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by ljm 2491 days ago
The issue really is the word ‘toxic’. It’s an intense label that shouldn’t be used so lightly, because we all present a lot of potentially toxic behaviours throughout our lives that, with the help and support of those around us, and our own awareness and resilience, we successfully nagivate through without issue.

The conditions that can be identified and diagnosed might have deeper roots so, yes, it’s better to take that to a professional than to hash it out on a forum. But it should not have been framed as being toxic - that just adds another layer of complexity to the situation.
1 comments
9wzYQbTYsAIc 2491 days ago
Yeah, the modern insult “toxic” is pretty interesting. It’s become a meta meme that supersedes the original meaning of the word. I’m pretty sure that the term toxic workplace predates, quite much, the more contemporary, gamer use of the word toxic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace

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ljm 2491 days ago
This is straight bulllshit. This is the first source:

> a toxic worker is defined as a worker that engages in behavior that is harmful to an organization, including either its property or people.

By that definition, you become toxic when you introduce a bug. You become toxic when you make a mistake.

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9wzYQbTYsAIc 2490 days ago
It’s not bad as far as operational definitions go. Operational definitions are intended to be refined over time and to be used as a starting point, not necessarily an ending point. Qualifying the types of behaviors might have been too restrictive of a definition for their study.

For example, if it read “engages in unethical behavior that is harmful”, you then need an operational definition of either ethical or unethical behaviors. It’d be an understatement to call that a difficult thing to define.

Maybe there’s some way they could have incorporated intentionality into the operational definition, but I suspect that it would introduce some gaps as a model of reality.

I’d argue that an intentional pattern of creating bugs would be the toxic thing whereas a pattern of accidentally creating bugs would be incompetence. Isolated or routine cases of bugs being introduced would be the normal course of software implementation.

Business processes and development techniques would be the organizational defense against the introduction of bugs and would probably be the source of the dividing line between when a worker toxically creates bugs and when not toxic.

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