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Ask HN: Is your team or work like a dysfunctional family?

4 points by edgefield ↗ HN
How many of you work in an environment that sometimes feels like a dysfunctional family where managers and leadership tolerates non-social behaviors for far too long and thus creates a toxic climate that undermines productivity and ultimately leads to turnover?

5 comments

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71a54xd
IMO, everyone in a team being forcibly "positive" or "happy" is a bigger red flag.
high_byte
exactly. everybody complains about our office location in private but never bring it up and even deny this when asked directly... also it drives me nuts how every issue must be sugarcoated for 15 minutes of ass licking instead of giving it straight as it is
71a54xd
Another is baiting people into "pairing" if they aren't going fast enough or operating with enough velocity. This generally entails just giving someone the solution, prevents them from learning and also generally feels demoting. The weirdest red flag I've encountered is a prior employer that got mad and though I was "misdirected" when I was digging into their code and looking into problems slightly outside of the tickets they gave me. Their later comments were, "we wish you'd spend more time finding extraneous wins outside of your tickets"... I willingly left about a week later.
hogrider
Nearly always. Managers are very very reluctant to do their jobs in this aspect.
grldd
Every company I interviewed with in the past two years is like that. Every single one.