[progressive_dad]

I think we've all seen a good engineer get fired because he's a pushover.

You know who doesn't get fired?

Story time: We had the most brilliant and insufferable devops engineer I've ever met. I don't mean just your standard grump overworked sys admin. This guy was a treasure. 1) Previously all engineers had 20% time and would work on personal projects. We had a ton of extra servers lying around and it was fairly simple to provision some space to work on an idea. His first week he went to the CTO and had 20% time axed and demanded that all provisioning go directly through him and all physical servers be nuked from orbit. 2) They got him a personal secretary. He routinely had her go 5 blocks to get him gummy bears, buy him a waffle iron and make him waffles in the office, and routinely made sexist comments. 3) Op sec. We would have media come by the office once in a while so this guy instituted a policy of "security through shame" If you didn't have 2factor auth on your email he would send you snide comments. If you didn't use full disk encryption you had to go to a mandatory course on personal security. If you left your laptop unlocked at your desk to go the bathroom it was prank emails and screwing with your settings. On the 3rd time he would confiscate your laptop and lock it in a personal safe he had under his desk for the day. 4) This guy would use our internal channels and slack to shame anyone non-technical. One time the personal assistant to a VP in another department accidentally posted a listing asking if anyone had a bed for sale to the channel for asking about restaurants in the area. 24hours of shame where he got the entire tech team to participate emailing everyone in the company if they had any food shaped furniture for sale. Apparently she broke down crying and had to go home for the day. 5) Despite the fact that we had no QA team this guy refused to deploy hotfixes even for critical launches. You got one day a week to launch code. You got one chance. If there was anything wrong it was, "roll back and try next week." Unless of course the issue was you needed a CDN cache clear or there was something wrong with the build. Then you could email him (directly after the deployment) and have him refuse to respond or believe you for about an hour before he would actually do anything.

These guys get promoted. They run things.

They fire the pushovers.

[tekklloneer]

Wouldn't have to worry about firing me, I'd quit.

[progressive_dad]

I stuck it out until he confiscated the personal laptop of an engineer who had permission to use it on network.

After that I got permission to work from home for a month and used the opportunity to find a new job.

[d8421l01vv4r]

Do you know if (m)any of your coworkers also quit?

[progressive_dad]

Several asked to be transferred to other departments. That's what prompted his demand to be the sole point of provisioning. He had final say over Finance, Analytics, internal reporting tools, if he didn't like you it didn't get a server.

I had been with the company for four years at that point and I knew a lot of other old timers. Overnight it went from a flat organization with a progressive expectation that "No one is going to tell you what to do. You are here because you kick ass and we expect great things." to a strict hierarchy with several layers of management and influence.

Everyone who had been there as long as I had was equally unhappy with the new direction. This was all done under the guise of, "Getting the budget under control." when we all clearly saw the budget was fatter than ever. Where we had a diversity projects and research going on before, now we had 1 or 2 large money making projects. Where we had an expectation that we needed to be competitive and lean and every aspect mattered before, now they were hiring more and more management instead of workers.

We were doing so well that many former co-workers contacted me and other old timers during this time and we warned them off. Many simply didn't renew their contracts because they saw the writing on the wall.

Only one other person outright quit and that was really heartbreaking to watch. He had just transferred from California and the bullying was so bad he told me he was going home to stay with his sister and start going to therapy. He couldn't stand the idea of working in tech anymore.

[overcast]

Out of all of the asinine startup job postings looking for "rock stars", this guy is truly one. Awesome.

[progressive_dad]

They broke the mold when they made him.

[maze-le]

I wonder how many good people just had enough of it and left. In environments like these you either go mad or get so detatched from your company, that you don't give a shit about anything anymore... or you just leave...