per week to get a salary to pay your bills.

You're not there to make the world a better place, to belong to a family, to improve anything. Just do your job and go back to your life at the end of the day. When you're off work, do your best to forget about it. In fact, always prepare yourself for interviews, so leaving your current job it is easier when the time comes, and it always comes.

This detachment always served as protection from toxic workplaces, and I worked in a few of them. Don't let anyone fool you that it will harm your career, the only thing that will harm your career is not putting effort to learn skills that are in demand.

> You're not there to make the world a better place, to belong to a family, to improve anything. Just do your job and go back to your life at the end of the day.

Speak for yourself. I do want to make the world a better place and I'm fortunate enough to have a job where I do that. It's rewarding; my life has purpose during working hours.

Sounds great. What's the job?

> Speak for yourself. I do want to make the world a better place and I'm fortunate enough to have a job where I do that. It's rewarding; my life has purpose during working hours.

That's your problem, not mine. God forbid I'm ever in such a situation.

If we just accept that abusive managers are unassailable and move around, pretty soon we'll find no place free from abuse.

Not to mention that not everyone has the luxury of being able to move around easily.

I'm dealing with this at my currently. It is a fairly large org and has good people and not so great people like any large enough group will have. What they don't have in my estimation is someone who actually knows how to engage with individual contributors in a meaningful way so struggles with issues of communication and direction, again, not atypical. I've invested into building an internal "meet up" for dev+adjacent folks to hold a weekly tech talk session, and am slowly building trust in what was a relatively low-trust environment. I do all this and some more within approximately the normal amount of working hours as if I weren't doing this with some very careful scheduling. My philosophy is that if we need to be here then might as well find a way to enjoy it and get something more than a paycheck. The effort is also slowly paying of in getting the attention of recruiting and hr, in that they are trying to learn how to engage with technology more effectively. It is slow growing but has been a joyful experience getting people to come out of their shell and give their, sometimes first, presentation at a meet up.

I have a different take:

Be the change you want to be. Everyone just says "leave" but what if you have no where to go, and inversely, if everyone is just leaving, then there is no incentive for organizations to change.

You can argue its "futile" but the truth is, its not, these things compound, the more people do it, the less it can be swept up and hidden away. Real change is thousands and thousands of people doing small things to increment in a better direction. Its not always easy, but its the right thing to do. Thats how as a society can do better.

The idea of shifting it to "some other person" is why I think we have some of the issues today with reform and general societal polarization: everyone wants someone else to fix the problems

I don't think it's futile to try to change an organization within, but depending on the level of toxicity a lot of times leaving (and giving opportunities to others who want to leave and are still there) does more good than spinning your wheels someplace.

If the company is in the USA and leadership doesn't like LGBTQ than there will be no chance one way or the other to change that org

People should absolutely call out toxic work environments as just that. What's lacking is legislation protecting employee rights. Your approach is to cut and run, but ultimately people need to raise their voice for legislation to exist.

Yeah, tech is fortunate enough (for now… note how company ”gratefulness” to employees seems to be dependent on stock price) to the point that most everyone in the industry can switch jobs land on their feet and be better off.

I guarantee you that will change in about 10 years, if not sooner.

Ironically, as a collective bargaining unit we have the most negotiating power right now — when we don’t need it.

It seems foreign to us in the US, but being an employee should be no different than a tenant at a nice apartment building: both types of corporations extract value from the individual. Both find a way to make profit. However, as a tenant you have some legal rights (Europeans would still laugh at them in comparison). As a tenant you’re legally entitled to some basic day-to-day guarantees (though maybe not always in practice): a light breaks, plumber is needed, common areas kept in order, tenant disputes? A landlord has to fix that. I’m not saying a corporation needs to hold our hand, but it absolutely should be responsible for providing a comfortable environment, work-life balance, etc.

It’s really not too crazy to demand the bare minimum from our jobs, considering how much of our lives are spent working on them.

You have a problem with work.

I know I'll get HR involved, they will help me.

You now have two problems with work.

Unless your goal is to get someone fired, I've never seen HR getting involved to be a positive action.

If you have a good relationship with an HR person, and trust them enough to ask for informal advice, some positive action can follow. If you want to go the formal route, if you use words and phrases that sound like a lawsuit in the making, expect an action to your disadvantage. HR is there to protect the company, not you. An obviously disgruntled employee crying foul is immediately perceived as a threat to the company, regardless of whether they're objectively right or not.

In this case, HR wasn't the problem. They were helping and tried to improve the situation. The problem is that there's only so much HR can do when the top executive chose to completely disregard them.

I'm biased, my wife works in HR but I've heard multiple stories from her where she helped solve problems by acting as an intermediate and deescalating the situation.

One of the major impetus of HR is to comply with laws regarding discrimination and ensure that the company doesn't engage in behaviours that would result in them being either liable or having a PR problem. This means solving those kind of issues and that sometimes involve batting for the employee with the executive team because they know that it's in the best interest of the company.

In this specific case, OP is a manager and passing up the chains issues that have been signaled to her. In a well functioning organization, this is absolutely the correct response and it's part and parcel of a manager's job. Involving HR early with a clear solution to deescalate and improve the situation (as described by the first case from OP) is great because this is what's best for the company. If the employee had transferred to the new team there would have been no basis for a lawsuit.

OP is a manager, good managers look out for their subordinates and surface issues so that they can be solved. Ideally before they become thorny legal issues. From this write up, it looks that OP did exactly this. At the beginning, she surfaced issues with two employees that could cause problems down the line for the company, she highlighted potential issues with documentations, requirements and test cases that would be problematic with the FDA (in any highly regulated environment like medical devices, making sure that the company is compliant is crucial and definitely the responsibility of any project manager).

So, she did exactly what she was hired for.

I mean it depends. If you document your communications thoroughly and the company is sufficiently sloppy, then backlash from HR could set you up for a lucrative lawsuit.

I saw some CA employment lawyer [1] on youtube, and something he says a lot on his talks is "Don't call me if your manager is mean or not following some legal requirements, instead, here's how to best document and complain about it so it'll look good for you if they ever retaliate against you. Once they retaliate, then you should call me."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@braniganrobertsonlaw/

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