I have a friend who recently left Microsoft after a decade and a half. He'd completely drunk the Kool Aid but ended his experience at the company facing more than a year of abuse from a new manager and senior engineer. Very similar to this long post about Apple, unfortunately. He and a couple of other people on his team tried to move to different teams, but despite a long history of excellent work, everyone was treated by the rest of the company like they were toxic waste.

Nobody thinks that their company is like this until they're on the other side of it. In my friend's case, it was only in retrospect that he saw patterns of toxic behavior from management.

I haven't seen this sort of outright abuse, but I've definitely experienced firsthand at multiple companies a situation where a newcomer needs a ton of tribal knowledge in order to do their job, but the newcomer's team members get miffed every time they're asked a question. So then the newcomer ends up having to do way too much work on his/her own the hard way, it makes everything way harder and less effective, and before too long they're branded a "low performer" and it all goes downhill from there.

It happened to me at Microsoft, and later it ALMOST happened to me at Apple. Fortunately, at Apple I knew what was going on that time and I just badgered my irate teammate and bullied him into giving me all the info I needed. (Or went around him when I could, since I was lucky that the rest of the team was a lot easier to work with in that respect) He was a nice guy, but he'd get visibly annoyed every time I asked him a question. Either the answer was patently obvious, or the question was unanswerably difficult.. Later on, that teammate left and a new one came onboard with a ludicrous number of really dumb questions, but I just swallowed my bad attitude and did my best to patiently and nicely answer them.. and sure enough, after a couple of months he was fully up to speed.

Also, even more fortunately, when things were going badly at Microsoft I had a decent savings account built up and a lot of self confidence/stubbornness, enough to say from a place of complete conviction "I'M not the problem; this whole org is a steaming pile of shit!" no matter who told me otherwise. I feel really bad for the author of TFA, because I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to have the type of screwed-up, mercenary attitude it would take to get through his experiences unscathed.

I totally agree. I'm working on a system now that is the most complex I've ever worked on - managed K8s, OperStack, bare metal - all the provisioning, build and test infrastructure (dealing with nested virtualization, DinD, integrating build tools into tools that do things as low level as PXE boot servers). There's a huge amount of tribal knowledge required and I struggled with this.

Thankfully my manager was open to questions, and patient, it was me "not wanting to be a bother". But I had a meeting with my manager's manager and he talked about how stupid he felt, and understanding that no-one would feel like I was an "anchor" asking the "silly" questions of "Why do we / don't we ..." and persisting through that because everyone had been there.

> long litany of real or perceived psychological abuse. Maybe I too missed a smoking gun.

Its staring you in the face. How can anyone be allowed to pull off half of that shit? I mean if you are _knowingly_ causing someone to take beta blockers, you've got to have a long hard look at yourself.

I have made mistakes, fortunately early in my career. I made a colleague cry, I thought it was a "bit of fun" but I was being a horrid shit. I don't shout at work anymore. Its a sign that I've lost the argument, failed to see reason, or more often just plain wrong.

To allow others to cause people to cry or shout is frankly unforgivable. Especially if they are senior and its aimed at a young'un. Yes, they might be annoying, or a dipshit. but its up to you to guide them or move them on. Not play with like a cat with a half dead bird.

in short: enigneers don't let other people be abusive dicks.

> perceived psychological abuse

Do you call this:

> "You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental problems."

"perceived psychological abuse"?!? What the heck, the sociopathic person who said that stupid ass thing should have been fired on the spot, apparently he/she still is a manager at Apple.