[rprospero]

Along those lines, one of the most toxic places I've ever encountered for developers was at a company that sold b2b software. You would think that developers would be valued for creating the product, but they were fully treated as a cost centre. The profit centre was the sales team who went out and got companies to send money. The developers merely existed because legal said that, for compliance reasons, the firm was required to provide the costumers with software after the client paid for said software (legal accounted for 24% of the company's budget while software development was 15%). If the sales team promised something that the software couldn't do (e.g. track the position of any cell phone in the country with just a phone number in the early 90's before smart phones), then any refund owed to the client would come out of the product team's budget. The salesman (they were all men) would not be required to return his commission, since he did his job and got someone to sign a cheque.

Surprisingly enough, the company was not Oracle.

[verinus]

interesting that this company could stay in business.

over the long term I would think that two things will happen: good devs will leave the company while the remaining fight an uphill battle maintaining code until the customers leave.

but ofc sales and incentives in general are a whole different area of problems.

[rprospero]

It's interesting that you mentioned the good devs leaving, because they never got the chance. The owner had a policy of only hiring average devs and 10x devs were fired with extreme prejudice. His hiring theory was similar to modern server management: Cattle, not pets. It should be possible to fire a dev on Monday and have their replacement closing tickets by Friday. Good devs were harder to replace than average devs, so every good dev was a liability.

This policy was also useful for retention. Other firms in the area knew that he fired all of the good devs, so they never tried to poach his employees. In fact, if you got tired of the toxic environment and quit, the firm's name on your resume meant that you probably weren't going to get another dev job without leaving town. When a dev sees their former colleagues making sandwiches at Subway, another weekend of unpaid overtime doesn't sound as bleak.