Good read, BUT the advice is stay away from Drama and especially work Drama. Seems to me 50% of people are damaged immediately by work Drama and the other half die slowly with maybe one or two sort of winners.
Yea, the lesson is: If you find yourself in a situation like that, bail out as fast as you can. When we're young we are often not taught—or more importantly we do not have the opportunity—to simply GTFO of the crappy situation we're in (Family, Bullies, etc.). It has tragic consequences both early in life and later on. It's (one of the reasons) why we get school shooters, why people stay at crappy companies when they don't have to, why people stay in destructive relationships.
Modern society often allows us the freedom to avoid people and situations we can't control but don't want to be in. For the love of god, please take advantage of that.
We are also not taught how to make the decision to GTFO. I've recently had to make such a decision and really had no prior experience to based anything on. It was a completely new experience.
Yes I eventually made the decision to GTFO but it's still lingering in the back of my head if I made the right one.
I've done it multiple times now since I've graduated from college. It makes you uneasy each time and shortly afterwards I definitely questioned myself. But today, I don't regret it one bit.
I think that's probably telling in itself. I've GTFO'd twice; one time was by my own choice, while in the other I had to be helped along by the organization a few months after I failed to follow my sensible instinct to resign. Both times, once I was finally out the door at last, I found myself feeling like a weight had come off my shoulders.
I could be wrong, but I don't see any way it's possible for that feeling to come along with a lurking realization that I'd made a mistake. (Certainly it never has in my experience, at least, and I've made plenty of mistakes.)
If you bail on every company that's dysfunctional and political (that's about 90%, including of startups) you'll probably get stuck with the job-hopper stigma before you find a good company.
Employers get away with horrible conditions and general dysfunction because of the job hopper stigma, but unfortunately, one person leaving bad situations immediately (instead of wasting months to years trying to make lemonade out of piss-lemons) is not going to break that stigma. In fact, it's going to lower your value and make you more likely to end up in dysfunctional companies.
A better strategy is to play the game, well, by learning how to do enough in typical, semi-dysfunctional environments to get career credit, while keeping an eye out for better opportunities. This all-or-nothing attitude that many young people have toward corporations ("if they think that way, then I don't want to work for those losers anyway") doesn't pan out in the real world. Even the good companies have plenty of stupid, political people in them.
The answer to "job-hopper stigma" and any and all other competence-trigger hurdles is simple. Sell the benefit, not the feature.
In other words, change the conversation from "who you are" to "what you can do for them". A track record of accomplishments does a lot more to convince a stake-holder that you know what you're doing than a list of previously-held positions. If all you have is a list of previously-held positions, then sure, if there's more entries on it than years, you'll have a rough go at it. But you don't have to operate this way.
Nobody is unemployable. There are only people who have figured out how to convey competence and people who haven't.
Well. Conveying competence is, indeed, a valuable skill. But the most it can do for you is to get you a seat at the table. What will you do once you've got the job, and it comes time to play the game?
And, while we're at it, why assume that the only possible reward for playing the game is the opportunity to keep playing the game? Isn't it possible that, in playing the game with sufficient skill and artistry, you can create for yourself the opportunity to do the work you joined that company to do?
...to be honest, I really don't know the answer to that last question at all. But it sure is an interesting question, don't you think?
Do your job? I'm having trouble understanding what you're getting at. If you don't like your work environment, then leave. Just don't take six months to figure that out. But really, you should know whether you would like working there before you take the job. It's not that hard to take a few of their current employees out for coffee and ask them what it's like to work there.
Not every job has the insane level of politicking described. Just find a place where you fit in. It exists.
> really, you should know whether you would like working there before you take the job.
My worst work place had an extreme micro-manager of a president. People were fired after working there 15 years on the spot and others their department was under performing for years and years never were let go.
Final straw: Unannounced layoff of 10%. They fired people at their desk all morning and afternoon and did not have an all company meeting till 3:30 pm. The bonus the job had a loop hole and didn't have to pay unemployment tax. So everyone didn't know they did not qualify for unemployment and were left with 2 weeks severance pay and found out they didn't qualify many weeks later after they were denied their unemployment.
Should have known: This was a place I knew intimately for 5+ years. I was friends with most of the staff. I did have coffee with half a dozen people and well made a 10+ year commitment mentally before taking the job left 6 months afterwards on my 4th year of employment. Now I LOVE my job working for Head Start.
Hardly an "insane level of politicking", as you like to put it; in a relatively close parallel early in my career, I cost my contracting firm a moderately lucrative client, and verged closely upon getting us sued, out of the same sort of sheer ignorance, as applied to vulnerability reporting rather than feature improvement.
I mean, sure, it would (possibly) be ideal if everyone in our field simply looked at the technical aspects of everything, without any personal or emotional investment whatsoever. What about your experience on this planet has given you to imagine that it's reasonable to expect any aspect of human life, singly or in the large, to be anywhere near ideal?
I disagree. I work at Google, and I can't imagine getting in trouble for making an unambiguous improvement to someone's code.
There is, of course, some politics. It's just not at the level where people could openly be pissed off just because someone made them look bad by doing better. Politics happens over much more ambiguous things, like what length people from one team should go to to fix bugs affecting another team. These are areas where there are legitimate differences of opinion, so it's only natural that people's biases affect their work.
Virtually all startups are dysfunctional in a variety of new and surprising ways, but I think you can clearly identify the main dysfunctions (or at least, things which won't be addressed) in 50-500 person companies, and figure out how much you care about those factors.
That's an important corollary to the author's actual point, if you ask me. Sure you shouldn't make golden calves out of bad old code, but also don't be the guy that mercilessly hacks apart other people's code without allowing them to defend it. Instead have a socratic dialogue about the pros and cons of different approaches to the problem.
If I understood the article, the pros were technical, and the cons were political. And, here's some actual good advice: Never try to solve a political problem by technical means (or vice versa).
If I understand correctly, that's Facebook saying that decisions are not going to be made politically. They're going to be made on the basis of what is best technically. And that's great... for Facebook.
What I was talking about is companies with a different culture, where politics gets into technical decisions. In that culture, you can't just fix the technical problems, precisely because at that company, code does not win arguments. Politics does.
Really? Because I'll bet you any sum you care to name that Facebook is just as riddled with internal politics as any other organization of its size in the field, Google specifically included. To believe otherwise is to believe that the people who make up Facebook are other than human.
He made a classic mistake that I think all of us make once: overperformance without proper (managerial or executive) support.
Overperformance fucks up more careers than underperformance, because it makes enemies. (No one actually gives a shit about the pittance drawn away by an underperformer on salary, but overperformance puts peoples' reputations on the line and is generally volatile.) You don't want to fall into that trap. I'm not saying that people should do shoddy work, but if you're going to do more than that you're asked to do, make sure it's behalf on someone powerful enough to clear obstacles and get your back, and who will.
He improved the product and, through no intention of his own, ended up ears deep in office politics. It's a perennial risk. It takes at least one of those, for most of us, before people realize that if you're going to overperform, it should be for something you own. That way, you avoid the risks (you can't get fired from your own side project) and keep the rewards, instead of the reverse.
Totally agree.
"Overzealousness worse than fascism"
And I don't believe in such idealism, if he was doing it for the sake of performance he should show it to the developers first, and not perform a show for his boss and boss's boss and THE BOSS and who knows who else. So what was the real intention behind this?
I don't think he had an ulterior motive. I think he was young and had never had a negative career experience and therefore didn't realize what office politics were about and that, even if the execs seem like nice people, any information you furnish to them stands a nontrivial chance of being used in a horrible way.
In a collegial, sympathetic R&D type environment, people are happy when others improve their work. However, in an office environment, it's not the same thing, because you can hurt peoples' careers without even trying and unintentionally make enemies.
I would go work somewhere else and stay happy.