>he asked the team, “for this meeting I’d like us to try and introduce ourselves a little differently. If you’re comfortable, I’d like us to try and be 10% more vulnerable than we normally would in a work setting.” I remember feeling a mix of anxiety and excitement rise in my chest. I sat pondering what I would share. I decided to go for more than 10%. I shared about how my marriage had almost collapsed a couple years prior and a taste of how painful it was. Some of my coworkers shared deeper things I’d never heard in a work setting. It was awkward. It was beautiful.
I'd rather not have my manager forcing me to do group therapy. I owe the company some work hours and they own me money.
If I want to have personal relations with someone from my work, befriend somebody, share personal things, that is my choice. My personal life is not the company business.
Of course I wouldn't say all that to the manager, but 'I'll put him on the list of people I should be careful about, and fake some confessions.
It’s pretty nuts, putting out your dirty laundry in public is a surefire way to self sabotage - especially in a work setting. In American culture, there’s a lot of “positive self help” talk about being open about these things. But the reality is - it actually just provides drama and ammunition to people who might not have your best interests at heart. Some things are best kept between your close trusted friends and family or therapist, no matter how trendy the culture is about being “open”.
- secret slack room to help me overcome my depression (wasn't invited of course, I just spotted it several times while looking at my colleagues' screens)
- lowest paid member in the team, while also being one of if not the most productive. 12x: verified. 30x: speculated if I had control over the architecture.
- 70h/week, no vacations, for 3 years. No paid overtime of any form.
- Double bind situation where I was used as a punching ball between the CTO and the #2 employee.
- Excluded from secret negotiations to obtain a raise.
You know what I did ? I quitted, cold turkey. That's when the CEO started to hate on me, feeling betrayed. The #2 left shortly after confiding he wanted to punch the CTO in the face. After realizing hiring someone to replace me wasn't cutting it, they distributed overtime to everybody on the team. Result: unionization. One year after my departure I received a call from the COO telling me he was willing to hire me back at the condition I would behave (since I was thrown at every hot issue, semantic propagation tied in their mind the idea I was also problematic). He was let go shortly after and replaced by a manager from the holding company (if you know what I mean). I haven't worked in 6-7 years. Most colleagues who left have had a similar empty period.
HN doesn't smile on frequent account cycling, but throwaways for sensitive disclosures are possible.
OP could likely walk from their ID easily should they choose. It would be difficult to tie the account to a specific legal / professional identity, though there are some personal-ish details in their history.
I haven't named the company nor indulged in excess in the way I expressed my views. What poses problem goes beyond the aftertaste the loaded and one-sided account of a conflict leaves in the mouth. There is something scandalous in what I said, because it tells a story of contagion, in which what's as stake is not the mere risk of hiring a walking red flag, but of losing your ability to assess risk and becoming one yourself. What could have possibly happened to a manager whose job is conditioned on his ability to hire back someone and who approaches the problem with "you better behave". He lost track of economical reality, passion took hold of him and made him blind to his own interests. Why ? Because we engaged in a symbolic exchange using taboo tokens. The danger doesn't lie on the individual level, and isn't rooted on whether or not we are opened to these topics, but depend on the fact that being taboo, these subjects are not codified enough in social norms to operate in a mechanical fashion. Imagine if someone were to thank you every time you'd do him a favor in a society which wouldn't have this norm. We do it automatically and do not give it a second thought. But in a context like this, it would ring like "I'll think about you", or "mucho gracias", "many graces". "Who is this weirdo ? Is he stalking me ? Is he high or part of some cult ?". It would work up people, they would get cognitively and emotionally involved, it would slowly turn into an obsession as they lose track of other values, in particular economical ones, up to the moment they say "why are you doing this to me after all I've done for you by opening up to your issues ?", completely blind to reality banging on the door.
We are not ready to discuss this kind of things. We are not equipped to deal with the kind of storms this can raise on the collective level and proactive openness on the individual level we're restricted to, no matter how hard we wish for a transcendance, is an enabler of these situations where no isolation of individual responsibility can pin-point the source of the issue. I mean I got along with everyone and the people I had the most temporary conflictual relationships at some point were also those I was closest too. In the beginning we all had good intentions. Nevertheless, double-bind propagated in the group like an epidemic, preventing us from having innocent relationships. Suddenly, invoices were issued, each party establishing accounts in different currencies.
In the end, from a cold-headed analysis of the situation, I still think I was the one that was behaving. If this was a story about my circle of friends, I'd be the asshole, placing economical matters in a central position, as if we were in a corporate setting. But it's my employer who behaved as if we were friends, and started neglecting economical considerations to its detriment.
In short, speaking of mental health made everybody unhealthy. In fact I'm not the one who overshared, my father did. I didn't show up for a couple days and blacked out communication-wise (because of a girl, a half-truth). The CEO phoned my dad who confided I was suffering from bipolar disorder since my teens which just isn't true from a clinical perspective (this is my sister's diagnostic in fact). Shortly after everybody was in the know. I could tell from their terrified eyes when they glanced at me when I came back. They were afraid I'd flip my shit. This is something we can't deal with. You can't just be designated as being a "little crazy". This expands to "a little [very-weird]". There is a perceptual threshold, including among health and sometimes even mental health professionals that makes people assume past a certain point you just flip your shit, that's your thing, an irreducible otherness that sleeps within you. Needless to say this has never happened to me (unlike my sister).
You can't just unveil taboos, you always end up exposing a mask. There is something very archaic to what happened to me, something attuned to the idea that naming illness is what propagates it: to deal with the mask, you have to wear one yourself (in the form of a secret slack channel for instance, even though as someone who used to belong to it told me, it was set up to find ways to help me). This idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Although I have only explained how my employer was contaminated by what ought to be called "panic" in light of its etymological and anthropological roots, I think you can easily picture how this kind of situation can make you crazy. And if I'm responsible in any way of letting myself get contaminated, this is by entertaining this very idea, that being designated as crazy was slowly turning a lie into reality. The epitome of madness, supreme injustice, that isn't that different of accusing someone of having cast a spell on you. Tough stuff that puts all of us back into the jungle.
To conclude, I'm not even out of this hellish loop, since I still have a gaping hole in my CV I can only mask. There is no way explaining the reason behind it like I'm doing here would diffuse or at least atone this red flag. Innocence is impossible, I have to maintain the mask in order for it to not cause explosive contagion.
To those worrying this I'm posting under my real name: I'm not. And I was able to work as much for so long because I was enjoying it. This wasn't that different than alpinism.
> no matter how trendy the culture is about being “open”
I've noticed this trend in recent years to be "open about mental health", etc. And I think by itself this is great, mental health is important. But invariably, especially in management/HR settings (or in the entertainment industry), it is done in an incredibly shallow way.
Mental health is hard. Just talking openly isn't magically going to fix things and may even initially make things worse. It may release feelings that need to be carefully managed e.g. by a therapist. Obviously, no company would ever be able to provide that. Instead, they're just looking for "I started running every morning and was able to fix my depression" kind of stories.
"I used to have anxiety over being a good developer, but then I realized that it was about hitting story points, not learning Rust. Now I deliver business value regularly and have been able to cancel my appointments with my therapist."
"Being on-call 24/7 helps me feel like I'm a part of something, fulfilling a deep want for belonging that being kicked off the Girl Scout troop created in me."
"I've always lacked a father figure. When you told me to spend less time browsing HackerNews and more time on Jira, I felt like I was part of a real family."
> Some things are best kept between your close trusted friends and family or therapist, no matter how trendy the culture is about being “open”.
This makes total sense if you have a therapist and / or have friends you can be vulnerable with (and know how to). But there are undoubtedly those who do not have that. For them the risk of career sabotage vs a change of improved quality of life might be worth considering. I don't know where the breakdown is, probably against mandatory sharing in the work setting on the account of an average workspace being pretty adversarial. However, if I could make a call for my younger self I would choose to share.
I also agree with this sentiment but at the same time I think it boils down to how you interpret these things , for op it was one of the greatest things but to somebody else , this makes boss not likeable.
I think this shows that the boss was going out of his way which I "personally" appreciate.
I don't know what people expect managers / boss to do. Somebody on team expects their boss to X and somebody else on that same team expects their boss to be anything but X.
If I ever become a manager , I am probably taking this boss's approach , I think its good to have some talks like this. I am also much inspired by the likes of charles schwab and dale carnegie's how to win friends and influence people so probably there is a bias here
> I don't know what people expect managers / boss to do
What they do should be related to the company work, otherwise they're overstepping. They're not social workers. They have to respect the privacy and independence of their coworkers.
> If I ever become a manager , I am probably taking this boss's approach
Please don't. Coworkers can obviously have social relationships but they should grow organically without being "managed".
You know the best way for that to happen is? Let them work together. They'll build their own relationships. They don't need your help. If they don't work together enough for this to happen naturally then they're strangers to each other anyway and that's ok too.
It sounded like an optional request not a command. I’ve managed and I’ve been managed and the relationship ships I’ve built along the way are deep enough to have conversations like these. We’re doing life with this people it’s not a dystopian novel about capitalism. If you have a genuine person as your boss moments like these help form friendships, and don’t feel like a dark Dilbert comic.
Friendships increase team communicability which bolster project success.
An "optional request" in a public group setting like that is not optional. You were non-optionally forced to respond to the challenge one way or another. If you don't share, then you're the guy who opted not to share. It turns off the touchy feely types who like it and don't understand the problem and can be "not a team player" fodder for anyone who wants it.
The actual respectful and considerate way is not to put people in such positions in the first place.
Like asking something from someone where it would be some unusual imposition or favor (like something that would be ok to ask a friend or family but not a mere aquaintance) and telling them it's ok if they say no. That is an empty statement. You were not supposed to put them in the position where they had to say no.
You can allow for people to not be robots without putting other people into awkward positions they didn't deserve to be put in.
It's definitely favoring some people at the expense of others. Like the gp comment, now they not only have to do their normal job, they also have to generate bs for their manager. The manager should be the one who has to figure out how to work with their different people, not the other way around. That is the managers explicit role that they supposedly get paid more for and what gives them the authority to manage and judge anyone else. That's their actual job rather than coding or whatever. Instead, they are making their team members all conform to them, on top of their actual jobs which are supposed to be something other than managing people.
Still, you'd rather save your push back privileges - which come with a cost - for something actually important and work-related. Not for random crap like that, being put on the spot randomly in a personal way.
I mean, I am a manager and if I saw another manager doing this type of exercise I would probably report it because it seems extremely inappropriate and they would probably want a heads up that we have a manager trying to be a wannabe therapist rather than trying to foster a safe and productive team environment.
In what way is this ever providing someone with 'ammunition' and how is this self-sabotage? What are you afraid someone would do with this kind of information?
Reading this comment and others feels like people have read a bit too much Sun Tzu and are treating what could be collegiality as warfare.
Maybe you’ve never worked at a company like this. Did you not see the note about his perf review, which had nothing to do with his performance (the actual outcome) but instead had random negative feedback? Like not involving coworkers enough? What if your “confession” indicated that you have a hard time opening up and involving others? Couching your feedback in a personal insecurity makes it far less likely it will be challenged since the person already has a complex about it.
> random negative feedback? Like not involving coworkers enough?
You got the order of events wrong. That was with the first manager, before the "10% more vulnerable" meeting. (Not saying it's a good idea though.) (Or did you mean sth else?)
From the article:
> I told my team I was struggling with depression and took some time off. ...
Its not difficult to imagine a person saying 'i have nothing i want to share here' be stigmatised in future. As a person who doesnt want to work together and be part of the company culture.
I'm not sure anyone wants to share the work-safe marginally funny story they use around new people as the chaser to someone discussing how they got clean off drugs or recently dealt with a miscarriage or something.
Like will anyone care? Probably not but it's an incredibly awkward situation to toss people into when they're at work.
which would probably even work okay because everyone loves and applauds a success story or something that isn't your fault, but imagine someone sharing their ongoing drug addiction. People who think that workplaces are "safe" spaces for personal issues should try envisioning what the reaction to that would be.
It would be OK to discuss drug addiction with your parents. It would not be OK to discuss steamy night with your wife with them.
It's almost like adult people can understand environment and make conscious decisions what is acceptable and what is 10% they can bend the rules if they want to switch the mood a little.
Honestly it's hilarious how supposedly emotionally mature people panic and over-analyse in this thread.
> Almost like adult people can understand environment and make conscious decisions what is acceptable [...]
Apparently not because in TFA, the author shared personal facts about their divorce and other people shared even "deeper" things they'd "never heard in a work setting". Quote: "it was awkward".
These aren't things that belong in a workplace context (sure, if you're going out for drinks after work maybe you can volunteer such things - but not during a workplace meeting!).
Because bosses exist on a scale. For the sake of the argument, let’s use American letter grades.
The boss mentioned above would be a “B” boss - good intentions, but a forced execution that shifts more of the burden to employees. I don’t necessarily mind these types, but it can be incredibly off-putting for those of us who work to live, rather than live to work.
Above that you have the “A” bosses, who invite that level of vulnerability by repeatedly displaying their trustworthiness to you and the team. I’ve had a few of these bosses before, and they’re amazing; sadly, they rarely last long in the face of “maximum profit” corporate cultures that demand everyone be a replaceable cog in a machine.
Okay, so at what point does that become “forced group therapy?” The C-D-F bosses.
C-rank bosses will demand vulnerability because they mistake it for honesty or loyalty. Good employees pick up on this and will placate them with some useless trivia nugget but otherwise have mediocre to bad rapport with said boss.
D-grade bosses are even worse. They’ll push and pull and drag and yank something suitably vulnerable from everyone, and even try to solutionize whatever was shared with the team. This is (in my subjective experience) the most common form of boss, born of MBA coursework and saddled with buzzword-laden articles of “how to be a better leader” from magazines no C-Suite would be caught dead reading.
Finally is the F-grade boss, who literally just wants to know who is going to need replacing imminently. Don’t get me wrong, this is something every other grade is silently doing as well (hence the “forced group therapy” metaphor), but F-grade bosses are bad enough to be overt about it. Got a coworker who mentions they’re trying to have a baby? They’ll make sure said coworker never has a positive review again, so it’s easier to replace them once they’re pregnant.
All of this is to say that if YOU are a boss, and an employee is being vulnerable with you in an unprompted or non-coerced manner, you have won their trust and you better respect that. But if you’re forcing them to be vulnerable somehow, you’re actually harming the trust relationship in the long run and will make your staff wary of your motives.
Prove they can trust you, and they’ll open up on their own.
This is great. I absolutely agree that the best leaders gently invite and lead with appropriate vulnerability. They also don't mind if people say "no" either with words or body language.
Power asymmetry and also group pressure. There is still plenty of tacit pressure to share despite the "optional" caveat. Someone who says directly "I don't like this, no thank you" even in very deferential words will garner some degree of negativity, either from the manager or the group. Same for someone who shares too much and winds up sobbing, or someone who shares a vulnerability inconsequential in comparison to what others share.
I don't even know how I would react if i was caught off-guard with a stupid question like that out of the blue with everyone watching. On a good day, I would probably laugh it off and say something obviously idiotic like "my vulnerability is that i work too hard" to indicate that I don't find this amusing. On a bad day, caught off-guard, I might actually take the bait, "become vulnerable" and blurt out something far more stupid in front of everybody.
I know I won't be able to convince everyone here, but I didn't feel pressured to share anything deeply personal. Some people on the team didn't. They weren't punished or looked down on. We were a tight-knit team before and after that event.
Interesting to know. Seems people who reply here, a bit assume it's a group of competitive coworkers who mostly don't know each other, in a big cut-throat corp?
I'd been ok with that meeting at my first job (together with my closest coworkers only). It'd been weird at my 2nd job though. I guess it depends :-)
Your manager asking you something is never a request. How you "choose" to answer directly affects how they will perceive you, and there is an implication.
People are very weird. 10% more vulnerable to me would be a story about “I’m not very good at painting but I like it” or “I have 6 toes on my left foot”. As opposed to divorce, bipolar, etc.
A manager asking a teammate to do something in front of a bunch of other people - even "only if you're comfortable" - always puts them in a position where they feel they have to do the thing. Come on, this is basic social behavior.
I get an optional ask from a manager is still an ask, but i agree 10% more vulnerable means it's ok to show some weakness like disliking public speaking or imposter symdrome, maybe past/resolved trauma. Strong opposing views seem to focus on sharing big things like a recent miscarriage or drug abuse or depression... That feels inappropriate as way over 10% and indeed should be directed to therapy not a work meeting.
also it makes a difference if there are actual mental health benefits associated and manager training to handle things properly (including confidentially) or if it is one "rogue" well meaning manager initiative in a culture where it doesn't fit.
Sharing may help or backfire case by case even if the culture is open and supportive. I've seen enough FTEs get more benefits but contractors/contingency staff being let go after coming out with similar mental health issues...
Read his description a couple more times, while pretending that you're a therapist. The "wait, what the ?" stuff can give you a better sense of his emotions and mental state, if you don't balk at the objective counterfactuals.
In recent years I had a manager who read a lot of pop-psychology and self-help books. His 1:1s turned into pseudo therapy sessions where he tried to assume the role of therapist. He and I did not get along because I politely changed the subject back to work and the office every time he tried to get me to “open up” about my childhood, my home life, my fears and anxieties, and other topics.
I thought he was a weird outlier, but I joined an invite-only Slack for management a while ago where I’d estimate 1/4 of the topics in the #1-on-1s channel are from managers trying to psychoanalyze their team or act as therapists. The good news is that the Slack is very good about correcting these people about their role and what is appropriate for work. The bad news is that these new managers are getting the idea from somewhere that they need to be some type of therapist and patriarch of the team. It feels like a weird iteration of new-age management philosophies that breed in B-list business books and social media like LinkedIn.
This is wild to me. As someone who's done some eng management and has also read a lot of psychoanalytic theory, the only things I would actively ask my reports to "open up" about emotionally are what they like and dislike about tasks and processes, so I can better distribute work that satisfies them and remove frictions. That said if they want to tell me more, I'm happy to listen.
Otoh when dealing with peers at director or C level, things tend to get significantly more psychological, likely because their facility of judgment, which is ultimately psychological and moral, is functioning with far higher leverage due to their organizational authority.
I'm a serious work focused person too and my manager is a little on the mushy side. Exasperating for me, but the younger talent on the team eats it up so it works for him in that respect. I'm still not sure what percentage of it is an act.
I wouldn’t necessarily be worried about them using it against me later, just the fact that they want to force me to open up and be pretend buddies is annoying. It’s a work relationship.
It could be just me enjoying remote work, but I am not looking to be friends with them 4000 km away. I’m too old for this, I know all my work friendships faded away in a couple of years and even in those years we focused on work and chat about career.
Don’t force me to share personal things with everyone. I’ll share it if I feel like it with the ones that I feel like it.
I'm thinking maybe this is rather to present an opportunity for the team to put forward their expectations, pain points and desires. Being 'vulnerable' for me in a workplace setting means perhaps admitting that I really don't appreciate people bikeshedding over items I'm submitting for review (rather than being actually constructive) or that I feel the git work flow don't attribute fairly (hiding my contributions). Maybe others feel the same and we could do something about it? And those were only on individualistic side. To evolve the team and team play I'd think this a good time to bring up that I'm actually hating responding to support inquiries and rather have Pete doing more of that. And that I think Sue is doing amazing work with Figma and I'd really like to learn from her. Wouldn't this type of 'vulnerable' make sense in a team?
Paraphrasing Seth Godin: do you want your heart surgeon greeting you before surgery by authentically telling you about the big fight he just had with his wife this morning?
Not gonna lie. When these sorts of situations have arisen in the past, I find it really tempting to troll. These prompts are such BS that they just invite a BS response.
“Whoo. OK. I’ve never talked about this, but here goes. When I was 12 I used a Hello Kitty doll to kill a man. Wow. Feels great to finally get that off my chest.”
One time at a corporate retreat, we had to fill out each others' "friend books" (I'm not making this up). One question was about our personal motto. I wrote down "Hell is other people" - I think some people took the hint.
We had a team building exercise, that I wasn't able to attend. The person running it decided that a great ice-breaker would be for everyone to name their greatest fear.
I'm a parent. You can probably pretty easily infer what my greatest fear is.
Would I share that? Fuck no! Not only am I not particularly willing to get that intimate with a bunch of strangers, I also don't want to be a huge fucking downer. What I do want is to recognize that while you can speed-run friendship & bonding to some degree, it's fucking inappropriate to try to do so at work. It's work. I'll make friends if I make friends, but otherwise I'm out at 5, physically, mentally and emotionally.
Neither would I. I can only think of this question having any place in such a situation if you suffix it by "at work" and exclude the obvious things such as getting fired or the company going bust.
Well, the manager asked only for “10% more vulnerable”. That seems pretty far from “being forced into group therapy” in my perception.
It was the author and colleagues that decided to overstate, and seemingly did not regret. Groups of humans sometimes have connections like these, whatever the environment they are in.
I am sure other similar meeting with the same prompt only generated people saying they have two cats, they I am anxious about learning a new programming language or that they do not quite understand Stripe business model
10% "more vulnerable" for me in a work setting would amount to something like "the eggs I made this morning were a bit overcooked", because I don't share anything vulnerable about myself at work. Especially not with managers. I have a sneaking suspicion that wouldn't be an acceptable answer in that meeting, however.
Making high performance teams is part of their job description though, and there is research to indicate that teams with strong social bonds perform better.
Those teams develop strong social bonds precisely because their manager doesn't request (force) them to be 10% more vulnerable. That's a 1-way ticket to a bunch of people not liking you.
You can achieve that vulnerability via being a likable and honest person. I think often us technical-minded people forget that relationships aren't an optimization problem and don't respond like you think they would. Just being decent and trustworthy will take you there, saying things like "you can trust me guys!" often has the opposite effect.
Yeah but you don't form strong social bonds through awkward team exercises. The best team I worked on was super high performing and we did end up sharing personal stuff on our spare time eventually (and some of us are still friends years later). That all happened organically.
What didn't work, however, was the office manager's increasingly awkward attempts to force socialising. When at some point we raised the issue (politely!) that this was often distracting, he became offended and lashed out. We later also found out that he was basically spying on us and reporting back to HQ.
It's one of the reasons why I'm incredibly wary of people who try too hard to be my "buddy" at work, especially if they're not peers.
Asking a question in front of a group, bur adding a "if you're comfortable", doesn't really make the problem go away. There's always a pressure to answer, even if you say that answering is optional. It's not a horrible violation but it's still kind of weird and unnecessary in a professional context.
Because you cannot freely say no to that. They have authority over you. Even if they promise it won't affect their opinion of you, you never know if that is actually true. So you are forced to play along.
I promise you I mean this sincerely, and not in a memey internet insult kind of way - are you perhaps autistic?
I ask because this is exactly the type of comment one of my siblings would make, and she is on the spectrum. She wouldn't be able to understand the social dynamics at play here, whereas for other folks it's just common sense. "Optional" is not really optional in some social settings, and that's something autistic folks struggle with being aware of, much less understanding. The activity may be optional in the most pedantic sense; you won't be struck down by lightning if you decide not to participate. But there will be consequences.
All of which is another reason why this whole exercise is an awful idea, considering that the number of autistic folks in software engineering is probably a bit higher than the population baseline.
You are not your code, but putting my code up to be torn apart in a PR definitely feels like being vulnerable to me. It's a good thing for it to be torn apart and scrutinized, so as to make the product better, which is what we're all after, but it still touches a nerve when the reviewer is an ass about it.
Yup. Absolutely zero percent chance a Jr dev's expressed vulnerability that day was "when I see sr dev is sitting at his desk muttering "stupid fucking idiots" and reviewing PRs, I get scared and anxious".
I’ve heard of exactly these “vulnerability sharing” exercises from colleagues, but luckily have not experienced it myself.
Anyone starting to over-share becomes very problematic, because it forces everyone to conform. One of my colleagues didn’t feel like sharing anything personal, and he was silently outcast for the rest of the offsite and it continued to bite him in the ass for the rest of his time in that team.
The examples were very similar to those mentioned - people talking about their divorces, sex life, etc. I don’t think it’s fair to force colleagues to share such stories with each other.
"I think your question is overly invasive and inappropriate in a professional work setting, and I'm not going to answer it."
Is that more than 10%?
Another option would be what Norm Macdonald did when Larry King asked him "what's something nobody knows about you" and he answered "I'm a deeply closeted homosexual." Just go over the top.
Yea, this was really disturbing. Your work and manager already have a lot of power over you. It seems really nefarious to ask employees to bring in vulnerabilities about themselves from outside of work. I don’t buy the team building nonsense, which will probably used as the “explanation” here.
I work in manufacturing and we have a weekly safety slide that normally presents a safety based work scenario or learning, this week's one was based on how to be safe while out trick or treating and one of the guys said he didn't appreciate being told in how to behave outside of work hours. I have have to admit that his attitude caught me off guard but I understand where he is coming from even if the intention comes from a good place finding the line between work and home can be a grey area. Saying that I don't thinkmi would appreciate being ambushed with being asked to provide a personal anecdote
Putting aside the trite "we're cool here" corporate routine, it sounds to me like a hack of a manager gave someone the opening to trauma dump on their co-workers and some by-standers got treated to some drive by group theory. Awful all around.
I am the kind of guy who wears his heart on his sleeve. I grew up in a familialy dishonest context so being open and transparent has been my default.
That attitude is a liability at work and I’ve learned the hard way.
We’ve all heard the phrase don’t shit where you eat. In modern workplace cadence that means don’t use your workplace as your source of therapy or friends or certainly family.
The way we present yourselves at work has to intrinsically be a performance because that’s how money works.
Find another place to express emotions and thoughts and find friends. That place should not be the workplace.
You choose your friends because you have shared interests and you make each other feel good. You have family because they brought you into the world and you have shared qualities and bonds. You chose your job because it pays you. You do it for the ducats. Don't get it twisted.
I agree and this wasn't the only red flag in the post for me. The reverence for a company that does, in the end, "just" process payments or the part about "a billionaire liked my project"... I feel like there's something rather unhealthy about that kind of mindset.
All the best to the author of the post, hopefully they can find more meaningful work.
> The reverence for a company that does, in the end, "just" process payments
It is funny how the more unimportant the company is, the more this kind of reverence is expected.
For me there was a stark contrast between two jobs I had:
Consultancy where I worked on software for local government that millions literally depend on? Keep your work-life 100% separate.
Marketing startup that spammed Google with crazy amounts of SEO-spam? Lots of instructions from HR to ask about personal matters in 1-on-1 meetings, weekly 2h mandatory confraternization followed by free beer, random CEO speech about his favorite topic for 1h every month.
I think the better approach would be for the manager to share something themselves, to demonstrate that a bit of vulnerability is okay, but not even ask if anyone else wants to say anything and certainly not make people feel they should. In other words lead by example so that if someone feels like they want to open up they can and their manager will be supportive.
10% more vulnerable than normal is open to interpretation. You don't need to lie or put anyone on a list, it's just an attempt to foster persona relations between a team, the idea being with a little empathy and knowledge of each other people might be more likely to resolve future differences amicably.
It's funny how people in this thread are arguing that the 10% isn't a big deal when we have TFA describing how they shared personal details about their divorce upon hearing this prompt, and that other people apparently shared even more intimate things.
There are ways of lighten the mood that are decidedly less abusive, such as "tell us something funny about yourself" or "what is your hobby?". You don't have to like such questions either but at least they're not open invitations for trauma dumping.
So now you have a bunch of people that freely overshared and that would freely overshare anyhow, you have people that invented something like "my cat just died" and everyone is now doling out condolences and asking how they feel for weeks even though they never even had a cat and they secretly hate the boss and the one guy that openly said they don't do stuff like that at work and they're now shunned by everyone.
Worked out great, didn't it?
Now the above is probably a bit over top but it shows the typical American company culture effect. Going through this at work right now since we got bought by Americans and more and more fakeness is coming in.
Imo you're being a bit dramatic. I find it nice to work with real people, I'm work from home right now and its odd to me just how little I know about the people I ostensibly share 8 hours a day with.
See I think there is a huge difference between naturally getting to know your coworkers and this group pressure sharing exercise.
It's completely fine to get to know your coworkers. But let the oversharing ones (the extroverts) congegrate together naturally. We had someone like that on the team. Was likeable enough but wouldn't stop talking about everything in their life. That was their choice tho and I am fine to listen but I'm not "sharing back".
And then there were introverts. Some that spoke very very little and some that were in the middle. They randomly shared some things from time to time in quieter moments with less people around and when they felt comfortable. Very real people and it was nice to get to know the a bit more.
I'm more on the introvert side there and if you group pressure me into this sort of thing I will remember that for a very very very long time. As in we are never gonna be friends. I'm still sour about what an extrovert HR person did 4 years ago and I don't speak to them any longer. They are also showing from time to time that they haven't changed and they'd be the type to use whatever came out in an oversharing session against you.
I'm on the introvert side too fwiw, I just feel like inventing a dead cat is a pretty out there response for the situation, which was a gentle push to be a little more open than usual for those that feel comfortable. Definitely can be taken too far in either direction. Without any place for chit chat being set up for it though, at least in my company, the 'natural' amount of sharing is basically zero, which feels like not enough for me.
It's not a gentle push though. It's setting up a group pressure situation that is definitely gonna make introverts feel uncomfortable (by a probably extroverted person that may genuinely not understand what they're even doing in that regard as it'd feel natural for them).
Now I understand that with remote work there may not be enough space for chit chat. But there are other ways than a forced group pressure situation to set that up.
For example, we decided as a team when Covid WFH started to basically use our daily 15 min stand-up for whatever. Sometimes we just did stand-up and we're out of there after 5 min coz nobody felt like talking. Sometimes it'd be a half an hour of just talking about whatever. We also have a dedicated time each week blocked off on the calendar for it as well and when we have ad hoc working session calls we get in some chit chat here or there as well. It's not all just business but it can be.
RE cat: see this is the internet and it's an anonymous forum. I used that example because our cat actually just died a few weeks ago. You thought it was over the top. Interesting indeed.
I thought feeling compelled to make up a story like a dead cat would be over the top, I'm so sorry that actually happened.
I don't quite get the difference between a blocked off time for chit chat and the way the manager asked for it here but totally, being forced like you have to say something you don't want to sucks.
Feeling compelled to make up a story is part of the whole group pressure thing. Either you overshare i.e. share something that actually happened but that you would never have wanted to share without the group (and boss) pressure situation or you make something up (like many people in the comments here are saying).
I guess the difference is the same what I mentioned about stand-up changing: The team decided to do that. It wasn't a manager saying that's how we do things now.
EDIT: I also just realized you gave out condolences. See if I was in the situation from the article I might not be able to quickly come up with something fake and I'd instinctively just mention the cat thing (coz I don't want to be the guy that gets shunned). And then the next few weeks are gonna be very uncomfortable coz people will keep mentioning it.
I had a manager do something like this but in a slightly better way. Each week we took it in turns doing our "life story". Some did it funny, some did it really personal and serious, some more of a CV, and some a mix of them all. You could really decide how you wanted to do it, and people got to know you a bit better.
When these things come up I just share work vulnerabilities like, "Yeah, that project I pushed for was a terrible idea in hindsight." Or "I'm really struggling with this project because I don't know if anyone cares about it".
That way I tick the participation box without making it therapy.
This isn't and shouldn't be the typical response to such things.
The boss had also become vulnerable asking you to be 10% more vulnerable.
I think I would respect it more than harsh cold calculating boss.
And also the chinese gospel's taking its effect here , the post above this paraphrased it differently and this has taken it to completely different level.
Nobody is forcing you with a gun to tell things or else you are fired
the boss just said , " Hey if you are comfortable , lets try to be a little vulnerable " and if you didn't like it you could've said " hey boss , I appreciate your gesture but I really really wouldn't like to share it as it would be a violation of my privacy , hope you understand "
This would probably be my approach if I was one of those people who hated boss asking him such thing but I don't. I think I like it.
> The boss had also become vulnerable asking you to be 10% more vulnerable.
That's really irrelevant. It's like taking your pants down, showing your privates and assuming your coworkers will do the same.
Absolutely unacceptable especially when it comes from position of power, where workers may think that if they don't engage they'll get fired or won't get promotion. It's coercion.
> the boss just said , " Hey if you are comfortable , lets try to be a little vulnerable " and if you didn't like it you could've said " hey boss , I appreciate your gesture but I really really wouldn't like to share it as it would be a violation of my privacy , hope you understand "
This is never innocent. If someone's life depends on the job, they'll comply as they don't want to second guess if their refusal will lead to them end up being homeless. They'll share details they don't want to and get injured.
Trust is earned. A person you don’t know immediately asking you to be vulnerable is predatory. Commonly seen in cults, frats, etc but at least you opt in to those (and can opt out).
Agreeing to work with a new manager is putting you in a vulnerable enough state. Build that trust over time - you likely don’t even need to hear about coworkers failed marriages.
Even if it was indeed fully optional and nobody felt the obligation to share even though they didn't want to (which I find hard to believe), you have to consider that you're also imposing on the people who are listening. They didn't sign up for group therapy either and sitting through accounts of potentially tragic events might be an unnecessary emotional stressor for them (e.g. maybe they were also recently divorced or lost someone to an illness), especially if they're expected to go back to work and be productive afterwards.
Suggesting people share 10% more of some vague stuff is not coercion by any definition of that word, especially since there is no way to prove how much % you shared.
what kind of dystopian workplace do you go to where people are looking to use things against you?
The jobs I stick with are the ones where colleagues have got each others back.
All this zero-sum game playing toxicity is what ruins work for the collaborative pro-social people. Find a work place that doesn't reward that kind of behaviour.
> what kind of dystopian workplace do you go to where people are looking to use things against you?
Any corporate environment. You'll get stabbed in the back sooner or later.
> where colleagues have got each others back.
That doesn't sound healthy if people have to get each others back - usually means there are some bad actors that you'll need to cover up for. Do the job, be polite and leave ego at home. There is no need for politics, gossip and other meaningless activities.
> work for the collaborative pro-social people.
That sounds dystopian to me. I prefer to have social life outside of work, with actual friends that I choose, not HR.
I don’t know whether you are American or not, but I find it ironic that on a forum who’s demographic skews American, this sentiment of anti-individualism at the workplace is so widely shared.
America is supposed to be this super-freedom, super-individualistic place. Except when you are a worker at a workplace. Then you are supposed to spend at least 40 hours a week (except you are supposed to want to spend more time than that; and most do [except they don’t want to]), you are supposed to leave your politics behind, don’t talk about politics at work, you are supposed to do everything your boss tells you without question, and certainly don’t bring in your morals. Your workplace is a dictatorship (in a freedom loving country) and you are not supposed to complain about it. You are supposed to like your work, so you are not even entitled to your feelings. And suddenly your workplace is supposed to be this communist utopia, where every worker has a task, and the work is supposed to make them happy, and the whole workplace has a comradery of peers. Except you are all making money for your boss (or worse, your shareholders) and only keep a tiny portion of what you produce, but you are not supposed to complain and definitely not supposed to unite in bargaining for better, only unite in being exploited (except you aren’t supposed to see it that way).
The American workplace is probably as far away from the American dream as it possibly could be.
First of all, you should be aware that Stripe was founded by two guys from Ireland and it's based in San Francisco. This is the epicenter of the American political left. This is the side of American politics that cares about worker's rights, treatment, etc.
Ignoring that, your characterization isn't accurate at all for American software companies in my experience. I'm an American and I've worked overseas in Australia. In addition, most of the current technical team that I am currently on is based in the UK.
If anything, I've found other western cultures to be more discouraging of openly challenging management decisions. However, the differences are very very small. Working for a UK/Australia/German company is exactly the same as working for an American company. The day-to-day culture depends a lot on the people who run the company rather than their nationality. Trust me, there are jerks everywhere in the world.
Yeah, I would just instinctively make something up. Maybe everyone else does that, too, how would any of us know?
I really don't like this trend of employers trying to act like we're all friends or one big happy family. It only serves to blur the very real boundaries of power in favor of the employer. Engaging with it in earnest feels like self-exploitation to me.
What you are experiencing is the symptom of working in a large company where no matter how well you perform, you can not significantly move the needle yourself.
Coupled with the fact that, as you yourself pointed out, there is a literal endless amount of work to do, forever. This is also due to the nature of the company being so big.
All companies always has work to do, and no one is ever «done», but in a giga-enterprise all meaningful deadlines and deliveries sort of tangentially rounds down to zero in terms of impact.
I almost burned out from this myself working in Microsoft. I was succeeding in my work by most metrics, but I am motivated more by my work being MEANINGFUL and having impact more than anything. That is almost impossible to achieve in any large enough company.
Jumped off to be a startup CTO and life started smiling again instantly.
Take time away from work, but not too much time. Comments such as «it takes years» can be true if you have ground yourself down to a nub, but trying (and being ok with failing) to do some work that lets you feel like you mean something and contribute back to society is an understated and important part of the healing process.
>What you are experiencing is the symptom of working in a large company where no matter how well you perform, you can not significantly move the needle yourself.
You can't move the needle unless you are part of management and learn how to do politics. Large companies mean lots of politics being done. And you want to position yourself on the part of the winning team.
Also, people skills always trumps technical skills. Being aware of that helped me immensely on my career, much more than anything else I could have done.
I agree and this is good advice that works well. My counterpoint is that if you are very good at:
finding things that could be better or tools that should exist but don’t, and that if materialized would solve multiple problems at once instead of just one; and
explaining why that’s important in a way that everyone can buy into and dealing with naysayers who’ll want to cut you down and doomers who will say it’ll never work; and
have the focus, discipline and grit to make it through a 10k LoC project and land it on the other side while ekeing out code review along the way and not tripping over loose cables and uneven steps of your initial design / architecture / model that was either flawed from the outset or not malleable enough to fix after a month of entrenchment into your code; and finally
once you’re ready, to then go over the entire codebase and lift the old code up into your new way of doing things so that there is no split brain between the old way and your new tool:
then you can make it as a 10x engineer. It is exhausting but so is running up and down a football field, cycling laps around France, or serving tennis balls at 90mph for three hours at a time. Taking the elite-coder staff-engineering path isn’t for the faint hearted.
first i think what you’ve presented is a fiction, in most environments such large projects are surely going to involve multiple people if not multiple team. and then why? unlikely you’re be financially compensated for all the impact you’re really delivering. anything less is just exploitation
My experience is that this is quite common. Especially at startups but also at fortune 500s there exist staff engineers who have no team and just exist working on whatever catches their fancy that day/month. The grandparent talked about a month long project which is where these engineers tend to live in my experience. Its not that they get no help more that they jump around and maybe grab someone from the team when theyre almost done to integrate the new feature with the existing codebase.
This is an extremely important piece of advice. To drive change in a large org, you will need support, which will either come from management, or people on the ground - this is purely people skills. Just writing amazing code and shipping it isn’t enough.
hmm surprising because I had mentioned how to win friends and influence people book by dale carnegie in some other comment on this post and one of the most sticky / remembered lines of this book is that even in a highly technical post , much of the success (approx 70% IIRC) can be because of having people skills.
People skills matter , But I suppose in large organisations. I don't think people skills matter "that much" in open source (other than documentation and hey not messing up like attomatic and being a little bit nicer in general)
Hell we should all try to be a little nicer in general , not just in open source.
Well, I’m not sure that the Linux kernel would have been that successful without Linus’ people skills - granted some it is slightly subpar, but his ability to organize a large number of people and have them follow his lead ( that’s the tricky bit ) is actually quite striking.
Now, you might say that the Linux kernel is a large project, and you’d be right
I’m in early 40s and going thru a minor midlife crisis around this. Feeling that I’d wasted time in my 20s building technical prowess only to see myself still be viewed as mostly fungible.
I think my future is moving towards consulting and building my own products. If people want to fight each other to get a seat at the table, be my guest. I see it as a waste of life. I can already build significant projects on my own, and it’s long overdue for me to reap all of the profit that those efforts generate.
Don't feel bad about the technical prowess part. Just consider you are "done" with growing the tech skills and start stacking other skills on top and you'll do great.
Many companies have parallel IC tracks. And even though higher level ICs do need to “herd” more you’re still doing a fair amount of technical work (maybe at least until director equivalent).
The director equivalents I know ("distinguished engineeer") still do plenty of individual work if they want to; it's simply expected that they know how to do things in a way that has the same leverage as a director. And yes, that can include temporarily recruiting people to do work outside their team.
In some sense, you don’t solve it. You are correct to perceive you are at a crossroads. And the hard part is knowing that either choice may foreclose some possibilities on the other path.
There’s still plenty of time to change gears, or move back and forth between the two choices. There are also other paths; see my comment above.
Important part is to not ignore the discomfort. I suggest reading Charity Majors’ blog posts around leadership vs engineering roles.
I wouldn’t say people skills “always” trump technical skills. Some projects require strong technical chops such that no amount of people skills will be sufficient. If everyone thought this way we wouldn’t have made so many of the recent major tech advances.
Now given a fixed level of technical skills it’s obviously always better to have more people skills, perhaps that’s what you meant.
People have wrong priorities when working in big corporations. If you want to make an impact you should work towards creating your own business and working in big corporation is just a mean to achieve that. Focus on growing your bank account, good credit history, live lean and in your free time nurture the idea you have, make steps to make it happen.
In some jurisdictions you need to check your employment contract as company may feel entitled to your idea you are developing outside of work hours. Ensure you don't have any such stipulations in the contract.
Yeah this is why I sometimes miss the jobs I had in my early 20s, working at bakeries/ice cream shops/etc. Obviously the pay wasn’t great and the working conditions subpar, but there is a genuine psychological benefit to making a simple thing, giving it to people, then finishing work at the end of the day and being done, without an ongoing to-do list, sprints, daily meetings, and all the other requirements of contemporary white collar jobs.
It’s led me to wonder how one could structure a knowledge work job in a similar way. The tough part conceptually is how to make progress long-term while still only keeping your focus on a day at a time, max.
I’ve had a chance recently to moonlight doing the work I did the first half of my 20s almost a decade after I left it for tech. Despite its dead end nature, I’m seriously thinking about returning to it.
The work amounts to super overpaid (thanks unions) retail using antiquated software that it modernized could eliminate at least half the jobs, but since there are union staffing minimums and salaries the employer has no incentive.
There’s something nice about helping customers for a couple hours, doing some other mindless work which could be done in half the time if automated, and then going home.
And the group of folks in the industry are mostly great to be around. Particularly after nearly 5 years of working from home in roles that are increasingly more isolated and less collaborative.
I couldn't find it after searching, but I remember reading about a company where they just relaxed and got done what they got done. To me, this would be the ideal workplace.
With any form of investor expecting a return I dunno how possible this is, but I’ve worked for one family owned business (non-tech industry but had a small tech team) and it was super relaxed like you mention.
No investors, no board of directors, just a woman and her son who owned the business. They wanted to grow it but were very reasonable about it.
That being said the salary was probably 20-30% below market. At the time I wanted to make more money so I chased that for a while instead.
I often find that even investors can be reasonable.
Most of the problems in tech are of the employees own creation. Unreasonable requirements and unreasonable timelines, often coming out of thin air for no reason other than some middle manager's political interests.
It is super hard to fight against it, and it's even harder to demonstrate how forcing tech to work more than necessary is bad for business.
Small businesses deal with it by being small. Big companies are just chaotic complex systems where you don't have much of a choice.
> finishing work at the end of the day and being done
You can try to find your own thing that you'll focus on after work. After 5 I would switch off any company equipment, phone etc. Make sure that there is never an expectation that you could be available outside of your work hours. Feel free to forget anything you worked on after 5, you'll catch up next morning.
Some workplaces will be against that and make fuss. Find another job then and if it is not possible, just deliver as little as you can without being sacked. If manager is unhappy, but not unhappy enough to let you go, then you are doing great.
That's definitely possible, but in my experience it's not the same thing as actually being done when you're working at a bakery or wherever. Then you don't need to turn off your phone, avoid company messages, think about what project you have to do tomorrow. You don't need to care about the job at all until your next shift starts.
I work in IT and I don't need to think about that project that's running late or whatever. Yeah, I have to turn off my work laptop, but that's more akin to taking off my apron if I worked in a bakery.
Sure, it sometimes happens that I'm working on some interesting project, and I may find myself thinking about it after my workday is done. But it's because I generally love what I do. It wouldn't surprise me that, say, a pastry chef would possibly think about combining ingredients in some different way, too.
I think the only job where you absolutely wouldn't have to think about it is if you don't have any kind of agency and only do what you're told. I'm not sure that I would enjoy that kind of job.
Indeed. And I think this is both a case of managing expectations (if you're always available, people will learn to expect it) and also of realizing what is and isn't expected of you.
Where I work, a normal workday is 9 AM to 6 PM with an hour lunch. There's some flexibility as to the actual hours, I usually do 8-5, others do 10-7. Yet, some people always put in very long hours for some reason, complete with gulping down a sandwich in front of their computer for lunch. I'm not sure what gives them the impression they have to do it, since it's clearly not expected from our common higher-ups.
> some people always put in very long hours for some reason, complete with gulping down a sandwich in front of their computer for lunch. I'm not sure what gives them the impression they have to do it, since it's clearly not expected from our common higher-ups.
This is just how I like to work and approach problem solving. I can take breaks when I make the effort, but, when work starts, I rarely think about anything except climbing whatever mountain I find myself on, helping others at my company, or exceeding my own (or others') expectations. That intensity helps me think deeply and solve problems effectively.
There are people in my company who do good work but draw boundaries clearly and sharply. I respect that. I just love what I do and find it interesting and absorbing partly because I love the intensity of striving and struggling, constantly refining, improving, growing, and exploring.
My company generously rewards good work, too. That also helps; my effort never feels wasted, unacknowledged, or unrewarded.
I don't think you're talking about the same thing as GP. I've had spells like you describe, and I did enjoy them. And I don't know about you, but I never felt like this was expected of me by the company, so there was no pressure involved. I think that this actually being my choice made all the difference.
This seems quite distinct from what is discussed in this thread, which is people feeling some kind of pressure to work long hours, or to be available after work hours when they're supposed to be doing personal stuff. And, usually, the reasons for being called up don't seem to be some genuinely exciting problem that it feels invigorating to tackle. Instead, it's typically some form of TPS report that needs pushing around.
> Yet, some people always put in very long hours for some reason
Guilty. The reason was living with abusive partner and not being brave enough to end the relationship. Things were bad, but not bad enough to do something about it.
Do you have any guiding star for what work gives you meaning?
I thought getting closer to the users/customers would help me. After all, software is for humans. But I found the social aspects of that, handling bugs, setting expectations for features, was tiresome and not meaningful. The only happiness I did find was when I saw my client/users flourish without me with the software I made tailored as best as it could be for the money. But that doesn't make a business unfortunately...
Work satisfaction is a meme. Yes, there are people satisfied with their work, but realistically, this is not going to happen to you. Stop giving a fuck about your work, slack off as much as possible, and look for coworkers with whom you can build real human connection, instead of corporate NPCs.
I don’t know if that’s sustainable. We’re all stuck with this work-thing being one third of our life for the foreseeable time, so spending 33% of like, everything I’ll ever experience on something I don’t give a fuck about seems like both a lot of dull time and a bad decision overall.
I think you are rationalizing your choices by thinking everything does the same. It is not true, some are not stuck anywhere, some choose to live a simpler life that needs less money, fewer compromises, etc. etc. the world is a big place.
Sure. I was specifically talking to people browsing hacker news, which have a high probability of working a job in the capitalist economy. Of course there are other ways of life, but the predominant part of humanity does not choose those. So I still think it’s appropriate to talk about ”all of us“ in this case.
Exactly... if you want to be miserable at work, by all means, "slack off as much as possible".
I think we forget the big picture that "no one gets out alive" and that it's up to each of us to spend the time we have in a way that makes us happy. If you can afford to not spend 1/3 of your time at a job in order to fund the remaining 2/3 of your existence, lucky you! But if not, choosing to slack off at a job you hate is essentially choosing to throw 1/3 of your life away being miserable. (Not judging if that's your choice, but its baffling to me.)
I agree completely. I’ve had periods where I just slacked off and I was miserable, leading to a negative feedback loop. The only way to break out was ironically to actually work more, which led to more enjoyment of it. Cognitive dissonance is powerful.
That’s my opinion, too. I also find that by taking this attitude, you guarantee that you’ll only end up working jobs that confirm your worldview. I have friends who think my work experience is a wild fluke.
And it makes your colleagues miserable because they have to carry the load or slack off too, which inevitably means the whole team is disfunctional and should be let go
I would say that anything that is opposed to Marx’s concept of alienation would fit the bill. Work should feel impactful and your decisions should lead to some tangible output.
It helps to be close to your users, or to build software that has a clear purpose. It’s good to work on a small team where your input has a clear influence on the quality pf the product.
As someone who has been on a journey from a 6 man startup to a larger company going through a merger I’m really feeling the pull of creating/joining a new startup. If nothing else for the joy of being a small team on a mission and work with people who are really invested.
Or sometimes the needles you can move seem unimportant to the org, even if they have objective value. You get a few pats like OP but no real recognition.
Though maybe that’s why you can move those needles; nobody is guarding them jealously.
There are absolutely a lucky few at even the biggest mega-corps that are seeing their work make huge impacts. But most people won't find those projects or there won't be space in them.
"Just find high-leverage projects to work on" is a truism. Of course everyone would love to work on high-leverage projects - finding them is precisely the challenge that we're discussing.
I think the author had unrealistic expectations from working at a large company.
He expected doing something meaningful that will change the world. He expected to be applauded like a hero for his efforts.
But things don't work like that.
If you work your ass out, don't expect more than a pat on the back. Managers won't care about your efforts, your mental state or your sleepless nights. They care about looking good in front of their superiors.
So it's better to do just that is expected for you, enough to get a good evaluation.
If you come out with a brilliant idea that might help the company a lot don't just do it. Find some allies in the higher hierarchy, explain to them what is their advantage, do a POC or MVP, then let the top management know in a public meeting. That way you get a lot of credits and applause for doing great things for the company and fighting the good fight.
This story of his would have fir just fine in a much smaller Stripe, back when you could actually know everyone, and Patrick interviewed every programmer. A time where making a difference wasn't all that hard, as everyone fit in one cafeteria in the Mission.
It was always a pretty competitive place, with a lot of smart people working a lot of hours, and a culture of attention to detail that left many people with impostor syndrome. There were pretty good expectations of being nice to each other: No infrastructure team giving your request the cold shoulder, because that was just not OK. So people working really hard and burning out to try to meet every growing expectations was common.
The post also had the other weakness of the culture: A lot of management changes, along with a culture of performance among managers that would be fit for Amazon. So a manager might change teams, and the person that used to get exceed expectations would end up with a PIP with the next manager, often by surprise. You can imagine what it does to morale to tell someone how they are the most helpful person they've worked with, and then see them gone two weeks later. It was a great place to work in many ways, but the negative parts took their toll.
So, if anything, the story showed me that even though it's been many years, a lot of Stripe is still recognizable.
The flip side of that is that if companies make "passion" a hiring criterion, they'll end up hiring people who care about making a difference, which may serve them poorly if the position doesn't actually fit that.
Of course not. They got 4 years of fantastic work out of the guy before he burned out. That serves them just fine. The only requirement is that you have no morals.
I don't see it that way. He wanted to work there. They paid him for his time and from his account all of the passion was his own. I'm not speaking against those who just want to do what's required, but is it really wrong to hire someone who is passionate about the work?
Sorta, yeah. Working for a largeish enterprise I actively select against too much passion. Those people will come in, go WTF constantly for about half a year, spend another half year doing less and less, before eventually leaving for greener pastures.
I mean, I get them, as I went through the same thing.
My big company strategy is to troll internal chats/forums for things that seem like interesting problems. Do something to fix them or make them suck a little less.
Always be building solid, interesting things and make sure that if someone, for some reason finds them, that they would say "wow, this is cool, who made this?"
Then I casually share links to those things in the right context. If I get a 10% hit rate then I'm happy.
Do this all day every day between assigned projects 9-5 and you'd be amazed at the network you can build outside your own team. Keeps the options open for lateral movement.
This reminds me of a side project that got me multiple peer bonuses from strangers at Google. At some point the company decided to switch software for the performance eval system, and decided that everyone would have to copy their past review manually, piece by piece, into all the form fields of the new tool. In the FAQ they said that people asked if they could do this automatically and it wasn't practical to automate this process.
So I took a few hours one day and made a Chrome extension that did it for you. Wasn't hard to write. Saved people maybe 5 minutes. Some folks appreciated that so much they spent the 5 minutes nominating me for a peer bonus! I never really capitalized on that in any lasting way though.
> a brilliant idea that might help the company a lot don't just do it.
Never do it. It will never end up benefitting you, even if you find "allies" - who might even stab you in the back and take credit for the idea and then let you go once they get a promotion.
If you have a brilliant idea, keep it to yourself, try to think of a way it could be used outside of the company and if it is strong enough start your own business based on the idea. Otherwise forget it.
It's not "more" work; it's "different" work. I quite enjoy low-level optimizations, and all I have to do to work on that all day instead of coordination, meetings, and drudgery is convince people a few levels up the chain that the cost savings are huge and that the extra speed enables cool new features.
It's corporate America, so I'm going to be unceremoniously fired eventually anyway, but in the meantime I might as well enjoy myself, impress my coworkers, snag a promotion or two, and get a "made a cool new thing increasing profits $XX million/yr" line item on my resume.
> start your own business
Probably eventually, but starting a business is very different from being at a place big enough that I can profit my salary many times over just from faster code. If I start one, I'll write fast code there too, but "fast" isn't a business idea by itself, and I don't see anything wrong with doing a good job for whoever happens to be writing my paycheck.
> the cost savings are huge and that the extra speed enables cool new features.
Been there. The savings were never passed down, but you could always enjoy photos of boss's new sports car or their month's trip to Borneo to "recharge" and think of new challenges. Ah sorry! I got an iPod once as a thank you.
> "made a cool new thing increasing profits $XX million/yr"
That may backfire. Nobody likes a new kid on the block that has tricks up his sleeve that could jeopardise someone senior's career.
Sure, that's the game. I get an extra bonus or raise or something with promotions, and more when I switch jobs, but nearly all the profit goes elsewhere. If you want to leave the upper-middle class you'll need to set out on your own eventually.
If you don't have a solid plan and life circumstances for building your own business yet though, why would you not do things the business likes, especially when it means your day-to-day is more palettable, it doesn't actually require any more work, and it has some moderate career impacts in case you never set out on your own?
> this may backfire
That's the same sort of logic that leads people to have asphalt roofs instead of white roofs in southern climates. You do, absolutely, alienate a significant fraction of buyers (employers). You command a premium at every place that's left though because they want you _because_ of the things that make you different. So long as you don't shrink the pool too much, each individual job is more lucrative.
This has not been my experience. I’ve seen people rewarded for ‘brilliant ideas’ (though really more like brilliant execution, let’s be honest, ideas are worthless in their own). Now could they have more reward starting their own company? Perhaps. But it’s certainly more risky. In a regular job if your idea doesn’t pan out you haven’t lost much, maybe you get a slightly smaller bonus that year or something.
There might be ideas that work only in that particular context and you can't implement on your own outside of that. Otherwise, I agree with you.
>Never do it. It will never end up benefitting you, even if you find "allies" - who might even stab you in the back and take credit for the idea and then let you go once they get a promotion.
That's why I said to get allies from the higher ups. Not your boss or your peers. Preferably business people. And you don't need to give them all the details. Just let them know if would make them look good, have their approval and use them as a shield.
I mean, brilliant ideas can still be fun to work on. Who cares if you don’t get appropriately rewarded for saving the company $50k/month, it was time well spent.
As opposed to working on that pointless crud thing your boss likes.
I agree with you. But not everyone will. Some people have jobs to pay for their lives outside of work, and that's it. And that's fine.
I take the stance of, the job I do for 8 hours 5 days a week might as well be something I actually enjoy doing above and beyond the financial incentive. Working on something I think is really neat is enjoyable, and I'm lucky to work in an industry doing things not so far from what I would spend my time doing anyway if I were retired.
Great blog, but reading it gave me deep secondhand anxiety and even exhaustion. It’s strikingly clear this person is a people pleaser to potentially unhealthy levels, maybe due to low self-esteem or something else, and it could be contributing to the depression. Legitimately, therapy might be the right call here. But on the positive side, they do seem like a good person who wants to build good things. That’s commendable.
100% agree. Please OP consider therapy or at least a next job that you can't give too much of a shit about. Care about the quality of the work you're shipping because it's fun. Be a human but keep your personal life personal.
People pleasing, approval seeking makes you the battery in somebody else's flashlight. You will always find yourself used up by others. Don't give others control of your joy.
Totally, I think it also comes with a healthy detachment of the identity from work, because its only worth it in a personal context when working for yourself, not for another company.
These symptoms are a classic sign of burn out. One thing I notice in your writing is you’re very tied up in things having meaning and mattering in some specific way. This itself can lead to burnout because if everything must matter you must be emotionally invested in everything. But you can care without it mattering to you. You can do a good job without being totally invested in everything about it. You can love what you do without it having significance in every detail.
In a complex job with a fast pace, a fair amount of tech debt around every edge, a relentless pace of innovation happening, and - yes - growth, there’s too much to be invested in everything. It doesn’t have to matter that much. The parts you really care about, the craft and quality of your work, your relationships, mentoring and growing the people around you, seeing things get better one piece at a time, and a few things - they can matter. But everything can’t. And even those you have to at some very deep level realize don’t matter really.
Stripe doesn’t really exist in this world. It’s a shared fiction to help frame the interactions between you and a few people you actually interact with in a day. The real truth is the only thing that happens in your days is you type on a computer and talk to a few people. It actually doesn’t matter in any meaningful way what you typed or some higher purpose around humbling honesty or exothermic curiosity or PMEs or whatever stories we tell ourselves to create some sort of reality out of the fiction. The only important things you really do is how you shape the lives of the people you interact with, and how you shape your own life.
Burnout is hard. Adopt a daily meditation practice. Let your mind heal by letting go of meaning and practice enjoying the moment you’re in with whomever you’re with, but most especially yourself. The joy will come back faster the faster you let go of things needing to matter or have deeper meaning, especially when those things are a fiction like a company or a career or any of the other small and big lies we’ve been told and we reinforce to ourselves daily. I know I’ve been there man, and I know exactly - exactly - the sensations and experiences you describe. It gets better, but I think once you get there it never totally goes away and it’s easier to slip back.
FWIW I don’t think burnout is the same as depression. I’ve felt both and burnout is different. It’s that loss of ability to engage - which overlaps with depression - but usually doesn’t come with the thoughts of hopeless despair and desire for life to be over. It’s just more of a deadness and inability to initiate what you think you should want to do but can’t, and it pervasively impacts everything.
The way I conquered burnout was by having a life outside of work that isn't computer related. In my early twenties, the only notable attribute of my life was work and computers. I'd wake up in the morning, go to work programming things, then get home and either do programming side projects or play computer games, then I'd go to sleep and repeat it the next day. I had no hobbies, no friends or acquaintances outside of the people I met at work, and nothing to drive me besides the artificial goals at work. Recipe for burnout and it constantly happened.
Eventually, I got married, had a family, found things to do in the community, and do plenty of sports and hobbies that involve shutting off the computer. Even though my jobs after my 20s have been even more soul-crushing than the ones I had earlier, I've never had a hint of burnout. When I'm done with work, I shut off the computer and that's it. I'll go build a piece of furniture, or repair my car, spend time with my kid, anything that doesn't involve office politics, two week sprints, or status reports. Just having a life outside of work has done wonders for my mental health. No meditation or spirituality needed!
Yup, avoiding burnout is all about having rich alternatives for your time. If you find yourself working yourself to the point that you don't have the energy to do anything else outside of work, you need to cut back.
If you do get burned out, the only remedy I've found is time away, sometimes many months of it. That's really tough (or impossible) for many people's financial situations, though.
It feels flippant to say, "stop caring so much about things", but it's actually great advice.
We should think of ourselves as having a limited "caring budget", and be judicious in how we spend that budget. Part of the trick is figuring out what that budget is, since it can be different for different people, or even different for the same person at different times in their life.
I think framing burnout in this way is helpful: you get burned out when too much is too important to you, and you've overextended your emotional ability to give a part of yourself to each of those things, for too much time.
An important thing about that to me is that it doesn't at all consider whether things are going well or poorly with all those "too important" things. Certainly things going poorly will increase stress, but even caring too much about too many things that are all going well can burn you out.
“A shared fiction in the world to help frame interactions between people”. You sir are a natural philosopher.
I think what’s universally important is to keep active and engaged in what we’re doing. Some of us have to tell fictions that what we’re doing has meaning, whilst others just know what brings meaning to their life.
For me I studied vipassana and Buddhism, and did the daily meditations with Gil Fronsdal[0] on his amazing audio dharma[1] which has a lot of resources (and his teachings dating back 25+ years recorded and freely available there). If you’re in the area you can visit the insight meditation center[2] in Redwood City.
I think these things helped me a lot in my recovery but I also don’t think it’s necessary or sufficient. I think my advice above is the real key, but vipassana and Buddhism give a pretty structured approach to achieve the appropriate detachment from what’s not truly real and the appreciation for what is. IMO that’s the basis for recovering from burnout durably. But the other thing is there’s no magic, it takes time.
I’ve seen this pattern repeated so many times that I feel like it can be generalized:
when your mental health collapses nothing else holds value, it really doesn’t matter if you achieved your dream job, got all the prestige and income you initially desired, being mentally healthy is the basis of the pyramid.
Something I learned based on that is to really prioritize it!
Even if someone considers their career to be everything, realize that spending some of your earnings seeking professional help (therapy) is even a cheap investment considering that if you break and have to quit, you’re going to lose hundreds of thousands, and to recover it will suck (I’ve heard of people trying to quit tech altogether after burning out)
Sneaking something else related to mental health: sleep should be #1 health wise, when you’re consistently not getting quality sleep for months, there’s nothing you can really do to get around that, it will eventually just break you (your body won’t care if you’re coping with coffe or exercising!)
Btw that’s great writing and I really appreciate your courage in sharing this!
I hope you’ll find your joy again.
Sorry for a probably unpopular opinion here, and let me generalize a bit: Gen Z all the way... (Saying this makes me feel a bit old, I guess I'm certainly am than the author).
On a serious note, in my book there are hints of perfectionism right from the start of the story (fonts dimming, wait 30 sec to join the meeting..). And too much fragility in personal attidudes. S/he is probably a relatively young idealistic person, early in the career. Such people often don't last long, if they can't change inside and take manager's or corporate shit. One needs at least some "fuck it" attitude to preserve one's dignity. Your performance review does not and cannot define you as a person. Else you're likely to end up disappointed and/or emotionally exhausted. And that's what I see here.
They idolized a company that is known for top-shelf engineering talent and, more importantly, brutally hard interviews...and they just got an opportunity to interview with them.
You have no idea what the interviewee will "no hire" them over, so you assume they want perfection because obviously. You're deathly afraid of making any mistakes because not getting the job you've been dreaming about for years is not an option, so spiraling straight into the ground after your first minor oops makes total sense.
Once you've gotten the dream job, you now have to work even harder to keep it because, shit, have you seen the engineering talent in this place? Getting a "failing" perf review from your management sends this anxiety into overdrive, so you work harder to prove your worth.
Some people barely last under these conditions. Others will gladly torch everything and everyone in their life to succeed, whatever that means.
I cannot understand how anyone gets past 5 years old while still being this fragile as to think any of this you just said.
Everyone has some of these feelings but it's just a feeling like 10% of your mind not 100%. WTF idolizes a company? That is just wrong. Who raised someone to let them even think like that?
Everyone is searching for validation and often times we seek it on the outside and often in the wrong place.
Companies don’t care about you, they care about the work you do … and if you don’t bring less to the table … surprise. But everyone has to learn it the hard way, some earlier than others.
You sorta answered your own question there - it's largely, if not wholly, about your childhood experience, what validated you etc. Gonna sound very projectionist and therapising here - but I'd say with a 70-80% probability that op (or the myriad software engineers with this trait) had someone of significance in their childhood that gave them praise when things were perfect, or when they knew something.
Obviously this exists. The point was to express that this is not a reasonable way to exist.
Something has gone wrong for an adult human to be quite this fragile. Many people and even whole systems have failed them.
It's not about being uncaring or unsympathetic.
If you sympathise with someone like this (the ideas in the comment I responded to here more than the main article) because of the difficulty and unhappines of their state of existence, you should wish them to have been empowered to exist in the world without being flattened by the totally ordinary things that the world is full of that they will have to handle every day in ordinary life.
i feel similarly and have had an adjacent experience with anxiety. the more i got to know myself, and the more i've accepted myself over the years, the more i've found myself self-advocating and validating my own existence (to myself) -- i do not need to prove or justify it to others, and i have been working on keeping this mantra alive.
a large part of this experience has been overcoming things by applying a healthy dose of, "fuck it -- this is for me." [1]
[1] obviously one can suggest there is an element of hedonism or selfishness inherent in the attitude, but i think we can appreciate framing it in the context of not using this attitude or mantra to justify being self-destructive, or harmful -- that is not the point. it's more about applying it in a way, that combats the mundane insecurities i've faced and experienced in a range of extremes, which otherwise get in the way of personal growth.
Its funny coming from the other side, where fuck it is all you know. Of course balance is the answer and change is hard. If i ever can id love to incorporate this into my hiring criteria as a kind of diversity, because as a fuck it person i find i pair quite well with those who cant do that; and likewise working at jobs with too many of either type the flaws (and mono culture) become so significant its hard to stomach.
The author mentions they have nearly 10 years of experience in the field, so assuming they went to college and got their first programming job soon thereafter, that puts them around 30-32, so fairly solidly millennial, if maybe on the younger side of it. Not that this matters; I'm always dubious of generalizations based on made up things like "generations".
I definitely got people-pleasing vibes, and I agree the whole "making my screen look neat and tidy" and "engineering my arrival time to the meeting" bits were too much. If I had an interviewer who cared about or was impressed by those "metrics", I would consider that pretty shallow.
Based on that first performance review they got, my feeling is they had a bad manager. I agree with the manager that communication is a crucially important part of work, but you don't give someone a low rating when they completed an otherwise wildly successful project. That's just cruel and demoralizing. You can attack the communication problem without demotivating your employee and possibly hurting their career progression.
Whenever a poor performance review is a surprise to the employee, that alone is a management failure. Don't wait until review time to discuss problems; bring them up immediately and try to address them. Maybe by the time the review comes up, the problem will be gone. And if it's not, the employee won't be surprised by the reasons behind a less-than-ideal review.
I wouldn't call that ageism; attitudes change over time, and people early in their career haven't yet learned "how the game is played" so to speak. They will have some emotional attitudes about work that don't always align with reality, which in some cases can be harmful for their mental health and career progression.
This is just a consequence of being inexperienced, and in this case it correlates closely with age.
I do agree that bucketing people by "generation" isn't helpful. Just saying "it seems like this person is early in their career" is sufficient, and is the actual relevant bit.
There's a lot of comments on the "10% more vulnerable" part of the post in here that amount to "I just owe the company work hours, and they owe me money", and a strong aversion to showing anything resembling human connection going slightly further than "how are you", "fine". One commented even called the question by the manager "abuse", and suggested the manager should be fired.
But if on most days we're spending most of our time with these people, what do we gain from automatically disqualifying them from human connection just because they work at the same place as us?
And let's not pretend that the manager in this story forced anyone to do anything.
There's a power differential when management suggests you do something. Even if they genuinely, 100% for real would not care if you didn't share, the power balance is still at play there, which makes it dicey regardless of anything else. I actually like my manager, he's a chill guy and I've had some deep talks with him a few times (after work hours!), but if he pulled a stunt like this during work hours I'd 100% tell him that it's a completely inappropriate thing to do.
I know that he doesn't mean ill or harm by it, but how is the new hire who's anxious to be starting the job supposed to react to it? How can you expect them to say no without feeling like "not being a team player" or whatever other stupid cliche HR types like to use?
> But if on most days we're spending most of our time with these people, what do we gain from automatically disqualifying them from human connection just because they work at the same place as us?
Some people just don't care to make people from work anything more than an acquaintance. They have their own social lives which they invest infinitely more energy into than their work lives, and that's completely fine. I personally can't remember the last time I've spoken to any of my ex-colleagues after they or I left the job, I definitely wouldn't call any of them friends. I still hung out with them at the bar on Friday evenings after a tough sprint, we had a good working relationship, we just weren't friends. I have actual friends who I'd rather spend the time with for that.
The goal with any of these icebreakers is to encourage the team to be humble and approach work related problems in a thoughtful manner.
It's easy for someone to assume you are asked to open up about non-work related stories, but it's never the intention. For example, talking about how your Aunt passing away being the reason you got into software engineering, is not really going to help the team in any meaningful way.
However, it is quite valuable to share a story about how a coworker left you a huge unfinished project before abruptly going on vacation, and how you struggled to pick up the slack. You can use that story about the pain and frustration you felt and how you learned the value of having your work in a proper hand-off state when you eventually plan to take extended time away.
Don't ever feel like you need to talk about your hobbies, or family, or even your love of cats or dogs. In time you will build your work friends and connect with people who share some your interests, but it will never be forced, and a few of them may become lifelong friends.
That's fair, but that's not how the author presented this request from their manager. Judging from the stories shared, people seemed to believe that they were being asked to share stories from their personal lives.
It doesn't really matter what the manager intended; if they were primarily looking for vulnerable professional moments, they should have said so. And if they were indeed looking for personal stories, that's inappropriate.
> Some people just don't care to make people from work anything more than an acquaintance.
I've also been in a situation where I tried but realized behind the work persona they were assholes I would never be friends with.
I've considered quiting at that point but decided to just not socialize with them. Work interactions are fine.
It's a bit sad because in previous job I got along really well with most coworkers but such is life. I have enough friends and if it ever becomes a problem at work I'll just leave.
I’ve heard of cases where not sharing vulnerability in such a setting led to others (who did) being offended and subsequent othering. While arguing the manager needs to be fired is a bit too far, you do need to consider the power differential and how it forces conformance from everyone.
Yes, if someone shares they were abused as a child, it becomes much more fraught to tell everyone you messed up two poached eggs while making brunch last weekend and you are not quite the chef you hope to be.
That’s why you have to volunteer to go first, because then you have plausible deniability about the expected level of vulnerability.
I have personal experience with a manager who acted similarly intrusively, seeming to want to blur lines between professional and personal. They later critiqued my (supposed) emotional state and motivations in a professional review. "Force" may not be accurate as in strapping me into the group until I talk, "abuse" may not be accurate as in an active misuse of power -- but there are negative consequences for non-participation.
I'm not the least bit opposed to connecting with peers. I've extracted two cherished friends of 10+ years from prior jobs. I just require it to occur organically and with peers, separate from groups led by the person signing my paychecks and writing my annual reviews.
Being vulnerable can be great and helpful when forming personal relationships. A manager asking their direct reports to be (personally) vulnerable in a professional setting, in front of a group, is inappropriate.
While I agree that it wasn't forced (and I know that I would personally have no problem sticking to whatever level of sharing I was comfortable with), I bet you that at least one person on that team felt uncomfortable with it, but also felt like they could be penalized in some way (even just socially) if they didn't share. That's not ok.
If you can't forge bonds with your teammates without your boss asking people to share vulnerable moments during a team meeting, there are deeper problems that this sort of exercise is not going to address.
From my most recent job, I have quite a few strong friendships that we've maintained over the years, even though we've all left that company years ago. But most (if not all) of my so-called friendships with coworkers at other jobs faded quickly after one of us left the company. That's pretty normal, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's also nothing wrong with having a vibrant social life outside of your colleagues, and not really being interested in those colleagues beyond acquaintance level.
The thing is that in this scenario there is no control over the conversation so some participants may feel uncomfortable. My 10% can vary greatly from someone else's. The writer admitted so themselves "I decided to go for more than 10%. I shared about how my marriage had almost collapsed a couple years prior and a taste of how painful it was"
Imagine your manager asking you to share something at 10%, you share something modest like "sometimes I really feel anxiety over my work / deadlines / performance" and then the next person shares a deeply personal, super serious story about their almost collapsed marriage. They either set the tone for the whole conversation, forcing everybody else to follow along, or they hijack the conversation since what they shared is more serious.
There is no way to know before hand what someone is going to share, so there is no way to know before hand that everyone is going to feel comfortable.
"Human connection" could be discussing your hobbies with your coworkers, doesn't have to be a round table where everyone is sharing difficult experiences.
Unpopular opinion, but this is the problem with work from home.
Reduces people to output. And if that output can be done cheaper by someone in another country or automated away, why even hesitate to change out the things that generate the output anymore than a lightbulb?
As much as I am a huge WFH proponent, I do agree that forming social bonds with coworkers is harder in that environment. An unsurprising consequence of that is managers having less personal attachment to individual employees.
On the other hand, I do know of a few companies that manage to team members socially engaged, mostly in ways that don't feel like forced "mandatory fun time". It's not easy, and it's a cultural value that needs to permeate everything. But it can be done.
It can certainly be done, but requires a lot more proactive effort on behalf of the company than in office because of the lack of casual encounters.
And I wonder if companies are motivated to invest in that and/or if once you’ve made that investment if wfh really saves money relative to hybrid work.
As the number of wfh jobs gets closer and closer to pre-2020, but the share of workers who want it doesn’t decrease equally, it’s much easier for companies to use it to exploit people (“want a wfh job? Then accept all these other things.”)
It is abuse and the manager forced everyone to respond either by participating or by refusing to participate or by lying or by exposing that they actually have literally nothing interesting to say.
If you don't get that, then you are probably out their making life 5% hell for half the people around you, in blissful ignorance thanks to the effort they all put in to catering to your inconsiderate interactions.
Ways I found that helped me the most dealing with this kind of situation:
- Refine your definition of what’s “meaningful”: anything that helps you, your colleagues, helps you to learn a new thing or simply allows you to create something beautiful can be meaningful; there’s a lot of meaning in giving a meal to someone starving, even though you’re not solving any big societal issue or being applauded by many for that single act.
- Don’t take people like the OP’s first manager too personally: with time you realize they’re generally not evil or terrible human beings, they’re just in a different mission. Usually they are also as lost as we are, trying to find meaning and recognition. Just lower the importance you give to them (if you’re really incompatible with their personalities) and focus on your work. If even then it becomes toxic, then move.
- Most importantly: reshape your relationship with work. Who you are and what you do are not necessarily the same thing. I don't like the advice of "slacking and collecting your pay check" (been there, you also feel shit after a while), but I think that going a bit to that direction helps to find balance.
The one thing that immediately pissed me off was you doing something awesome, then having management attack you for reason X, where X attacks everything but the results. The reason never really matters, the real reason is that you threatened them in some manner and they need to justify their job.
Honestly, I would have just quit at that point. You're a saint for staying any longer.
This sounds like an absolutely terrible company to work for.
> Still more time passed and then came the depression. I found myself increasingly demotivated in all aspects of my life. I could hardly even muster the energy to play video games (my usual haunt). Some evenings I would literally sit and stare at a wall. My sleep went to shit.
I'm sorry for that. I went through something similar and I managed to bounce back up but it took longer than I anticipated. Years, not months.
This is so hard for people like me who have high standards and are hard on themselves. I always wanted to buy a home - I graduated at the right time but I never got a job at big tech. When I did get my full time job it paid a good chunk below market, provided no equity and now post-pandemic whatever was at my fingertips is at least an arms length away.
I have not done poorly for myself but I continue to rent in my mid 30s whereas my buddies at FAANG are much farther ahead in life. I was/am not kind to my past self in the current phase - constant thoughts of should have done this, should have known that, etc.
With the current economy I feel like another chance might not come for another 5 years at the minimum, so I’m trying to learn my lesson and go to therapy, and accept it gracefully. I can’t even type “life isn’t a race and I shouldn’t compare myself” without putting it in quotes.
Point is, don’t be like me. Yes it’s good to be driven and ambitious, but unmoderated it can be destructive.
Not sure if this helps someone, but I joined a new German company a few months ago, the type of company that has a great culture and everyone wants to work for (when I announced it on Linkedin my stats increased and I received a lot of invitations).
Anyway, on-boarding was awful and codebase is terrible. For the first four months I have been struggling, suferring, getting frustrated, and everything impacting my life outside work (weekends, sleeping, etc)
Then I realized. This is just a job. What is the worst it could happen? Getting fired and these people thinking I'm an idiot? I can live with that. I won't probably meet them again (perks of remote) and I could find another job down the line. And that helped me.
What you do at work and how are you seen at work, as long as you are responsible, shouldn't be that important. Leave it at work and try to enjoy your life. Don't carry it with you, especially when it is a position where you don't have much control.
Reading this, I do get the impression that the Partially Meets Expectation was given to get more work out of this guy. It's the worst kind of manipulation - spinning something that was an unqualified success into a "failure." Especially because the boss clearly already had an internal narrative, and it sounds like they cherry-picked feedback from coworkers to support that narrative.
Having had something somewhat similar happen in the past, it seems like this is common at high-growth tech companies. Everyone pretends to be your friend, and there are definitely some genuine people, but getting ahead is clearly number 1.
This is a great post and I'm glad the author was able to share it.
I feel like I had a similar experience. Start working at a new job, hustle for several years, get promoted, projects do well, then ended up feeling bored and unexcited. Not exactly burnt out, but burnt out on the current pattern of life. I quit and moved to another country.
I don't know if the author is "burnt out" or not. This is a privileged take, but sometimes it feels like a full time job is a leash. Life becomes so defined by your job it can feel suffocating. You can take a few weeks off, but a few weeks a year is hardly enough to have your own life.
I quit trying to find meaning in my work long time ago. And work never depresses me. I work to have food on the table for me and my family. That is enough of a motivation.
If I want to do something meaningful, I either work on a personal project or contribute to one, outside work.
> The tech I build protects well-being and promotes human flourishing. Tech should never exploit weaknesses no matter how well intentioned.
That's from the "values" section of the website under the "Tech as a tool" subsection. How does working for Stripe fit with this value?
As a mere user of "tech", and a concerned observer of what I perceive to be its negative effects on society around me the last 5-10 years, it feels impossible to deny that the main drivers of the tech space haven't been "protecting well-being" and "promoting human flourishing", rather the opposite, and often rather brutally.
The article leaves the question unanswered of what actually led to the depression, and I'm left wondering if the author explored that question specifically. Perhaps Stripe aren't building technology that promotes human flourishing, and perhaps the author's core values were clashing with the reality of a modern tech company.
Sleep is a definite signal. If you've eliminated diet, medication, and personal relationships (tough one) as causes, you're left with professional obligations.
Note too that "chronic fatigue" is NOT "lack of sleep".
The brain fog is the net resultant of the body being in a constant "fight or flight" mode for too long. Psychologically, you've been doing WWI "trench warfare".
Thanks for this writeup. I hope the author recovers soon.
Some of the situations feel familiar to my experience in other companies, so here's some advice to younger folks, which took me some time to grasp:
- Communication with the manager is critical. Better to overcommunicate than undercommunicate. It's a natural tendency for curious folks to do "side quests" and while you were supposed to work on X, you noticed that you can improve Y which in your opinion is more important. At the very least, drop your manager a Slack message like "hey, I was supposed to work on X but I have an idea about Y which can bring more benefit, I will take N hours/days to dig into that if that's ok with you" and see what's their response (also make sure to time constrain it to avoid getting sidetracked for too long). I was definitely burned by this in prev job: I shipped some nice things but I was supposed to work on something else which I didn't do, and each time my manager mentioned this (i.e. N months later in performance evaluation), I knew it was correct for him to point it out, but it made me feel bad.
- In bigtech the work happens in quarters. If you're unhappy about things you work on currently, take some time to prepare the work items you do want to work on, and seed your manager's mind before next quarter planning about things you DO want to work on, why, how is the impact and so on.
- When feeling overwhelmed with too many things on your plate, talk to your manager to dispatch some responsibilities to other team members. Don't be the messiah who needs to fix everything by yourself silently and burn out.
- For candidates: When doing interviews, you absolutely should do everything to streamline things and avoid distractions. Most likely use JS or Python for coding. Probably avoid TS, definitely avoid C++. It's too easy to get lost fighting the compiler or "reinventing the world" with languages like C/C++. You won't get extra points for going uphill, but you will get minus points for not finishing.
Big tech is very much a function of your team and manager. Any job is a function first of your manager, second of your team, third of your ability and fourth of your project. I always select teams in that way, within a company and outside, and this has been incredibly helpful.
Stripe is a great place to work in some ways but judging from the writeup they had a ton of context switching preventing their productivity and the needs of the team didn’t align with what they did best. I’ve seen this feedback many times in many jobs.
I’ve been there myself! No doubt this person will find something exciting in no time.
Apropos of nothing as interviewers we do not put any weight on your submitting solutions after the window closes because we have to evaluate candidates consistently for business and legal reasons. We can’t give one person extra time because that’s not applying a consistent bar. Smaller companies may be more flexible but big tech won’t be. On the plus side big tech knows interviews are often a function of luck and setting and will generally always invite you to apply again without prejudice a few months later.
Being in a position to recover by getting bored and hacking on stuff you’re passionate about without pressure is something we’re really lucky to have, and I always try to do this between jobs.
> On the plus side big tech knows interviews are often a function of luck
How does this not mean "we hire at random"? It's especially egregious after explaining all the reasons you can't give a candidate extra time, because you're so precise and consistent. Which is it? Consistency and luck are opposites.
I don’t know if it’s “we hire at random” more so “we hire based on intelligent guesses/calculated risk”. It’s not completely random because there’s a resume and a rigorous process.
It's not quite random, the goal is to bias the errors towards false negatives (bad rejection) than false positives because bad hires are so expensive to recover from.
It’s not randomness it’s a bias towards consistency and avoiding false positives at the expense of false negatives. There are more qualified candidates than roles, generally speaking. If that changes then I suspect process will change too, as the cost of a false negative will become higher.
Hitting a wall sucks, and FAANG style tech companies know how to hurl their engineers (and their management) straight towards it.
I'm glad you got out. Gotta look out for you, always; (most) companies sure as shit won't.
Unrelated, but if OP is here, about this:
> Things were moving rather smoothly despite my sweat soaked armpits. I silently resented my wife’s decision to unilaterally give up anti-perspirant due to chemicals.
Check out Arm and Hammer's Essentials deodorants. They don't contain aluminum and smell great despite being all natural. I switched to this deodorant after noticing that Mitchum deodorants were staining the pits of my shirts.
> >he asked the team, “for this meeting I’d like us to try and introduce ourselves a little differently. If you’re comfortable, I’d like us to try and be 10% more vulnerable than we normally would in a work setting.”
I think this is a ham fisted attempt at trying to solve one of the most isolating and painful issues of modern day work environments: the complete lack of any friendship or camaraderie whatsoever.
I was not born in the 1980’s but just reading stories of how people worked then, makes me feel that there was a level of trust and friendship somehow that is completely lacking in a modern job. It is a painful life when you cannot be friends with the folks you spend 40+ hours a week your entire life. I don’t know why or how it has gotten to be this way. Modern pop psychology recommends you to be vulnerable and open, but that’s definitely wrong, maybe even opposite of what you should do, I was never vulnerable with my college friends, but we did have kickass time in college and we were friends. I would much rather that just have continued into my professional life, but instead we get a sterilized environment, that we just live through trying to find meaning in our work, to make the passing of 40+ hours more pleasant.
You can't REALLY be friends with people that can extend or end your career. Needing to promote and fire people is part of the job. Doing these things friends is almost impossible to do.
I'm almost certain this is talked about in most managerial training curriculums.
This manager's tactic sounds like a tip from a book they read. Creating a safe space for teammates to feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable is ver hard, but asking them to be a smidge more vulnerable than last time is inauthentic and potentially dangerous in the hands of management with ulterior motives.
I think it might help to focus on staying grounded and regulating your emotions, especially when it comes to thinking about Patrick and his success. While it’s natural to admire someone who has built an impressive company and achieved significant financial success, remember that people are often respected for being authentic and secure in who they are, rather than for how much they admire others.
I think a good approach would be to consider asking for adjustments to your work hours or talking with your team lead about creating a plan to make your work environment feel more manageable. It might also be helpful to discuss with a therapist why Patrick’s success affects you so strongly. Understanding the root of this could help you focus more on your own growth and well-being.
The challenges you experienced at Stripe aren’t unique to that company. These same lessons are likely to come up in future roles if they’re left unaddressed. You have the choice to face these issues now or later, but life has a way of bringing them back until they’re fully understood and resolved. Taking proactive steps now can set you up for a healthier, more resilient future in your career and beyond.
I completely agree. I didn't talk about it in the post but I have done a lot of therapy over the last couple years. I'm painfully aware of the ways I've projected my past pain onto my present.
My attempt with the article was to simply reflect how things have felt and leave analysis largely absent. I realize it's left folks with a lot of questions and rightly worried about me.
I'm in a much better place now.
Thank you for taking the time to write this comment.
The common sentiment here that the manager's "10% vulnerable" exercise was inappropriate or even abusive is a little surprising to me.Maybe I'm just showing my age a bit, but my immediate reaction would have just been that this is a stupid team building exercise (whether accurate or not, that's just how I'd see it).Assuming I generally like my boss I wouldn't be a jerk about it, but I wouldn't be interested in participating and would say that as matter-of-fact as I could. Especially if the manager led with "if your willing to..." that should be that, I'd be on with my day no harm no foul.
For anyone coming by that would read the situation as inappropriate or abusive, what's different? Why do you see it abusive where I might see it a waste of time that I would just opt out of?
I think "abusive" is a bit hyperbolic, but I do think it was inappropriate. If the manager was asking them to be a little more vulnerable about a professional situation they went through, perhaps that would be ok. But it's completely inappropriate to expect people to share deeply personal stories during a work meeting.
And the power imbalance compounds the problem. Good on you for feeling comfortable and confident enough in yourself and your position that you'd be fine telling the boss that you're not interested in participating. I think most people wouldn't be able to do that, and some would feel pressured to participate ("because the boss asked") even if they were uncomfortable doing so, even if it's presented as "if you're willing to..."
I wouldn't be comfortable with that kind of sharing in a work setting either, but my approach would probably be to share a "vulnerable" professional situation, or, if I wasn't even feeling up for that, to just share a situation that I was fully comfortable talking about.
And being a teammate I'd also be uncomfortable if someone I didn't know on a close personal basis started talking about how their marriage almost fell apart during a team meeting. This stuff isn't any of my business, and I'm not at work for this!
(Re: your "showing your age" comment, FWIW, I'm in my 40s; not sure if that's old or young by your standards when it comes to this sort of thing.)
Thanks for the comment here, I'm genuinely curious how I may be seeing it so starkly different from many comments here.
> During one of his early meetings at a team onsite he asked the team, “for this meeting I’d like us to try and introduce ourselves a little differently. If you’re comfortable, I’d like us to try and be 10% more vulnerable than we normally would in a work setting.”
I had to go back and double check the original post here to make sure I remembered it right. This may actually be part of where I read it differently, if I heard a manager say this in a meeting I would have still assumed it was to be more vulnerable in a work context rather than breeching the wall between work and personal life. Maybe I would share a code review that made me feel uncomfortable, not a personal trauma in my life.
For better or worse I do tend to have a habit of speaking my mind, hopefully in a kind way that makes it clear I'm being genuine. I'd speak up in this kind of situation in part hoping that it makes others less likely to speak up feel more comfortable or willing to then speak up.
> Re: your "showing your age" comment, FWIW, I'm in my 40s; not sure if that's old or young by your standards when it comes to this sort of thing
It may not be a generational thing at all. I'm not far behind you, in my late 30s, and my initial reaction could very well have been the bad (and timeless) trope of "kids these days just don't ..."
I think this post highlights one of the core reasons why tech jobs suck so much and why burnout is so common among such smart people.
It is because a lot of these jobs are oriented towards PERFORMANCE REVIEWS that are based on BS unrelated to the actual work - such as feelings of others or sometimes # of commits.
Big tech management has departed from being leaders to being raters and rankers of things they are unqualified to rate and rank. They have organizational authority which they should be using to make good choices for customers, employees and projects. But the management only uses it for reviews.
Of course, this is toxic. No one wants to be led by people who don't care more than them and don't contribute in helping the work. Why wouldn't someone get burned out in such an environment?
Nah, I think OP has reached his idea of pinnacle. When you set out to do a thing, and achieve that thing, it's all downhill unless you set out for more challenging goals or switch up. People often get depressed, after getting their dream job, getting promotions, having a successful business exit. It's normal. When you realize this is normal, it makes it easier to embrace it and figure the next step forward. It's the right balance of the struggle that keeps us feeling alive and on the edge. Too much and you become hopelessly depressed, no struggle and you feel empty and depressed too.
Kudos for having courage to write it up. Enjoyed my time with you at Stripe.
Large company cog syndrome is very real. Especially when performance reviews are not tied to reality but someone’s inner monologue that you have no access to.
Take care. Time heals most wounds. Oregon is a beautiful place.
Every company I have worked at I have hit this point of mental health collapse, just like OP. At this point, I can try everything—"Treating it just as a job", "finding happiness elsewhere", "just get shit done"—but nothing works. For a long while, I only found myself to blame. I felt idiotic for not having the energy to work like everyone else does.
Past one and a half years, have been years of self-discovery. I have been hacking on projects full-time (hopefully, I will make sustainable money soon). And it's been so fun, and relieving, and joyful to direct your creative energy to projects, with no authority to answer to. It's not without difficult times though. Sometimes, I feel blocked to the point of abandoning months of hard work, but I am slowly learning how to avoid those situations.
Honestly, everything I was advised was a lie (or at least, didn't work for me). I like being able to shape things, and use my creative energy to do useful things. Politics, and bureaucratic processes, drain my energy to an extent that I simply can't function. And no matter how hard I try, I can't ignore it with the mindset of "it's just a job." I can't find happiness in "being promoted" or whatever rating I am given.
I just want to ship good software. When I am driven, I will forget about everything and just dive in to solve the problem. Sadly though, it's not an easy ask in a modern-day corporate environment.
So, I would say what you're experiencing is normal in many ways. Don't kill yourself over it. If you have a list of fun projects, attempt them. For many of us, creative energy is precious, and needs to be directed well to keep ourselves sane.
> Every company I have worked at I have hit this point of mental health collapse, just like OP. At this point, I can try everything—"Treating it just as a job", "finding happiness elsewhere", "just get shit done"—but nothing works.
Sure, because that's too late. Once you've already collapsed, pretty much the only thing that's going to fix it is quitting and taking a break, possibly with some therapy.
You need to "treat it as just a job" from your very first day there. You need to "find happiness elsewhere" every single day of your life, not just when you're feeling burned out.
Regardless, I'm glad you've now found a path that's working for you!
I remember the moment when my buddy Slacked me saying that my shipped email had been one of Patrick’s tabs in a Friday Fireside. I hadn’t attended because I was too busy trying to work more. My email admired by a billionaire? Bliss. The thought of Patrick noticing me felt unbelievably good.
Oof. Allowing other people to dictate your own self-worth is always a bad sign. I'll take a five figure bonus pay out over a "good job old boy" pat on the back any day.
Also, this article prompted me to use Ngram for the first time, to compare "camaraderie" and "comradery", which I was amazed and appalled by. The resulting diagram really helped soothe me, so here it is:
Probably the "English is a dual language with lots of words that mean the same thing because half are from French and the other half are Anglo Saxon" thing again. There are loads of words like this, there was an article about it on HN the other week
No, not whatsoever. "Camarade" is the French word they both stem from, and the spelling "comradery" is the (North) American variant which some sources describe as an error and some not.
It's the U.S. vs England spelling thing again, except this time the U.S. spelling doesn't seem to be catching on, for some reason.
To get a feel for the whole thing in Ngram I looked at "labor,labour", "color,colour" and "organize,organise" and for each one the U.S. spelling was winning by a little or by loads, but "camaraderie" heavily dominates "comradery" in terms of usage. So, a little bit mysterious, maybe.
>"She shared with me some concerns about my communication and project management. She, and apparently others she gathered feedback from, felt like I hadn’t done a good enough job pulling other engineers into the project."
You are software developer, not a manager. It is her job to worry about things like that.
>"for this meeting I’d like us to try and introduce ourselves a little differently. If you’re comfortable, I’d like us to try and be 10% more vulnerable than we normally would in a work setting"
What a fucking moron. Most likely he was fishing for weak spots to be exploited. I do not get how one can fall for this type of crap.
Anyways this whole thing reminds me why I've never wanted to work for big companies and eventually went on my own. I do not need somebody else to organize my life. I do job, client pays money and this is where it ends.
> He gave me a coderpad link. I started to read through the question. I could already feel my mind moving like molasses. On the surface the question seemed straightforward enough. It presented a simple data structure and asked me to do some filtering based on a set of constraints. “No problem!” I thought.
I fired up vim and got to work.
Wait, since when can you use your own editor? Is this common? Did I just fail to ask?
My interview with Stripe felt similarly nerve wracking - with writing code in what may as well be TextEdit.app contributing to that feeling
Some companies will actually ask you to share your screen and run a bash script they provide to install dependencies live instead of providing a coderpad link.
I don't like those interviews at all. It feels invasive if you aren't prepared with a VM already, and then you have to worry about undoing whatever their script did afterward.
Yes, you can use your own editor. It's not generally _offered_ for the first (pre "onsite") interview but is an option if you ask. It's made clear (recommended, even) for the onsite that you have that option.
A lot of this post reminds me of my own experience in big tech.
I think it's really brutal to those inclined to the highly sensitive person archetype (overly sensitive to external stimuli). Every little thing you do is analysed and the perf process is intense.
It can also be illogical - despite attempts to not be - as subjectivity in the perf process is almost unavoidable. Just take this author, who had a successful project, but got below expectations simply because their manager or a senior lead got a bad impression from probably a handful of interactions with them.
At these companies you _have_ to learn to not get emotionally or mentally invested in this process, or it can wreck you. Therapy can help a lot here.
I've been in this position a few times now. God is it hard to explain to other people, especially when you know how success is metricized by others and silently judged. But at the same time, the collection of life experiences gained by doing stupid, impulsive things has made me happier than I could have expected in the long run. And has shown me a lot of things I would not have seen otherwise.
I identified with this story quite a bit. I had a similar experience at a cut-throat big name tech company. It's extremely political and the business has to run extremely sharp to succeed. Hence the hightened politics and management involvement at that level. You did a great job with the writing! It was fun to read, and interesting to hear the story. Best of luck in the future
I read it but ohhhh my gawwwwd what compels you all to write stuff like this about an employer, why is this any part of your identity at all? This is the opposite of having a life.
Serious question, what is this mentality?
tl;dr Look at this guy! He left a job without another job lined up after making half a million for 4 consecutive years! but only thought it was a big deal because he learned how to write but was disillusioned by his masters in other ways.
Really, I don't get resignation posts. Like the ones on linkedin, or other social media. Just surreptitiously go like all the other people who just weren't there the next day. Whose slack randomly said (deactivated).
Big companies are great for job security, not so much for meaningful work (unless you’re senior, it seems). I’ve been at a massive company for four years and my work is uninspiring. Can’t wait to get back in the startup life.
What was the point of this to anyone who does not already know this person?
I thought the internal memo was going to just be the background to set up the actual point which would be something they learned or something.
Actually at first I thought it was going to be about Stripe's culture but there was really nothing too exceptionally bad, just ordinary bog standard work in a too-big company issues. The standout most offensive thing Stripe did to them was something they actually liked.
So, fine, it won't be about how good or bad Stripe is, just about some process they went through and it starts with "I'm not feeling much purpose to my life and I'm not sure why not, but work as a developer in a generic bog standard tech company is not providing it."
Ok, got it. Setup established. Ready for the point now. But then that's it. 'No "and then"'.
Ok like, so what? The mere fact of deciding to quit a tech job for the vague reason of non-specific dissatisfaction is relevant to this person's direct close friends & family, barely relevant to anyone else at their company, and not relevant at all to anyone else.
you are provided with an up-close and detailed story of a person under pressure at a high-pressure company, and the ending is not a good ending for the high skill person. Since there is no conclusion drawn "for you" you must do the work of active imagination and decide for yourself, why "so what."
At a minimum, some empathy for the person writing to start with.. being nauseous or in a cold sweat over work situations, interviews, the expectations of a spouse over stable income.. lots of reasons.. This person is being a lot more than ten percent vulnerable in writing this.. they say right away they were torn over writing it in public.
I think this is the feeling when you realize what you’re doing does not matter. No big purpose, just a mere immortal. I think you need a bigger purpose bro, like really. Reach out.
She, and apparently others she gathered feedback from, felt like I hadn’t done a good enough job pulling other engineers into the project. She spoke of how proud she was of the outcome but that it didn’t excuse my less than ideal methods.
I gather from what he wrote that he's a software engineer. How is it his duty to "pull other engineers into the project"? What does management at this company do, besides invent contrived criticism to mash into a compliment sandwich? American corporate management culture has become laughably toxic over the last several decades.
* it depends if the "other engineers" are on the same team or not. If they're a different team, it's not so much a manager responsibility.
* in tech, it helps to already be doing the next job level up to get promoted to it.
> What does management at this company do, besides invent contrived criticism to mash into a compliment sandwich?
The primary job of a manager is to get their employees promoted. The second job is to do whatever you promised your own management you'll do. So yes, that's what they're supposed to do - the "compliment sandwich" is the yearly performance review.
If they're a different team, it's not so much a manager responsibility.
That doesn't even make any sense. If you need people from other teams, your manager should absolutely be coordinating that.
in tech, it helps to already be doing the next job level up to get promoted to it.
That is not justification for negative comments in a review.
The primary job of a manager is to get their employees promoted.
I have never, in my entire life, ever come across anyone inside or outside of management who held that view.
So yes, that's what they're supposed to do
Yeesh. Agreeing that management should invent contrived criticism to form a compliment sandwich? Okay. The important part here is the contrived bit, not the compliment sandwich.
I kinda applaud OP for sharing their personal story.
However, I personally never understood why people give a shit about objectives which aren't tied to business objectives. I mean the build improvement of 10x is great, but so what ?
Also, Stripe is barely profitable. As an engineer in big tech, I wouldn't even consider applying. You're better off targeting Principal engineer at Big Tech since it implies doing some really ground breaking software work. At that point, you probably don't have to worry about middle management and that bs. Outside the big 4 I had an experience where the manager read a Software engineering management book and would follow the things down to the letter like a superstition. It was a stupid exchange but ChatGPT really helped build my repository of meaningless corporate soeak. I find it to be a very useful skill.
But that's the problem with the OP's job - "first hire onto the brand new JS Infra team".
That doesn't sound like a customer/external developer-facing position.
It can be hard to make a visible impact when your work is hidden behind many layers. But that's the nature of their job - it's not a "rainmaker" position, it's a cost centre.
But it sounds like they wanted to have a job that had more visible impact.
I'm glad someone else mentioned this, i think too often engineers think they've done something huge because it was technically challenging but how does any of this impact the business? why would speeding up dashboard builds by 10x matter at all?
Focusing on things often causes you to get worse at them, so businesses intentionally keep most employees away from profit or from thinking about it. In ZIRP land this might be because they're banking tech workers so they won't start their own startup, or in case someone comes up with a better thing for them to do.
Instead you do artificial projects and it either impresses people enough to get you a good performance review or it doesn't.
This often produces customer surplus (like when companies release cool open source projects they didn't need to write) so it's a good thing, maybe.
This is an interesting idea I haven't heard before. Specifically on "Focusing on things often causes you to get worse at them" are you saying that's due to a Goodhart's law kind of effect?
Having trouble thinking of examples of this from my own experience but they're all mostly social/political (often trying to hard in these realms can be to your detriment)
can you say more? maybe i read to much into a snarky remark but i think your idea is interesting
I feel sorry for this guy, but he will be alright in the end. Corporations create a facade of a rosy kindergarten, they lure in smart but immature guys like him, extract their energy and once they look depleted, they gaslight them into thinking they are failures and throw them out.
"Until I had my next one on one with my boss. She shared with me some concerns about my communication and project management. She, and apparently others she gathered feedback from, felt like I hadn’t done a good enough job pulling other engineers into the project. She spoke of how proud she was of the outcome but that it didn’t excuse my less than ideal methods."
Manipulative managers like her willingly fuse themselves with the beast that is corporation, and become its tentacles of some sort.
But this guy has also learnt a lesson that he shouldn't seek happinesses in someone's approval. What his manager thinks of him matters very little and once he has grown out of this kindergarten mindset, he'll realise that he is his own judge and the only thing that matters and the only source of happiness is whether he does the right thing.
The stereotypical brogrammer hazing interview at the start kinda foreshadowed everything else.
When you see that a company is playing games in an interview, the questions are what other forms will the doofus/jerky culture take if you join, and how will it affect you.
This is the entirety of the post's description of the interviewer and the interview itself:
> He introduced himself and we settled into the usual ritual of a phone screen. ... He gave me a coderpad link. ... It presented a simple data structure and asked me to do some filtering based on a set of constraints. ... He kindly ended the interview and asked if I had any questions.
Everything else is about the author struggling and being anxious. Where do you get "stereotypical brogrammer hazing"?
Because traditionally good software engineers in an interview would treat each other as colleagues, not turn the meeting into a one-way hazing.
The CS101 hazing interview style was popularized by some CS students with no work experience, and then cargo-culted as religious rituals by others who also didn't have any other conception of what interviews for experienced professionals should be.
Oh no! They asked a coding question for an l3 eng position and used coderpad, not some private environment which would be impossible to review after the call! Such hazing
Actually one could argue if it kept being “stereotypical brogrammer” on the actual job, it would end up being much better outcome for the author
Of course we only see one side of the story here, but as written the original manager sounds like a maniac. Letting someone complete a major and well received project and then sniping backward at how they did it with a performance review reeks of incompetent tyrant. Where the hell was the feedback and mentoring when it mattered?
If you are worth your salt as a manager your reports should know exactly where they are going into performance reviews and that process should just be a formality to make the HR department whole. Unfortunately, a lot of dipshits end up in management because once you make it here it is a lot harder (ironically) to get performance reviewed out.
The second manager also sounds pretty foolish, but at least in a more endearing and earnest way. That kind of emotional thing can and should be discussed on 1:1s once you have built up the relationship. As a manager you should be looking out for your reports and trying to set them up for long term success, and that means learning about their personal life to the extent that is mutually decided to be appropriate. Forcing emotionality out into a group setting sounds like a cringe moment in the Silicon Valley sitcom. This is a bad idea for so many reasons.. for one a lot of us are introverts and doing that is crushing anxiety.. and the innate peer pressure if others are doing it are going to lead to overshares and yet more anxiety. No.
If the depression era fell under the same manager they also missed the importance of momentum. Momentum carries you through failure, depression, hard times.. and you need to give your team easy wins if they are falling behind to rebuild momentum. Otherwise it feels like jumping back on to a moving train.
Based on this I'd wonder what's going on at Stripe. Run not walk from a situation like that, author made the right call.
By registering for Stripe, you are confirming that you will not use the Service to accept payments in connection with the following businesses, business activities or business practices: (1) door-to-door sales, (2) offering substantial rebates or special incentives to the Cardholder subsequent to the original purchase, (3) negative response marketing, (4) engaging in deceptive marketing practices, (5) sharing Cardholder's data with another merchant for payment of up-sell or cross-sell product or service, (6) evading Card Network's chargeback monitoring programs, (7) engaging in any form of licensed or unlicensed aggregation or factoring, (8) airlines, (9) age verification, (10) age restricted products or services, (11) bail bonds, (12) bankruptcy lawyers, (13) bidding fee auctions, (14) collection agencies, (15) chain letters, (16) check cashing, wire transfers or money orders, (17) counterfeit goods, (18) currency exchanges or dealers, (19) embassies, foreign consulates or other foreign governments, (20) firms selling business opportunities, investment opportunities, mortgage consulting or reduction, credit counseling, repair or protection or real estate purchases with no money down, (21) credit card and identity theft protection, (22) cruise lines, (23) essay mills, (24) flea markets, (25) drug paraphernalia, (26) extended warranties, (27) fortune tellers, (28) ?get rich quick? schemes; (28) gambling (including but not limited to lotteries, Internet gaming, contests, sweepstakes, or offering of prizes as an inducement to purchase goods or services), (29) sports forecasting or odds making, (30) illegal products or services, (31) mail-order brides, (32) marijuana dispensaries and related businesses, (33) money transmitters or money service businesses, (34) multi-level marketing or pyramid schemes, (35) online or other non-face-to-face pharmacies or pharmacy referral services, (36) prepaid phone cards, phone services or cell phones, (37) pseudo pharmaceuticals, (38) quasi-cash or stored value, (39) securities brokers, (40) sexually-oriented or pornographic products or services, (41) shipping or forwarding brokers, (42) substances designed to mimic illegal drugs, (43) telemarketing, (44) telecommunications equipment and telephone sales, (45) timeshares, (46) travel agencies or travel clubs, (47) online or other non-face-to-face tobacco or e-cigarette sales, (48) weapons and munitions (49) virtual currency that can be monetized, re-sold or converted to physical or digital goods or services or otherwise exit the virtual world, (50) personal computer technical support, (51) selling video game or virtual world credits (unless you are the operator of the video game or virtual world), (52) selling social media activity, such as Twitter followers, Facebook likes or Youtube views, (53) human hair, fake hair or hair-extensions, (54) any product or service that infringes upon the copyright, trademark or trade secrets of any third party, or (55) any product, service or activity that is deceptive, unfair, predatory or prohibited by one or more Card Networks.
I gotcha, i was speaking from the perspective of "manager of engineering team that has supported many different payment systems, stripe being worlds above the others" context.
As a human who values freedom I agree with your objections 100%. Would be great if payment processors weren't in a position to be moral gatekeepers for the economy
It's because they support credit cards, which have easy chargebacks. If you can get customers to pay via bank transfer/FedNow they could allow a lot more scummy sounding businesses.
Of course then the customers are going to get scammed or killed a lot more and will sue Stripe!
Beyond technical aspects I don't see the added value. In fact gumroad kept some earnings because when it came time for payout I had to (re)qualify under stripe's terms. Who was the scammer in that siuation? I'd say gumroad was.
I've processed with added value high risk processor platforms who'll handle hair extension transactions. For 15%. All it required technically was an html widget link.
That processor also used to not require the annual mcvisa fee. Amazing loophole lasted for a decade. They do require the fee now. Progress.
As for the main topic of touchy feely confessions that is 100% directly out of the communist struggle session playbook.
It makes sense to care about a 'startup' if it's like a few small teams, everyone knows each other, resources are still constrained, etc.
But when the company is public or on their series Z funding round and the once nimble startup has devolved into a big ball of bureaucracy- the psychologically healthier thing is to not care. Your project may be no-scoped by a higher up for no discernable reason. Your trash manager was probably imported from a similarly bureaucratically burdened company and will import and impose their bullshit. You don't have any real agency or identity to this company which will treat you as an interchangeable resource. Sure, try to be useful where you can but seek validation and meaning outside of work. I generally recommend a side project you have agency in that can maybe one day replace your primary employment.
I'd rather not have my manager forcing me to do group therapy. I owe the company some work hours and they own me money.
If I want to have personal relations with someone from my work, befriend somebody, share personal things, that is my choice. My personal life is not the company business.
Of course I wouldn't say all that to the manager, but 'I'll put him on the list of people I should be careful about, and fake some confessions.