Any impressionable kids reading... this story playing out like it did is highly company-dependent, as well as luck-dependent.
In a healthy company/organization:
* That outsourcing implementation approach probably wouldn't have happened, because an experienced person could've guessed how that would turn out, before it was started (it's such a cliche).
* Earlier on, people would tell the CTO it wasn't working out, instead of lying and saying the opposite.
* Whenever they needed to do something smarter/creative to rescue the project, they could work with the CTO on that, and maybe even with the customer.
* There wouldn't be marathon whip-cracking over the holidays, especially not after the team was already burning out.
* A manager/lead would go to bat for the success of the project and the health of the team, and insist upwards that the team needed a break over the holidays, if that needed to be clarified.
On that last point, in a "half-healthy" organization, a manager might intentionally be very vague, and omit information. That happens, and might or might not be a good idea, depending.
But the way this story is told, it sounds like the manager/lead outright lied repeatedly up the chain of command, which is generally considered very-bad, in both healthy and unhealthy companies.
I'll add that these things are vastly easier to armchair-quarterback. Certainly we're all going to make mistakes, especially when put in difficult positions, and/or when overextended/fatigued. But it helps to look at scenarios, to try to learn from them, and to think from a distance how they might've been handled better, so you're armed with that "experience", the next time you're tossed into a rough situation that has some similarities.
The worst problem is, every success will be credited to CTO and every failure will be aimed towards the manager because it's a disobedience. In this case, the CTO also reward the credit to his friend because he/she doesn't know the backend.
In the short time you may save the company, in the long time you'll lose and the company will lose too.
"Because the CTO had a yearly turnover of his direct reports, every status call about the project took some variation of “great idea, boss” even though literally no one involved thought it was even a good idea.
Or even a mediocre idea. It was a bad idea"
But if everyone confirms his bad decisions instead of pointing flaws out, then they are all part of the problem.
> But if everyone confirms his bad decisions instead of pointing flaws out, then they are all part of the problem.
They are part of the problem but they don’t have to be part of the solution. It’s the CTOs job to realize they’re not getting accurate information from below and work to fix it, that’s why they’re getting paid the big bucks. It’s not like it’s especially hard to figure out but building the trust to create an atmosphere of psychological safety is the job of executives and takes a lot of hard internal reflection but that’s what you sign up to when you sign up to do the job.
Thats the key. If a CTO doesnt set a stage of “look be fully frank with me” then nobody will just say “look bossman, we could have finished this three months ago.” When it really could have been less effort.
Viewed from another angle, the CTO successfully psychologically manipulated his team and almost literally beat a working, cheap solution out of them, and will almost certainly get full credit for this victory done on the backs of others. SO, was he truly not competent? Or was he extremely, dangerously competent?
Not only that, but while the CTO is busy counting his bonus money and accepting his new shares of equity from a satisfied performance condition, he managed to get the rest of the team to simply be proud of doing it for a pat on the back and the feeling of doing "live theater" or whatever.
Yep, the whole article was infuriating, yet I kept expecting a big windfall for the team in the end to justify it all, but instead we got:
"But you also want to feel like a rock star when all your hard work hits real users for the first time and you feel that thrill of I did that. People like what I did. I overcame the impossible."
Y'all got rewarded with an attaboy and a 'rock star thrill' while the CTO probably blasts off in his career and collects his $millions. Well done!
>> every status call about the project took some variation of “great idea, boss”
I read that in two ways.
1. The CTO / management let that fly, instead of reflecting and challenging people when they repeated receive nothing but agreement.
2. People were apathetic, which means they weren't really engaged in meetings, which means the meetings were the wrong format shouldn't have been happening.
Good companies encourage engagement (say the uncomfortable thing), empowerment (servant-leader), and reality (if anything is said that's not true, say something).
That is true, but the times I have seen such dynamics happen it was usually do to... emotional instability. If every time a subordinate brings you anything other than stellar news you get all emotional, angry and start blaming people guess what:
Nobody is going to give you the truth anymore — as A) it seems you can't handle it anyways and B) there is no incentive for them to give you the truth while there are many incentives to not give you the truth.
This is just bad leadership. The most important thing to make good decisions is correct and meaningful information. If you punish people for telling you things that you don't want to see, you will from now on never have a good picture of what is going on. Good luck making decisions that way.
And this isn't even rocket science, it is basic common sense.
Yes, that is bad leadership. But the article does not say that this CTO did this:
"If you punish people for telling you things that you don't want to see"
It is implied, but I rather see direct evidence of a culture of yes saying and grumbling behind the back, something I learned to hate. Most people in reality do not face a existential crisis, if they speak up and the boss gets mad. It might cause inconvenience, but this is already enough for many to just nod along and venting out that frustration later. And wondering why nothing ever changes.
Agreed, this is all speculation and I have seen corporate culture that worked despite bosses like that, but these were also corporate culutures which would have worked even better without the interruptions and "great ideas" from the top.
The main thing a boss can do is ensure the incentives for the behavior you want to see are there and there are disincentives for behavior you don't want to see. And with this over time corporate culture can be changed. But the peculiar thing is that you are part of corporate culture, and a part with special reach and importance — so you better act as you say.
>But if everyone confirms his bad decisions instead of pointing flaws out, then they are all part of the problem.
The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
If I'm in that position, my first priority is keeping my job. Correcting my boss in a culture where they are not accustomed to that is not helpful to job security.
I report to a CTO and certainly can point to people who are more like this, but even the most agreeable still pushes back sometimes. If you understand how CTOs think and what they want/need, it's not someone to poke holes in their plans, but propose adjustments and alternatives that fill the holes you see. It's almost like good improv
Also CTOs (especially in supposed F500 companies like presented here) don't typically drive the project execution and interact with the development team in a more than cursory basis. THis is another reason I'm super-skeptical of the entire story. The smallest company on the current list is over 16K employees.
Depends on the problem to solve. If they are trying to solve the problem of improving the CTO leadership skills, then yes, they are part of the problem. If they are solving the problem of putting food on the table, like most people are; then you might argue that this is sub-optimal, but I don't think putting their heads on the chop block is a better way to solve it.
I worked at a shop where 2 layers of management decided they didn't like to see red on RAG status reports and wanted to discuss "changing the definition of done" for projects to preclude you know.. actually shipping them to prod.
I have run into many people that work for companies, where vendor relationships are based on That Guy With the Really Good Coke at Burning Man, or, in more staid organizations, That Guy With the Prada Pimp Suit at the Country Club.
Many times, the higher-level managers are working on a culture, where they are The Big Decision-Makers, With A True Knowledge of The Big Picture, and everyone else is an interchangeable peon.
This is usually reinforced by their peers, and the culture is embedded like a tick. Pretty much impossible to dislodge, without damaging the entire company.
>I have run into many people that work for companies, where vendor relationships are based on That Guy With the Really Good Coke at Burning Man
This is the cynical view, but you're right.
But why does this surprise developers? The more optimistic view is: people want to work with people they like. I want to work with people I like.
There's a trope in the tech world of the ornery IT guy that everyone tolerates because he's smart. Well, a lot of times these people aren't as smart as they think they are, and will be the first to be replaced when it's possible. Life is too short to work with these kinds of people.
I believe in teams. I was a manager, for many years, and having a strong, healthy team was of paramount importance.
My team was pretty damn good. Almost everyone in it had decades of software development experience, but it was also difficult to manage. I had to deal with every member, individually, and had to sometimes be Bad Cop, but it worked.
When I interviewed candidates, I don't think I ever made a technical mistake, but I did hire people that broke the team, and they didn't last.
Teams are how we do big stuff. Individuals can be extremely productive, but there's an upper limit to how much they can do. If you can get a good team working, there's really no limit.
Being self-centered, dishonest, not taking responsibility, blaming others, etc.
Each person had to be very reliable, and that included admitting challenges, and asking for help, as long as it wasn't asking all the time.
Selfishness, where they would not compromise for the team, was a dealbreaker.
I gave each of my engineers a great deal of agency, and expected them to deliver, as opposed to having to ride them. They were grown-ups, and I needed them to act as if they were.
Personal Integrity and Honesty was a big deal for me, as was a sense of accountability.
Most managers "cop out," and only hire people that "fit the culture."
The problem is that homogeneity breeds mediocrity. If you want good, innovative stuff, you need to hire and manage people that don't "fit the mold." That's a challenge.
Everyone seems to get caught up on technical merit, but a good tech can generally be trained to do anything. During my tenure (almost 27 years, 25, as a manager), we went through many iterations of technology, programming languages, etc.
When we want a good, heterogeneous team, we need to hire for team cohesiveness, as well as technical merit. Almost no one we hired was able to just do the job, out of the starting gate. The tech was too specialized. We needed people that could be trained, and that would stay around (When they rolled up my team, the person with the least tenure had a decade).
Which points a larger problem: The vast majority of people are incapable of wisely handling the complexities of modern life.
>Pretty much impossible to dislodge, without damaging the entire company.
You are correct, the only way a good company can be built (if it can be built) is ground up.
In practice this does not happen. A sort of boiling frog phenomenon. The creep sets in because the founders hired or promoted people who have better soft skills (and sometime low on principles and hard skill) over people with hard skills. Sieving and assessing multitudes of prospective candidates for a job is a very time consuming, exhausting work, and people are often willing to settle for less, especially if the organization is really successful and the founders feel the need to expand rapidly.
Nope - Well run companies want to know the truth, expect mistakes, and want people to learn from them. In most of the teams I have been on, being a yes person is no t rewarded because yes people cannot deliver.
They were well run when they were small, then as they grew large they could live on just being large and dominant and started to accrue organizational debt like this. After a couple of decades almost no company is particularly well run, they grow until they are no longer well run or until they captured the entire market.
Former company of mine got a board member who pushed his "solution" on us, and it fucked up so much of our ordering processes, things we didn't even SELL were being shown. It took a year and a half to fix this, meanwhile it also meant we were unable to reverse a sale because "underwear" was shipped out and we can't cancel it (meanwhile, we don't sell underwear, just networking services). So we had to wait for the system to close out the ordering process and THEN they could assist the customer. Of course, that board member left a year later, Probably very pleased with himself for suckering our idiot CEO.
But that's ok cuz I got laid off of there, and I have no sympathy for that bumbling company. Idiots trying to outsource "solutions" that only added more pain for everyone.
Sometimes these are actual problems that need solutions but half the time ... It's just more crap to make themselves feel like they're "saving money but not building in house". Yeah just now you have to pay contracts to support the crap you never built in the first place. Good job. Golden parachutes for all the leaders, I guess.
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.
> 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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> we can all aspire to work in a company where people wouldn't be outright lying, nor feel that they needed to.
I think you should consider this might be antithetical to the very concept of a company - although don't misunderstand me to mean I think all companies are "dishonest" (even if many are).
"Working" in a "company" implying making some profit, usually implies something proprietary, which implies some secret, or with-holding of information/resources. So then, most, if not all companies, function off of scarcity-of-information/resources, and probably wouldn't be successful without.
Withholding of information or resources, is awfully close to the next step i.e. "lying". In fact, it is frequently requisite to "lie" i.e. tell half-truths in order to conceal/confuse/distort whereabouts, processes, etc. So while the stated goal of many companies may be transparency, this is actually incompatible with their own goals in many ways. And so this can be seen repeated internally, where "resources" usually imply "promotions", "sales leads", "job responsibilities".
This may explain why nearly every company seems to slowly become worse over time...
Many of the top companies you know were that healthy company once. You basically need to be one at that magical inflection point where the growth will crush you if your engineering is not empowered and on point. Especially back when clouds didn't exist, or were far less featureful, so turning dollars into horizontal growth was not a thing.
The dark secret is that being a healthy company is just a moment, not something a company is at all times. Staying a healthy company as you grown when you are actually successful is very hard, and once the health is gone, good luck regaining it, because now you have a lot of people that thrive in unhealthy environments.
Bang on. This is why I find these other comments which amount to "work in an unhealthy company? Just don't!" to be so naive. You're only ever one departure away from a shakeup which can totally change your work environment. If you aren't equipped or prepared to play the big game, then your options are
I have close to 15y of experience now, and I've mostly only worked on healthy companies - I can think of 1 that wasn't. I have worked in ~8 companies give or take.
Not OP, but I have a similar track record. Frequent switches because boredom, better pay (especially the first half of my career), and always searching for that amazing moment of confluence where I'm the dumbest guy in the room and working on an incredibly interesting/complex problem. Two years is about right to tackle something important and deliver, and also feel out if there are other opportunities at the current company. It has mostly worked out for me. You get really good at on-boarding yourself and getting up to speed quickly. I sell my labor as being an expert generalist and have professionally worked with half a dozen different languages, numerous different stacks, in a few different industries, and at big, small and in-between sized companies.
I feel like this approach wouldn't be able to make me truly valuable at any larger company for example, which in this case would be the ones considered unhealthy? Because there's enough complexity that takes years to understand. I think as an engineer your ability to provide value climbs in multiples the more you understand the product and what the company itself exactly values, besides the tech. You can solve meaningless problems using tech, but if you understand what is exactly worth solving, this is when your value can skyrocket, especially the larger the company is. Because you will have the understanding of marketing, leadership and product people while having technical capability to know what can be done.
And also I feel like if it's better to switch companies every 2 years because of better pay, it implies that the current company is not actually healthy, because if they were, they would understand the value you provide, you should be able to provide more value at their company rather than starting from scratch in another company.
While I don't feel my current company is healthy, at least I feel like I've been able to climb through promos and compensation faster than if I were to switch every 2 years. I have been there for 6 years.
Maybe you found a great company from the get go, those exist as well !
My pay bumps went something like: 1.5x, 1.5x, 2x, 2x, 1.5x, 1.5x, 2x (note that I changed countries twice so some of the bumps of 2x were also for a more expensive cost of life )
In only one of the companies I stayed more than 2y and was pretty great, I went from senior to senior manager within 4y. Now I’m at 2y again at my current company and am pretty happy, unlikely that I will change again.
The healthy part described by the parent post was along the lines of healthy work environment, not pay. Apart from my current company I’ve never worked somewhere that would give more then 5-10% increases per year, they were more like 0-5
>Because there's enough complexity that takes years to understand. I think as an engineer your ability to provide value climbs in multiples the more you understand the product and what the company itself exactly values, besides the tech. You can solve meaningless problems using tech, but if you understand what is exactly worth solving, this is when your value can skyrocket, especially the larger the company is. Because you will have the understanding of marketing, leadership and product people while having technical capability to know what can be done.
Yes, exactly. I am lucky that I am auto-didactic and grok things quickly. This is what I meant by complex/interesting problems: those are the kinds of problems that management is interested in because those make money. The more skilled management is, the more able they are to recognize those opportunities and allocate skilled labor to make it happen. The friction and need for finding a new company is when you work for under-skilled management that don't.
>And also I feel like if it's better to switch companies every 2 years because of better pay, it implies that the current company is not actually healthy, because if they were, they would understand the value you provide, you should be able to provide more value at their company rather than starting from scratch in another company.
Those companies only deal with the market reality when hiring new. Yes, it would make sense to retain your valuable people and reward them accordingly in an equitable situation, but when your shareholders are pressuring you to reduce labor costs, it is too tempting to give only CoL adjustments in spite of record profit quarters. They bank on retention through other means besides monetary (inertia, "career progression" cult, etc). To them, labor is a resource that is fungible rather than the core pillar of their business. They simply won't value your labor appropriately without negotiation.
Starting from scratch is really only a limitation if you don't ramp up quickly. And that means building social capital and demonstrating clear wins early.
> While I don't feel my current company is healthy, at least I feel like I've been able to climb through promos and compensation faster than if I were to switch every 2 years. I have been there for 6 years.
And how broad or deep has your experience been in those 6 years? Any serious migrations/rewrites/stack changes/scalability challenges/greenfield? Do you really feel you've been challenged professionally in that time? Being on the new hire cusp, especially for new initiatives is where all the action is and what has management's attention and capital expenditure. Being a backfill hire on a feature factory or vendor implementation team is definitely not where growth is going to happen.
And have you accumulated enough wins to make your next interview process easier? Thing is one of the gigs with the most impact in my career was one where I was able to find new opportunities within the org to deliver value, but it was the confluence of smart, motivated people working on interesting/complex things. If you aren't getting that, your 6 years in one place doing the same thing is working against you because all tech ages and decays.
In the beginning of my career I changed jobs quite often for better pay. That gave me a lot of big increases. In one of them I stayed less than 6 months.
I mean, nowhere's perfect, but I don't think I've ever worked anywhere as dysfunctional as the company depicted in the article. That's really quite bad. If the place you work is like that, consider applying elsewhere; this is not typical.
> Earlier on, people would tell the CTO it wasn't working out, instead of lying and saying the opposite.
I have done this, also have brass balls and dont give a fuck. EDIT: I mean tell the truth, so rare to not hide the fuck up. See MS security memo.
> There wouldn't be marathon whip-cracking over the holidays, especially not after the team was already burning out.
Ha ha ha ha ha... Ok this is partly true. IF you work in a BANK or in a FAANG then yes. If you work in any company that has "startup culture" forget it. The thing is that skin in the game (real skin) will change your attitude about work pretty quick. I dont think there are many companies where you will get it and have the opportunity to see that.
> But the way this story is told, it sounds like the manager/lead outright lied repeatedly up the chain of command, which is generally considered very-bad, in both healthy and unhealthy companies.
Do you know how many times I have been the cowboy who got some shit done in the dark of night cause it needed to happen? Most of the people I know who are good have gone this route. Hell I have seen these sorts of things happen AT A BANK.
Bend all the rules past breaking but tell no one. As long as you aren't making a huge fiscal bet (aka more than the company or your teams value) then your gonna get away with a lot. You either do it and get promoted or you get a new job (cause you limited your ability to get promoted).
> If you work in any company that has "startup culture" forget it.
Depends what "startup culture" is.
I actually did an early startup work marathon over Christmas, to help pull off a minor miracle, and make a very hard launch date successful.
But during the same period, I also managed the tasking/planning to shield a key teammate who'd gotten sick, and take stress off of them.
> Bend all the rules past breaking but tell no one.
I think that depends on the company, and the kind of rule.
In some companies, rules tend to be there for a reason, and if you break a rule, you generally have to disclose that, and maybe discuss it (ideally beforehand).
Even the healthiest large companies do this sort of thing, I've worked in a few and heck I've sold to a few too. Low code solutions that somehow need a team of contractors to deliver business functionality, delayed projects that drop key integrations to deliver something on time but functionally useless, CTOs whose next job depends on giving work to supplier. Worst of all, organisations that insist that they buy not build but then have larger software teams than their suppliers.
In a healthy company/organization:
* That outsourcing implementation approach probably wouldn't have happened, because an experienced person could've guessed how that would turn out, before it was started (it's such a cliche).
* Earlier on, people would tell the CTO it wasn't working out, instead of lying and saying the opposite.
* Whenever they needed to do something smarter/creative to rescue the project, they could work with the CTO on that, and maybe even with the customer.
* There wouldn't be marathon whip-cracking over the holidays, especially not after the team was already burning out.
* A manager/lead would go to bat for the success of the project and the health of the team, and insist upwards that the team needed a break over the holidays, if that needed to be clarified.
On that last point, in a "half-healthy" organization, a manager might intentionally be very vague, and omit information. That happens, and might or might not be a good idea, depending.
But the way this story is told, it sounds like the manager/lead outright lied repeatedly up the chain of command, which is generally considered very-bad, in both healthy and unhealthy companies.
I'll add that these things are vastly easier to armchair-quarterback. Certainly we're all going to make mistakes, especially when put in difficult positions, and/or when overextended/fatigued. But it helps to look at scenarios, to try to learn from them, and to think from a distance how they might've been handled better, so you're armed with that "experience", the next time you're tossed into a rough situation that has some similarities.