Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

This is sadly a lot more common than people think. I have a similar story from a prior employer, a system administrator who was often asked to fix problems usually caused by bad managerial decisions of which he always flagged initially as being problematic but nobody listened to him, even after it turned out he was right from the start, he was one of those guys who knew their shit. He was a really nice, quiet and reserved guy but I noticed over the space of 3 or so months his attitude towards work and the manager at the time started changing.

Not many people knew of his Twitter account, but I did. He would post crude remarks about the manager not listening to him and how he should be the manager, often using the initials of the manager when he insulted him to be careful and not be accused of slander I guess. I would often hear him in the office talking to himself, swearing under his breath and mashing his keyboard. You could tell it was getting to him. He was on-call 24/7 but apparently wasn't adequately paid the amount he should have been for someone who was expected to fix something at the drop of a hat.

One day he came in and sat at his desk refusing to do any work. He just sat there and then the manager confronted him and asked why he wasn't addressing his list of high priority tickets that he had and then the guy lost it. He didn't get violent, but he started yelling at the guy and the manager was a well-built guy (sorted of sounded and looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger) who I wouldn't even dare cross. After yelling he just walked out and never came back.

Of course my manager reported the incident to some higher-ups and then it was revealed a couple of days later he was in a mental hospital as he had a complete breakdown (he apparently drove himself there). I didn't know him that well, but I went and visited him after finding out where he was. He told me that it all built up; he was being blamed when things went wrong and weren't done on time and not being praised when things went right and were delivered within unrealistic time-frames. His girlfriend had also left him the day prior to the meltdown, he said she was unhappy because he was never home and when he was, he was always fixing something remotely or had to come in to fix something.

I have a feeling this kind of thing is a lot more common than we can imagine.

Sadly it is more common than people even think. Oddly enough it is always the ones that are most productive and I know from personal experience you can clear 200 tickets in a week and somebody doing the same job and paid more gets thru that in a year and you are the one being shafted as you spend your time doing the work instead of office politics.

Perhaps, instead of seeing your job as "what the job description says", you should see it as "whatever actually gets me rewarded."

Which is to say, at some companies, playing office politics is your real job. "Work" is just a signal you can emit to show that you are willing to submit enough to not get fired.

Perhaps doing more office politics than productive work is your job's signal it's time to leave. Do you want to work at a company where more resources are wasted on keeping the lights on so to speak than providing value to users? I sure don't.

If you can't talk to the CEO or CTO, if you're technical, on your first day physically at the company, that's a Bad Signal (tm).

I was assuming a context of "you become aware that your company has this problem, and yet you persist in wanting (or needing) to work there." For example, you might you need the money, live somewhere crap for jobs, and your mortgage is underwater so you can't move somewhere better. If that's the case, then you should, in all pragmatic cynicism, think about your "real job" at the company.

Actually, perhaps I need to preface all my advice with "in all due pragmatic cynicism." I've added it to four posts so far and people seem to react much better to them when I do.

Ah, pragmatic cynicism. Never was a fan of that, always more of a fan of unpragmatically changing things for the better. Especially these days when the global unemployment rate for programmers is ~3%, you will get a different job and you will get it quickly.

I'm told life looks very different if you have done anything resembling settling down. But I haven't been there yet and my glasses have rose coloured lenses.

I was in a highly political and highly toxic situation prior to my current engagement. It took me over two years to get out of it. If you are not already in one of a handful of major tech hubs, it can be extremely difficult to get out such a situation. Granted, the pragmatic cynicism doesn't help, but if you can stomach it you can stay in a somewhat better frame of mind than I let myself devolve into.

Out of curiosity, what was it that was keeping you at that job? Lack of money? Family? Moving options?

Yup. If you become good at corporate politics, you become someone who's good at corporate politics. It's the first time I really understood the whole 'if you stare into the abyss, it also stares into you' thing.

It's a bit like martial arts. Being good at it is nice since you don't have to be afraid of being beaten up. If you have to fight someone every day however, there might be something wrong.

Most individuals wouldn't have chosen that deal at face value, so it's understandable if they eventually come to resent their "real job."

This is spot on, in many engineering jobs getting the right technical decision made requires you to exercise influence over management and peers. And having some influence in the bank involves a careful tending over a long period. If that makes you unhappy, try to think of it as building up karma so you comments go straight to the top of the list.

Accusing politics of being the downfall of some enterprise is a highly purist position. Politics is usually meant as "things that aren't coding that I don't like". Even political virtuosos still accuse blame politics when convenient.

I have seen politics kill someone's work and I have seen a project launch by doing nothing but working away and submitting their end product to flabbergasted responses. But it's rarely so simple.

If you don't understand what's going on and blame politics, you are living in a foreign land and don't understand the language. If you understand and don't try to ensure your voice is heard and respected, you don't understand the customs. If you don't understand the language and customs, you're at the nations mercy.

But fundamentally if you view it as opposed to work you'll rarely succeed in the best outcome even if you do strike a balance.

People call poisonous behavior "politics". Positive behavior is "collaboration".

I've been in situations where politicking allowed the company to pivot from an established, ineffective strategy to an new, better one.

I don't know a lot of people who want to play office politics, so I don't really see how "politics is your real job" would actually help. It just transforms it from "politics gets in the way of my job" to "my job isn't what it should be, nor what I want".

Perhaps HR should put what actually gets rewarded in the job listing. That way, both employers and employees can save a lot of time by not interviewing for jobs they aren't interested in. If employers were more honest and listed job requirement such as "kissing ass" and "play office politics like you're a congressperson", then we'd all know what jobs to avoid.

That can be for many reasons but an example of events for me will go like this:-

> Get new job, jump in there really eger, do a good job.

> Face stupid political BS, eagerness disappears.

> Start looking for other jobs, then ultimately quit.

If you keep working hard in a toxic environment you're going to do yourself harm. If you care about doing good work, move company. Many will be content with just collecting a wage though.

As an aside, I'ved worked on a helpdesk and got through about 5-8 tickets a day while colleagues got through 40. Ultimately I was promoted because those 8 tickets were the ones everyone else was skipping because they didn't have a clue what to do. Neither did I, but once I figured it out I did. If your tickets regularly require on average 5 to 6 minutes work, then perhaps you should question the value of the work you're doing.

I had a similar situation happen to me, minus the going crazy part. If you constantly have to clean up because of the bad decisions of a manager then you should just leave that company. Don't bust your ass trying to make a difference and change minds that don't want to change. If you are an employee you are expendable.

> Don't bust your ass trying to make a difference and change minds that don't want to change.

Exactly. Either leave or just coast by doing the necessary minimum and keep your stress buffers and brainpower for interesting personal stuff

I am not sure if the "just coast" advice would work. The source of stress is still there, still sapping away all the mental power, still occupying your brain during shower.

Ideally it would probably be just coast while looking for a new job in your spare time.

Waaaaaay before all this you should find another place to work...

Your story is really sad. I makes me wonder, do you know if that sysadmin had tried to look for another job before he got totally burnt out?

It's the injustice in the system. People just can't handle it anymore. It's only going to get worse as they keep on printing money and give it to the rich as well.

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