[greggsy]

You basically described any workplace in a large company. Organisations are systems made of loosely interconnected and dependent systems, made up of people. The complexity of business norms, personality and cultural differences, and unrealistic expectations around business processes can be difficult to reign in inside a global company. Some workplaces have worked out a sweet spot, balancing people, HR, tools, culture and purpose.

I’m not telling you or anyone else in these companies to suck it up, but there’s a point where employees and teams in these situations need to step back and realise what they’re dealing with, and adjust their mindset accordingly.

Personally, I like identifying and unfucking bottlenecks. Sometimes explaining why something is so fucked to the people being fucked can go a long way.

[notJim]

I really disagree with this idea, we shouldn't normalize every workplace being full of back-stabbers and retaliatory jerk managers. Nor is horrible red tape a given, although some bureaucracy is of course required. None of this has been my experience at fairly large, well-known companies, although I'm definitely aware of cases where it has happened to friends.

[greggsy]

It’s not an idea - it’s just a perspective that some people forget: the world is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and our organisations are a reflection of that. I know that it’s fashionable to talk about not normalising things, but the reality doesn’t change.

I don’t like it either, but I can’t really do much about it. If you realise you’re in a difficult organisation, you can at least start to take action, or take a different tact (or leave). Being annoyed about the situation is probably just going to make you more and more unhappy because the system won’t (or can’t) change in your desired timeframe.

[Firmwarrior]

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote a book right around the time I was planning to leave, and gave everyone a free copy. The book really perfectly nailed what a toxic dumpster fire the company had become, and then it outlined his plan to fix it.

What's funny is that the guy agreed with everything I thought, he saw the problems that were hamstringing me (and everyone else), he had complete authority to fix the problems.. and so far as I can tell, he wasn't having any luck with it

The best fix seems to be to tell people to quit being jerks to each other and focus on making good products and making customers happy, but good luck getting that to happen.

One of the main criteria for performance reviews was suddenly something along the lines of "Teamwork" that captured what a non-toxic, non-Ballmerized good person you were. Of course, all that happened is that the best backstabbers and the weaseliest scumbags manipulated their way into high "Teamwork" scores, and anyone who sat down and focused on productive work/helping others got screwed on that score just like everything else.

[retcon]

Is enabling the same as normalization? Surely normalization is acceptance into culture whereas even in dysfunctional organizations the individual actors all think that they're solving problems and not taking any shit.

The pity is often how the most qualified talent for resolving poor behaviour is so often subordinated into slopping out the pigsty. There needs to be a foundational next step.

Edit: since Fairchild we've been scared of merely assembling raw talent under a thin layer of management capabilities and from this is developed the pseudo matrix management system that e.g. Microsoft operates.

[Firmwarrior]

I’ve been at other big companies where it wasn’t the case. The engineers were all there to get a job done and were willing to help other teams when necessary to make that happen, without lengthy negotiations ahead of time

There’s going to be SOME of that stuff any time you have more than one person in the same building, but a decade under the iron fist of Ballmer has permanently ruined Microsoft as an organization.