- secret slack room to help me overcome my depression (wasn't invited of course, I just spotted it several times while looking at my colleagues' screens)
- lowest paid member in the team, while also being one of if not the most productive. 12x: verified. 30x: speculated if I had control over the architecture.
- 70h/week, no vacations, for 3 years. No paid overtime of any form.
- Double bind situation where I was used as a punching ball between the CTO and the #2 employee.
- Excluded from secret negotiations to obtain a raise.
You know what I did ? I quitted, cold turkey. That's when the CEO started to hate on me, feeling betrayed. The #2 left shortly after confiding he wanted to punch the CTO in the face. After realizing hiring someone to replace me wasn't cutting it, they distributed overtime to everybody on the team. Result: unionization. One year after my departure I received a call from the COO telling me he was willing to hire me back at the condition I would behave (since I was thrown at every hot issue, semantic propagation tied in their mind the idea I was also problematic). He was let go shortly after and replaced by a manager from the holding company (if you know what I mean). I haven't worked in 6-7 years. Most colleagues who left have had a similar empty period.
HN doesn't smile on frequent account cycling, but throwaways for sensitive disclosures are possible.
OP could likely walk from their ID easily should they choose. It would be difficult to tie the account to a specific legal / professional identity, though there are some personal-ish details in their history.
Very creepy
We are not ready to discuss this kind of things. We are not equipped to deal with the kind of storms this can raise on the collective level and proactive openness on the individual level we're restricted to, no matter how hard we wish for a transcendance, is an enabler of these situations where no isolation of individual responsibility can pin-point the source of the issue. I mean I got along with everyone and the people I had the most temporary conflictual relationships at some point were also those I was closest too. In the beginning we all had good intentions. Nevertheless, double-bind propagated in the group like an epidemic, preventing us from having innocent relationships. Suddenly, invoices were issued, each party establishing accounts in different currencies.
In the end, from a cold-headed analysis of the situation, I still think I was the one that was behaving. If this was a story about my circle of friends, I'd be the asshole, placing economical matters in a central position, as if we were in a corporate setting. But it's my employer who behaved as if we were friends, and started neglecting economical considerations to its detriment.
In short, speaking of mental health made everybody unhealthy. In fact I'm not the one who overshared, my father did. I didn't show up for a couple days and blacked out communication-wise (because of a girl, a half-truth). The CEO phoned my dad who confided I was suffering from bipolar disorder since my teens which just isn't true from a clinical perspective (this is my sister's diagnostic in fact). Shortly after everybody was in the know. I could tell from their terrified eyes when they glanced at me when I came back. They were afraid I'd flip my shit. This is something we can't deal with. You can't just be designated as being a "little crazy". This expands to "a little [very-weird]". There is a perceptual threshold, including among health and sometimes even mental health professionals that makes people assume past a certain point you just flip your shit, that's your thing, an irreducible otherness that sleeps within you. Needless to say this has never happened to me (unlike my sister).
You can't just unveil taboos, you always end up exposing a mask. There is something very archaic to what happened to me, something attuned to the idea that naming illness is what propagates it: to deal with the mask, you have to wear one yourself (in the form of a secret slack channel for instance, even though as someone who used to belong to it told me, it was set up to find ways to help me). This idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Although I have only explained how my employer was contaminated by what ought to be called "panic" in light of its etymological and anthropological roots, I think you can easily picture how this kind of situation can make you crazy. And if I'm responsible in any way of letting myself get contaminated, this is by entertaining this very idea, that being designated as crazy was slowly turning a lie into reality. The epitome of madness, supreme injustice, that isn't that different of accusing someone of having cast a spell on you. Tough stuff that puts all of us back into the jungle.
To conclude, I'm not even out of this hellish loop, since I still have a gaping hole in my CV I can only mask. There is no way explaining the reason behind it like I'm doing here would diffuse or at least atone this red flag. Innocence is impossible, I have to maintain the mask in order for it to not cause explosive contagion.
To those worrying this I'm posting under my real name: I'm not. And I was able to work as much for so long because I was enjoying it. This wasn't that different than alpinism.
jesus, i don't know how you managed that for 3 years
I've noticed this trend in recent years to be "open about mental health", etc. And I think by itself this is great, mental health is important. But invariably, especially in management/HR settings (or in the entertainment industry), it is done in an incredibly shallow way.
Mental health is hard. Just talking openly isn't magically going to fix things and may even initially make things worse. It may release feelings that need to be carefully managed e.g. by a therapist. Obviously, no company would ever be able to provide that. Instead, they're just looking for "I started running every morning and was able to fix my depression" kind of stories.
"Being on-call 24/7 helps me feel like I'm a part of something, fulfilling a deep want for belonging that being kicked off the Girl Scout troop created in me."
"I've always lacked a father figure. When you told me to spend less time browsing HackerNews and more time on Jira, I felt like I was part of a real family."
This makes total sense if you have a therapist and / or have friends you can be vulnerable with (and know how to). But there are undoubtedly those who do not have that. For them the risk of career sabotage vs a change of improved quality of life might be worth considering. I don't know where the breakdown is, probably against mandatory sharing in the work setting on the account of an average workspace being pretty adversarial. However, if I could make a call for my younger self I would choose to share.
The risk is way too high
I think this shows that the boss was going out of his way which I "personally" appreciate.
I don't know what people expect managers / boss to do. Somebody on team expects their boss to X and somebody else on that same team expects their boss to be anything but X.
If I ever become a manager , I am probably taking this boss's approach , I think its good to have some talks like this. I am also much inspired by the likes of charles schwab and dale carnegie's how to win friends and influence people so probably there is a bias here
What they do should be related to the company work, otherwise they're overstepping. They're not social workers. They have to respect the privacy and independence of their coworkers.
> If I ever become a manager , I am probably taking this boss's approach
Please don't. Coworkers can obviously have social relationships but they should grow organically without being "managed".
You know the best way for that to happen is? Let them work together. They'll build their own relationships. They don't need your help. If they don't work together enough for this to happen naturally then they're strangers to each other anyway and that's ok too.
Friendships increase team communicability which bolster project success.
The actual respectful and considerate way is not to put people in such positions in the first place.
Like asking something from someone where it would be some unusual imposition or favor (like something that would be ok to ask a friend or family but not a mere aquaintance) and telling them it's ok if they say no. That is an empty statement. You were not supposed to put them in the position where they had to say no.
You can allow for people to not be robots without putting other people into awkward positions they didn't deserve to be put in.
It's definitely favoring some people at the expense of others. Like the gp comment, now they not only have to do their normal job, they also have to generate bs for their manager. The manager should be the one who has to figure out how to work with their different people, not the other way around. That is the managers explicit role that they supposedly get paid more for and what gives them the authority to manage and judge anyone else. That's their actual job rather than coding or whatever. Instead, they are making their team members all conform to them, on top of their actual jobs which are supposed to be something other than managing people.
I've read that, too, e.g. something from Google about psychological safety.
It seems to me that these "be 10% more vulnerable" increases safety / friendship for some people,
but decreases it for others who don't want to share anything.
Maybe there's better ways to go about increasing psychological safety ... For example, about Psychological Safety on Wikipedia:
> Two aspects of leadership have been shown to be particularly instrumental in creating a psychologically safe team. They are leaders using:
> Participatory management > Inclusive management
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_safety
Here's a nice comment (in this discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42026278
Reading this comment and others feels like people have read a bit too much Sun Tzu and are treating what could be collegiality as warfare.
You got the order of events wrong. That was with the first manager, before the "10% more vulnerable" meeting. (Not saying it's a good idea though.) (Or did you mean sth else?)
From the article:
> I told my team I was struggling with depression and took some time off. ...
> My team was extremely supportive.