La morte non è
nel non poter comunicare
ma nel non poter più essere compresi.
Death lies not
in not being able to communicate
but in no longer be...
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Thank you so much for this post. You summarized very well what happens to so many of us out there.
Just to share my experience: I too had endured a very similar situation here in San Francisco for many years before joining my current company, which focus a lot on the human side of things.
At my previous company, like so many people here, I was a contractor, and worked for clients, so there wasn't really a strong bond between me and my company manager. Hence, there was no appropriate way to observe and reward success and growth.
That distance created a big emptiness and lowered the company morale, so everyone is really disconnected, except for the group of folks that work on clients near each other and hang out more often.
Hence, to your words, there was no culture, poor social interaction and lack of curiosity. Even worse, there was almost no empathy present, and the company tried to remediate that with optional, non-inclusive parties which always happened outside office hours.
I would raise these things with my manager and he would try to convince me these things did not exist and were fallacies. Also, he would refer to people as resources, and he really viewed us all as pegs in a gear.
I knew it wasn't my place. I worked hard on interview prep, waited for a good opportunity and moved on.
Only after I left I realized how bad that environment was and how toxic it had been for my mental health.
Nevertheless, @adsiera I would like you to know that you're not alone, and you came to the right place where people typically demonstrate empathy towards each other.
My advice: take it all in and just silently make your move. And look for inclusive places as dev.to for support on your journey. It might be a long journey, mine took 9 months, and many more before I started to act towards this.
On the bright side, your past experience will enable you to ask excellent questions to your new employers when doing interviews, from your own experience.
Wishing well to you!!
Hey, Tiago! Thank you for your words! Well, yes...we do not have much of an option, do we? Just get more prepared and move on to another company. Eventually it will be the right one, I am convinced of it :)
Thanks again for your support and kind words, so very very much appreciated!
The problem is not with the "coders" or "coding," it's with management. The management has molded agile development into "Agile" development. Meaning that they have succeeded in turning knowledge work into factory work. If management can find a way to get as much productivity out of you to the point of just breaking you, that's what they will do. Managers get rewarded for getting more work done for the same amount of money. And since most managers don't know that software development cannot be built in the same way that a car can, they get it wrong most of the time, at the expense of the developers. As a result, the culture turns into a Darwinist free for all, and the ones that break get the boot. Fresh bodies are then hired only to go through the same cycle.
This trend will only progress and I predict that within 5 years you will see a large amount of knowledge workers unionize.
We don't have the social skills to unionize though... We simply work harder to avoid conflict. As an industry we've welcomed abuse with open arms. There are enough developers willing to put up with it that those who make noise are outliers and tend to be replaced quickly.
I agree.
Thanks for the interesting post. In my experience there are several commonplace aspects of the tech workplace that contribute to the stand-offish behavior you talked about.
One is the 'stack rank' review process where workers are all in competition with each other. If I help you in some way and you are thereby more successful, it could harm me because you might wind up looking better at review time. Even in organizations where there isn't a ranking system there will often be an unspoken pecking order where some people get to call the shots and others get told what to do. Violate this and you will be ostracized.
Then there is the Agile development process (with Jira as its evil helpmate). Product development is broken down into innumerable small pieces that get doled out to developers at the commencement of each sprint. Nobody is looking much at the overall design picture, and the result is something that resembles a big cumulative blob of paper mache as each developer works on his assignment of the day and pastes it onto the code base. Re-usability? Scaleable? Who cares, the assignment moved from left to right on Jira.
And finally there is typically a sad lack of social skills among people who are drawn to programming work. They are nerds. They never had many friends. They don't know how to have a conversation or interact comfortably with other people so they avoid it.
Thank you very much for commenting, Theodore! Yes, I thought exactly the same, about taking a sabbatical, by the way. We need that from time to time, to get updated with new technologies and giving ourselves a chance for something new (and possibly better!)
It is a great thing to have a partner who supports you!
Change is always positive, IMHO, no matter the result of it.
I cannot take a whole sabbatical year, unfortunately, but at least two-three months would be ideal.
You have put into words what I've been feeling for a few years. That is especially true with remote employees (like myself). Thank you!
Thank you, Pedro! I am convinced we are never isolated cases, there will (almost) always be someone having the same impressions/feelings/opinions, somewhere out in the world. Nonetheless, I could not be more pleased to hear that from you!! Thank you again!
Brava! È confortante sapere che non sono solo.
Too many programming environments lack 2 critical ingredients: art and humor. Life without both is incomplete.
Grazie Graham! Thanks Graham
Well, yes, somehow art and humour are considered distractions to productivity...hélas!