[dasil003]

Please take this the right way because I see many aspects of my personality in your post and I’m coming from a place of love: the way you phrased this is full of self-loathing.

People being arrogant or submissive is not necessarily a “complex”. Being passionate and opinionated is sometimes stated positively as “strong opinions loosely held” because it’s a demeanor that allows the best ideas to bubble up in a smart group. Under qualified people definitely find their way in everywhere but in my experience software engineering chops are orthogonal to where you went to school, bootcamp and self-taught are often just as good as CS majors from respectable schools. In short, I think your observations are accurate but your disposition and interpretation is needlessly pessimistic.

[jesuscript]

I certainly won’t take it the wrong way. Pointing out how one end of the spectrum have inferiority complexes is not an out right attack on their credentials. It’s more of a ‘I know you are trying to overcompensate’, which is fine for a bit, but if it goes on too long it can be tiring.

Self loathing is not an issue I have with who I am today. I absolutely hated who I was before, and get annoyed at anyone that reminds me of me from then. In other words, I have no love or empathy for that version of me.

Whether that’s healthy (it isn’t) is a whole other can of psycho mumbo jumbo.

My general abrasive disposition is something I want to work on though.

Edit:

I do think it’s worth examining the types of personalities involved because this is not as simple as saying X company has X culture and therefore people act like shitheads. I want to know more about the individual shitheads and what makes them vulnerable to this type of archetype.

[dasil003]

Totally agree with your last point. There's just not enough information in the post to really assess what's happening with any accuracy. It's open to wild speculation. On one extreme the manager could be putting a toxic level of pressure directly, on the other extreme it could be entirely self-inflicted. If I had to guess, the truth is most likely somewhere in between due to a general stressful miasma in the air of the current macro-environment after a 12-year bull run, a rank and file dominated by a younger cohort that has never known any different, and the general failure of Zuck's metaverse vision so far.

Would this be better somewhere else? Very hard to say. Meta is incredibly solid from a revenue and business perspective, and they've taken their medicine, so upside is definitely there. Meanwhile the economy is affecting pretty much everyone, so good luck finding somewhere more stable. All of this is background noise compared to the individuals involved though. Could be as simple as just changing teams internally.