Toxic behavior is screaming at people in meetings. It is belittling coworkers work. It is allowing the louder people to dominate the conversation even when their ideas are worse. It is making decisions through intimidation and politics rather than merit.

A toxic work environment is somewhere where toxic behavior is rewarded instead of stopped.

Toxic people like to believe they get their way because their ideas are better, but they aren’t.

It takes a certain personality to do the things that start up a big enterprise that actually supports the families and lives of "normal" non-toxic people. That's what we have to get.

We may not like it. And I certainly don't. But history has proven that is that it usually takes.

Very much untrue. Perhaps to build a cult of personality one needs to have eccentric tendencies. But to build a successful business toxicity is not required.

I would be curious to know why you feel history, versus your general stereotype of founders, justifies your point.

Now, I agree that some of the toxic behavior I mentioned is over-represented in people who are very driven. However, the toxic people who successfully create a business do so in spite of their toxic behavior, not because of it.

> Nearly 1 in 3 people who quit their jobs in 2021 did so to escape a toxic company culture, characterized by discrimination, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and poor work-life boundaries.

Well at least for me it isn’t. I know for that 1/3rd it’s unbearable oppression that they are expected to work when paid ridiculous salaries.

Devs have practically the best jobs ever invented. There’s insanely great pay, reasonable hours, stock options, work tools are paid for by the company, zero risk of death at the workplace, zero chance of injury besides maybe carparal tunnel syndrome. Etc.

One of the things I’m most appreciative about is starting off my career in a warehouse. I’ve never really understood the litany of issues and everyday is kind of like, what I’m getting paid how much? To sit at a keyboard and type… Even doctors and lawyers get paid less and work far longer hours.

Let's play SAT. Which one of these doesn't belong with the others?

Ding! Expecting someone to work after hours isn't anywhere in the ballpark of discrimination, sexual harassment or verbal abuse. This is a common manipulation tactic. It's like saying most drug arrests today are for heroin, crack, meth and pot. (Pot being about 80%). It's trying to make something look worse than it is. The more you know.

I should note that Bioware is not unique in destroying its employees with crunchtime, they're just the ones that stand out most in my mind specifically because they coined that term. It's quite common in the industry, sadly. I also know that Rockstar [2] and CDPR [3] are also very much guilty of this practice.

Edit: It's so common in the video game industry (and also somewhat unique to it) that there's a wikipedia article dedicated to the practice [4]. Insane.

[0]: https://www.careercontessa.com/advice/toxic-work-environment...

[1]: https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

[2]: https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1...

[3]: https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-re...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games)

I don't think when people say their workplace has poor work-life balance, it's not typically to the extreme you mentioned, it's more mild, like boss calling on weekend, after hours work, etc. I don't think you can have mild discrimination, sexual harassment or verbal abuse. Perhaps verbal abuse.

Sometimes though, you get real winners like Blizzard with all of the above recently. I know enough to never work in the video game industry.

Some companies also require your work-life balance be broken down in order to advance. This is usually an unwritten requirement, and failure to participate makes you "not a team player," "a poor fit for the company," etc. I remember my father left a job because him going to see his father in the hospital after work instead of grabbing a beer (or a golf club) and shmoozing with the higher ups all but guaranteed he would never make partner at the firm. "Yeah, you might have kids to raise and your dad might be dying and all, but maybe join us instead so we can get to know you better and discuss your career ambitions" is one of the most disgusting attitudes I've ever heard, and yet many law firms still act like old boys' clubs, and a failure to suck up early on will impose a hard cap on your career. I would consider this to be a toxic workplace, both because of the "we're all family here (which means your family comes second)" attitude, and the implicit "if you bring in tons of business but don't fit in with our culture, you might as well start polishing your resume unless you're happy staying an associate."

Those conversations have had very little to do with the list you have put forward.

If anything, a lack of accountability gives cover to toxic people.

You have about 15 and counting different people's opinions on what toxic means. It's pretty subjective, therefore not really meaningful outside an emotional way.

For example, a toxic workplace could be one that just wants people to return to the office despite great productivity while working from home (or vice versa, this is just an example). Something like this would be irrational because maintaining the current state doesn’t hurt the business, while the new required state (returning to the office) only exists to subordinate employees and ICs. It’s completely toxic behavior by management for do something like this.

In an ideal workplace, the only thing that matters is results (within the confines of civil society and the law). So demanding anything other than that is toxic behavior.

I don’t think anything you listed is inherently toxic, or even seen that way by Gen Z. However, any of the things you listed could be used to demand irrational behavior from employees. Behavior that intentionally keeps those employees from delivering results. This happens when a manger is more worried about his or her own status in the company than actually doing anything good for the company.

There's a lot of artificial and unnecessary stress produced by managers, produced by clients. When a deadline slips because estimates were wrong, managers can violate everyone's work life balance. Or they can scrum it and figure out what they can ship, or what new information came to light, and re-prioritize what to work on.

The Agile Manifesto is clear that there are to be no managers. Developers are expected to work directly with the business people (and each other) to understand the business needs of the project. As Scrum exists to detail how to carry out the values of the Agile Manifesto in a practical way, you can't both have managers and Scrum. They are at odds with each other.

I expect that is why it always seems to fall apart in the real world. A lot of developers don't want to be involved with the business. They just want to focus on the tech and let someone else do the bridgework between the two. Likewise, the managers doing the bridgework don't want to give up their job. It takes a really special team who are all interested in the business aspects as much as the tech, along with being free of existing managerial structure in the organization, to make it work.

So, if you have managers, "scrumming it" isn't going to happen.

- bad organizational skills

- bad tooling

- fuzzy objectives

- mediocre hierarchy

- insisting in micro managing and having "stats" instead of fixing the obvious problems

now the rest is more subjective:

- antiquated silo-ed work, people become moron knowing only their boring chore, they also don't understand what is happening outside their cubicle, can become paranoid, jealous, resentful (because grass is always greener). this leads to a subpar, if not sad, nash equilibrium of low motivation and mediocre human bond

Without a copy of the survey, it's hard to know what respondents saw, but the way they present the data suggests that "toxic" was left wide open to interpretation.

> Nearly 1 in 3 people who quit their jobs in 2021 did so to escape a toxic company culture, characterized by discrimination, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and poor work-life boundaries.

If they provided the full text of the questions and answers in the charts (which is good form when reporting survey results), they didn't provide that definition to respondents. If they didn't provide the full text in the charts, then there's not a lot that we can do with this data because we don't know what questions they were asking.

This is self fulfilling. The more you work to make them replaceable, the more they realize

1) They themselves are not needed, as anyone else can do their job

2) They are not obligated to stay, just as you are not obligated to keep them

I’ll concede some of the things you listed could simultaneously be considered both toxic and “good business,” but you got out over your skis here

At least they'll be doing it on their terms.

I've been in the software development industry for over 25 years now, and things that were acceptable, even encouraged, 20 years ago would get you written up with HR today, maybe even fired.

Is that better or worse? I'm sure there would be opinions on both sides, but it is what it is. Cultural norms change all the time.

I personally think that we are now leaning towards being nicer to each other, and trying to provide opportunities to more people, and perhaps that comes at the cost of "sales" and "innovation" and "hustle", but as I get older I realize that I am 100% ok with that.

If a minority of people make less millions or billions and more people get to work in an environment that doesn't stress them out or make them feel uncomfortable, that's a great trade.