Over the past 15 years corporate culture and workplaces have become increasingly toxic and, even worse, completely pointless. Over the past decade it has become so much less about professional advancement, meaningful work, personal achievement, and sense of progression. Instead it has become about exhaustion, exploitation, toxicity, impact on health, bad interpersonal relations, and absolutely no sense of accomplishment. In the end you get booted more often than not because you are good at what you do and have to be compensated adequately, and have almost nothing to show for all the years of professional engagement.
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@kdb+1ucY22KH I couldn't agree with you more. There's a stark contrast in culture and treatment of individuals between a company who is growing their business and increasing revenues, versus a company who may be under-performing or meeting other market expectations.
When people are busy trying to push forward to make the company better or increase revenues, there is less time to play company politics.
When business is slow and LR's are on the horizon, people become more guarded and fight to defend their jobs in the company political arena. Often times it turns nasty.
Innovation, development and growing business is lots of fun
Supporting legacy environments with little to no budget for improvement which customers are retiring? Not so fun.
It's really simple. You want to work for a company that is actually growing their business. In those environments, there are lots of opportunities.
Once the growth stops, the energy gets refocused on internal BS.
Totally in agreement with this
When I joined Cisco I was naive enough to believe that professionalism and efficiency must reign here at least in the sections that matter
Over the X years I have been with Cisco I watched managers turning a group of highly skilled individuals into an inefficient machine with some working hard while others sitting idle. Nepotism, churches based on personal affinities, monopolizing the resources and moonlighting while on the job are just a few of the things I could see over the years.
We are still delivering but I can say that the way the team has been functioning so far was designed to offer comfort and safety to managers and not to optimize the use of the resources at hand. As the workload is increasing cracks are starting to appear and due to the wrong strategy of our manager, or rather the lack of it people are unhappy even those IC who in a way benefitted from all these. The increased workload is not allowing them to moonlight anymore while it is impacting their personal life. The bonus being cut this year, forced vacation when the company wants you to have it is adding to the above.
Interesting enough you can look at your colleagues who are contractors, doing similar work with you, making more money than you (incorporated contractors can split income, defer taxes and many others), having access to the same technical resources like you (the only thing then don't seem to get is internal trainings) and not having to attend all these cr-p HR or Business trainings or team meetings. Many of them in my team have been around for longer that full time employees. They don't get paid vacation but they charge based on the assumption of one month unpaid vacation so that is being paid implicitly.
F... this :-). Going back to contracting again will be a good thing in the end.
This month has knocked the wind out of many people. Lots of sleepless nights for a lot.
This. Been in the corpo world for over 15 years. There's never a time when money is not tight, regardless of performance.
"It's called the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."
You'll find that if your personal life has more meaning, you'll seek out less meaning in your work. Stop tying your sense of self worth to your occupation.
Most of what you wrote sounds like how you're responding to/internalizing your situation. What are you doing to help change the things you don't like?
ZIRP made too much of everything in tech. Scroll thru LI and tell me how many of these software companies are unique or differentiated in any way?