[hn_throwaway_99]

To be honest, I'm wondering where all these cartoonishly unhealthy companies come from. I've worked in a bunch of companies in my career, and sure, at pretty much all of them at one time or another I may have thought "are you f'ing kidding me?", but that's really just the nature of large organizations.

And perhaps I've just been lucky, but in 25 years in tech I've never seen the level of gross incompetence described in this post. I'm truly envious of the vast majority of senior leaders and execs I've worked with - not because they're geniuses or anything, but because they excel at things that I find very challenging (and I know from my stint in management) and I learned a lot from them. Again, not everyone, but I've certainly had more good bosses than bad.

[michaelt]

> To be honest, I'm wondering where all these cartoonishly unhealthy companies come from.

Simply take the norms of one industry, and apply them in a radically different industry.

Take a manager from the construction industry who knows a bricklayer with an assistant can lay 2 tonnes of bricks in an 8 hour shift, and if they didn't it's probably because they took a 3 hour lunch break, and apply it to the software world.

Take a manager from the food service industry, who expects workers to clock in before their shift starts, and that a worker who's even two minutes late is letting down the team and needs immediate attitude adjustment.

Take a manager from precision manufacturing, where Zero Defects is the norm, and "bugs" don't exist, and failing to deliver precisely what was promised is a big embarrassment.

Take a manager from the call centre industry, who thinks if you take a lax attitude to sick leave people will start falsely calling in sick all the time, anyone who calls in sick should be interviewed by HR upon their return.

Take a manager from a paperwork-heavy industry where work is simple but precision is important - like data entry for paper forms, where a worker who makes even minor typos just isn't cut out for the work.

Take a drill sergeant from the army who knows the most important thing in inducting a new employee is yelling in their face and bullying them, thus letting them bond with their peers....

[dullcrisp]

Man I didn’t know all my managers had side gigs

[stoneman24]

I didn’t know that my manager had such an extensive resume.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I definitely agree with that. Probably the worst company experience I've had was with senior leadership who fundamentally didn't understand how software development works.

But still, I've never experienced a CTO who was that clueless. Other members of the senior leadership team, certainly, and I've certainly seen CTOs who I thought were poor, but never really CTOs who were as clueless as the one described in this article.

[pmlnr]

> where all these cartoonishly unhealthy companies come from.

From MBA people.

[raverbashing]

Let's not kid ourselves, engineers can and do fumble management matters

[sambazi]

probably more like too entrenced in their trade and don't focus on other ppl.

[rbancroft]

There are effective and ineffective MBA's.

[sage76]

Except MBA claims to be a signal of management capability. With that prior assumption, it is a catastrophic failure.

[varjag]

Jack Welch was chemical engineer…

[huygens6363]

Perspective matters IME. I held both perspectives, this org is dysfunctional and healthy, at the same position, organization and exact same circumstances.

In one I was sure I was right and in the other I entertained the notion I actual might not be and things are not that simple.

[neilv]

Yeah, I've generally had good bosses and colleagues, including some outstanding great ones. (Actually, I had such overall good colleagues earlier in my career, I was totally unprepared the first time I ran into someone dishonest. It took too long to believe they would behave like they did, which ended up extremely costly.)

Despite overall good experiences, I've heard of dysfunction like this article describes, and even worse, in numerous real-world companies. Talking about particular instances can be very delicate when you have insider info. But I think there's enough frequent dysfunction in industry, and some very common tropes that we keep hearing from people at other companies, that senior engineers will tend to be able to immediately recognize some of it.

[StressedDev]

My experience matches yours. I have had very few bad bosses and almost all teams I have worked on have been healthy. I have been on a few bad teams and groups. They usually failed. They were not bad because they failed but because lying was rewarded, political skill was rewarded, and solving the customer's problem was not valued.

When I see questions like "where are the healthy companies?", I think either the poster has been very unlucky, or the poster might be the problem. When I say the poster is the problem, I mean they typically fall into one of the following buckets:

1. The person is very critical and cannot accept humans for what they are. They demand perfection, demand their coworkers are the best in the field, etc. They may also minimize the positives.

2. They have a very cynical or negative outlook.

3. They do not like their field (computers, sales, accounting, medicine, etc.). As a result, they are always unhappy.

The main point is something inside the person causes them to view every organization as screwed up and awful. This includes organizations which are OK, good, or even outstanding.

[eastbound]

4. For myself, I was incompetent as a developer. Therefore I always landed in dysfunctional organizations. I was invested a lot, but in learning the wrong things.

Since I became competent (it was 2006, there were no Youtube tutorials for everything), I work with awesome people. It also means my managers at the time didn’t coach me properly (unsurprising for dysfunctional orgs). Life is much easier when you’re on top of things, and much harder when you’re unlucky. Unluckiness compounds.

[barrenko]

Understand that luck works in the same way as "unluck".

[t43562]

Your experience is not a scientific experiment so you also have to consider that you might have been lucky. Perhaps other people have been unlucky.

For example, I could paint your post in a negative light: "A poster who blames the victim perhaps wants to feel good about the company they work in and ignore the experiences of others, or perhaps they are now in a responsible position and don't want to think that they might be part of a problem."

This would be unempathetic but so is trying to blame the people who describe their bad experiences.

[tstrimple]

Have you mostly worked for younger tech companies or were they "traditional" businesses who had to be forced to adopt technology? The places I've seen with the biggest challenges are all large old and well established companies. Think insurance, transportation, agriculture or healthcare. Places where the people who managed the entire system out of file cabinets a decade ago now manage the document repositories they don't understand and they are still bitter about it.

The insurance company was known for hiring contractors and keeping them on the bench for months to years just in case they needed them. I also remember while working there a particular Big Three consultant kept showing up in people's meetings and never speaking up. No one could figure out what he did or why he was there, but the agency was billing $500 / hour for his time and no one could figure out how to get rid of him. It was a complete shit show. This doesn't even touch on some of the major technical blunders they made throughout the years. Just a few small personal anecdotes.

The transportation company was even worse. Literally the worst company I've ever spent time at. It only employees around 15k people, so it's quite a bit smaller than the above insurance company. All signs indicate that this company was well run by the founder. But not by his sons who inherited it. They had a driver turnover rate of over 100%. If they needed 100 drivers for the year, they would have to hire 105 drivers throughout the year. They just constantly churn through brand new drivers, train them up and lose them to other companies through incompetence. One of the consequences of constantly burning through brand new CDL drivers is you have higher accident rates. The project I was brought in to consult on was a driver monitoring system. So if the driver braked too hard or swerved too fast it would create an incident and the driver would have to talk to someone after their route to explain what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. I can't imagine why they had turnover problems! Their entire IT org was run in a similar dysfunctional way.

[justinclift]

Don't get a job at IBM. ;)