The first time, I lacked the self-confidence to speak up in the face of dominating people. So I internalized their behavior as "proof" of my incompetence - in the face of the patently obvious facts to the contrary, in the face of my own experience and judgement. Naturally, this made things much worse - I consider myself "part of the problem" in that case, though not the largest part by any means. Anyway, I was fired a few months later.
The second time, it was a breaking point - the CEO, who said those things was incorrigible, and the situation was unworkable. I called my boss in the morning (the fucker CEO had been yelling at me at 11 at night) and gave notice. He quit too - exhausted of losing engineers and being party to the abuse. Within the month, they lost most of their engineering team, and the few who stayed had received promotions and substantial pay increases to incentivize sticking around. They also "saw the light" and halted feature work for several months while (I assume) the worked on fixing their tech debt problem.
I've done really substantial work on myself since then, and I feel like I'm in a much better place to appropriately execute the soft skills required by my position. So I'd like to think that if (or rather, when :) ) the first situation occurs again, I will be self-assured enough to push back in an effective non-confrontational way, or at least speak my mind instead of being silenced by the unreasonable shame of an inappropriate dressing down. I would find ways of halting the narrative every time bullshit was spoken, and address the "inaccuracy" instead of behaving in a way that that manager took as confirming his suspicions that I was the problem.
And, in the second case, I'd have quit way, way earlier, when I saw all the previous red flags.
Mostly though, I'm not going to work for hotheaded, first-time founder-engineers so recently graduated from college, so bereft of the experience required to lead an engineering team. :)
The second time, it was a breaking point - the CEO, who said those things was incorrigible, and the situation was unworkable. I called my boss in the morning (the fucker CEO had been yelling at me at 11 at night) and gave notice. He quit too - exhausted of losing engineers and being party to the abuse. Within the month, they lost most of their engineering team, and the few who stayed had received promotions and substantial pay increases to incentivize sticking around. They also "saw the light" and halted feature work for several months while (I assume) the worked on fixing their tech debt problem.
I've done really substantial work on myself since then, and I feel like I'm in a much better place to appropriately execute the soft skills required by my position. So I'd like to think that if (or rather, when :) ) the first situation occurs again, I will be self-assured enough to push back in an effective non-confrontational way, or at least speak my mind instead of being silenced by the unreasonable shame of an inappropriate dressing down. I would find ways of halting the narrative every time bullshit was spoken, and address the "inaccuracy" instead of behaving in a way that that manager took as confirming his suspicions that I was the problem.
And, in the second case, I'd have quit way, way earlier, when I saw all the previous red flags.
Mostly though, I'm not going to work for hotheaded, first-time founder-engineers so recently graduated from college, so bereft of the experience required to lead an engineering team. :)