[question_away]

My point is that adopting terms like "toxic" to describe this team's culture is over-selling and detracts from workplaces that are actually toxic.

If we're dropping the bar of a toxic workplace to be: trouble sleeping, questioning self-worth and general anxiety then what language do we use for workplaces that involve actual malice? Co-workers sabotaging others, misogynistic comments, abusive messages, etc are all toxic but clearly on a different level than described in the post.

> If you're family's construction work environment is toxic and treats them badly, you should be complaining about it and bring attention to it so hopefully we can all demand better for them.

That sounds nice, but there are workplaces where complaining will make life worse for you. And for certain union jobs, it's very difficult to leave.

[015a]

Both examples are toxic; malicious; whatever adjective you'd like to use.

If the alternative is to worry about devaluing the word, and thus letting less-toxic-by-whatever-definition-suits-me-best workplaces slide, because dontchaknow slaves work for pennies stitching jeans together in bangladesh; that's not acceptable. There's always a greater evil. If you ask me choose the lesser evil; I'd prefer not to choose. It's possible to hold them both accountable.

Moreover, this idea that tech jobs can't be toxic, they must be a lesser evil, because: you're paid so well! You get to work from home! You get free lunch at the office! Job security for life! That's bullshit. Its all, entirely, totally, rooted in society's child-like understanding of mental health. OSHA for mind jobs doesn't exist; it probably shouldn't, because we really don't understand what causes this, why different people react so differently, and what "healthy" looks like. But that doesn't mean the damage isn't real.

I am entirely and totally convinced that in a few decades: we'll look back on comments like your's the same way we look back on the companies who used radium to make measuring cups, or those who lined the walls of houses with asbestos. It'll be overwhelmingly obvious in hind-sight. That toxic workplace behavior can cause damage in people so significant that its net harm is higher than many of the more mundane things OSHA protects against. And maybe more critically to Big Business; that workplaces which operate like this are overwhelmingly low-performing on any timeframe longer than a few weeks.

[disqard]

Your comment will probably age well with time.

I'll add that in this "information economy", we have few (if any) easy-to-learn-and-apply frameworks, analogous to notions of food groups, good vs bad fats, etc.

Thus, not only are we drowning in information (especially as knowledge workers), we're also extremely prone to navigating it in ways detrimental to our (mental) health.

[didibus]

To me, toxic implies something that's bad for you but in insidious ways. That means it's slow and subtle, you wouldn't even believe it, at first you'd think this is great, these people are happy, this job looks great, but years later, you've got memory loss, needed to take physical disability, and the whole team quit... What the hell?

I feel it perfectly describes toxicity. What can cause such a thing? What's the root cause? It seems there are certain things about the human psyche we've yet to understand that somehow can be very damaging to it.

It means that if say there's a person whose the perpetrator, they might not even realize. If a manager causes the environment to make people feel crappy, they might not understand how, why, even if that's not their intent.

Malice can be toxic too, but malice describes the intent, someone could purposefully make the environment toxic, still toxic, but the intent was malicious. I find toxicity describes the environment, it's not because no one was purposely poisoning the well that it can't still be toxic.

Now if people are being abusive, psychologically or physically, in obvious ways, I would just call that an abusive workplace.

That's just the way I interpret those words.

Now if you're simply trying to say we should prioritize our efforts first to workplaces that are really bad in obvious and extreme ways, downright abusive, I wouldn't disagree, but is this really detracting?

That's why I said, if you know of worse offenders, bring them up, don't just deny this particular offense. I know that labor in other countries is much worse, but I can't as easily enact changes in other countries. I know that some jobs treat employees really poorly and pays terribly, and I'm not okay with that and support labor rights, higher wages, and would love to see more paid leave, shorter hours, better safety protocols. Simultaneously I happen to work in tech, so I'm also interested in seeing those jobs improve, they have different kind of issues that seem more insidious, they're also worth talking about in my opinion.

I would agree with you if somehow tech worker complaints was drowning out the voices of other workers who have more obvious abuses going on. I just don't think that's the case.

[015a]

By my memory; not researched, probably wrong, but: one of the early organizations to use the word "toxicity" to describe human behavior was actually (not a joke) Riot Games, in describing some League of Legends players.

I wish I could find the blog post, as it was at least a decade ago at this point, but it described their reasoning as: it's not just malicious behavior, but its malicious behavior which "spreads" between people. Malice creates Malice. Someone yells obscenities in chat, it tilts another player, and that player is now yelling obscenities in the next game; that's toxicity.

Which is only to say that I think it's a good definition and wholly applicable. Corporate politics flows down from the top; the behavior of managers affects the behavior of middle-managers, which can affect the behavior of line workers. Toxicity isn't just a bad apple; its a bad organization.

[question_away]

If you look up any articles about the Activision Blizzard saga you'll find the word toxic being used most often to describe their workplace. Is OP's situation comparable to Activision Blizzard?

[didibus]

We don't have a good way to measure harm, let alone be able to compare it between contexts. So we just don't know to be honest.

All I know is memory loss, and needing to take a 2 year work leave sounds pretty bad. You're only hesitant to recognize this because you don't understand the cause. If I told you it turned out there was lead exposure in the office, now you probably would find it terrible. One day we'll hopefully understand the cause and effect of such thing, and the behaviors or whatever it could be, still might be caused by actual toxins who knows, but when you do, you'll similarly go, I can't believe they allowed this to go on when we know it causes memory loss and traumatic brain disabilities. Even if it's only on certain individuals, you'd be appalled to know some restaurant willingly served peanuts to someone allergic wouldn't you?

[klyrs]

Is woodsorrel comparable to water hemlock? Kidney stones are better than death, but both are toxic. Sounds like the author was directly harmed by their work environment, so it sounds fair to call it toxic even if it could be worse.

[outworlder]

There's toxic workplaces, and there's actually _hostile_ ones. We don't need to be literally abused for a workplace to be toxic.

[ROTMetro]

Had to come back because this upset me so much. Here we have an elite person functioning at an incredibly elite level with the strength to reveal their weakness publically with nothing to gain from it but maybe helping others they don't even know and your response is to attack them as being priveledged or coddled. This isn't a seven year old not wanting to go to school and needing to learn a lesson that sometimes we have to work hard. This person has proven themselves already.

Dude your attitude is the reason people don't talk. The reason people OD. The reason they turn to self medicating or self harm. FU! You want an unacceptable view take a look at yourself. If someone has the courage to tell you they are hurting be a God damn human being and understand that they are hurting and don't respond with saying they really shouldn't say anything.

[ROTMetro]

This sounds like a crabs in a bucket response to me.

I have been assigned physical labor jobs in prison that were actual torture where I finished with hypothermia and shredded hands embedded with fiberglass and complaining would definatlely lead to much worse. I have had the bottom of society post prison jobs, like recycling plant where you sorted shit (actual fesses, also, one time a dead body) out of cardboard off a belt going 90 miles an hour with a 60 piece per minute pick requirement and 10 hour shifts. I have worked on stressful development projects. The development projects were much worse for my health mentally and physically long term, and in fact my coping with that in the dumbest way possible led to the sweet prison gig.

At least in the recycling gig we were all in it together, and the prison one I had a fixed date when the suffering would end.