[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.