throwaway2928

> Is your negative attitude due to a medical condition or you just being an asshole who has an attitude problem?

I'm always unsure. These days, I'm generally a pretty positive guy but I know I've struggled in the past.

On this particular team I was definitely not the biggest asshole. In fact, after this manager left, the biggest asshole was fired pretty much based on the fact that the new managers weren't willing to tolerate his attitude. The bro culture of the team was curtailed (which is why I was so much happier on it afterwards).

It's very hard to be a manager, a people leader. I don't think he was wrong to bring up the fact - he was doing it because he wanted to protect his company - but it certainly danced around a line of legality. After I withdrew my application he made sure to tell friends of mine that he had rejected me because of my depression. Really mature, that guy is.

Not that long ago, I was considering joining a startup where an old manager of mine was the head of eng. They seemed to be doing some cool stuff, another friend had recently joined and spoke well of it, and I thought I'd give it a go. As part of that process, my old manager took me out for coffee to talk about the company, etc.

When we chatted, he basically laid down that he was concerned- when I had worked for him, I'd been depressed. He wanted to protect his startup from that kind of attitude. So there I was jumping through hoops to assure him that I had gotten therapy, that I was keeping an eye on it, on and on... only afterwards did I realize how fucked up that was.

Yes, he's got a right to try to protect a fragile young startup. But on the other hand, he's doing it via discrimination due to health issues.

In the end, I also realized something else that mattered: I was always feeling like shit those days that I worked for him in large part because of how he ran things. After he left, we got a much better manager who honestly seemed to work hard to make me happy. Why the hell would I want to go work for that guy again in the first place?