And smooth talkers game peer reviews.
The developer got fired 10 minutes later. Others took note to not challenge him if they want to keep their job.
That happened ~10 years ago and I am actually grateful for that experience because I was just starting out, the scammer indirectly taught me much more about how to scam and lie your way to the top, how to sell your ideas to unaware management and most importantly - that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies.
My experience (5 startups) is that office politics are 100x more important in small startups. Everything is more concentrated, including the politics. That's why there is so much cofounder drama to go around.
At least in a big company there's a lot of inertia and process to tone down the politics a little bit.
Maybe a different kind of politics, but it was toxic as fuck and my career was basically at the mercy of heads and directors that I would never have reason to interact with. Hit a bump on a project that causes a delay? Expect some higher up to threaten the prospects of the entire team unless we got it done on time.
Most of the people engaging and benefitting from such cut-throat politics and gossip had no right to be in such management positions. Non-existent leadership skills.
Tiny startups can be equally rough but at least it's more direct.
Time for shouting "king's naked!" comes eventually but people who ignore timing will end up losing this game. The secret to this is to understand how other decision-makers see the status quo. Who made a bet on this person? Who understands that he is THE problem? Is right now the best time for a direct opposition?
And sometimes it's just easier to accept that it may make sense to work elsewhere.
Before he could infect another group with his special touch I politically maneuvered him into the most boring of tasks that no one wanted to do. He had run the one project into the ground. At the right moment I used his own triangulation manipulation bits on him. I had to become that which I despised to basically take him out before he did too much damage. I had him shunted off to a task that if it was done no one cared. It was a pity too as he was a competent programmer. But had too much of an ego to listen to the other decent programmers around him.
Moral of that story? There are jerks out there that will take out a well functioning team and not even see they are doing it. Beware of them. The world is not broken. But there are those who start fires because they like to make messes.
's/big //'
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Which it's not really, as it only considers the US version. "The characters portrayed here are based upon other characters that RG invented."
A SBC like a Raspberry Pi is sufficient to host mail services for a fairly large number of people. Filter out spam with Spamassassin and a greylist, run sieve to organise your incoming mail flow, use specific mail addresses when communicating with commercial and government organisations and you'll end up asking yourself why so many people insist that self-hosting mail is not an option.
Now that you're self-hosting mail you can also self-host XMPP using the same address making it possible for people to reach you through either SMTP (mail) or XMPP (instant messaging/voice/video calling) using that address. This can be hosted on that same SBC without problems.
Source: my own experience self-hosting mail (and more) since the 90's. If it worked on a 486DX2-66 it should work on a quad-core 1.5GHz 64-bit ARM...
Before even considering why someone might not choose to do so, I would like to point out that selfhosting email is not even that hard to do nowadays. I spent a couple hours a few years back manually setting up a stack on a dummy domain just to see if its as hard as developer circles make it out to be. It was not. Furthermore a quick search today nets half a dozen docker containers you can spin up that claim to be one stop solutions for email. If even a fraction of them succeed in what they claim you could self host email with one command and an env file. You could even use the dockerfiles as a template to run the software on metal, its all there.
Even with this newfound knowledge, and as someone who tries to selfhost equivalents to any service I find myself using regularly, I would never attempt to host my own main emails. My bank accounts are linked to my emails, my investment accounts, my insurance, my loans, things that I am not willing to risk compromising my ability to access as the result of some sort of overly prideful sentiment.
Just because someone has the ability and knowledge to host their own email does not mean they should or would even consider it.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Eh, I've seen these in every kind of company, none are immune.
It worked reasonably well at one place I was at for about 8 years, estimating one of those characters popping up every 200-500 hires.
It’s the strategic side to your internal integrity function. Typically recruit folks who are lightning rods for these kinds of behaviours: young, female, brown, queer members of staff - don’t forget reception annf cleaning personnel! - and train them (often not necessary!) to spot abuse of power, bullying, threats and gaslighting and to confidentially report it.
Catch people with these behaviours early and divert the smart ones, fire the dumb ones. Sure, you’ll lose your next CEO, but did you want to work for that kind of person?
I had a boss who was a manager at one of Google's flagship products, and he made it his point to not let anyone forget it. He pushed people to work nights and weekends, he berated team members and threatened firing them during daily meetings, he overrode engineer's calls to not release a product to claim he released it before schedule, he threatened the same engineers if anything went wrong during the illadvisable release, etc.
He was since hired as a VP of engineering of another global company.
It's the biggest chunks that rise to the top."
What ruined it for me was interviewing ex googlers. Not the PhD levels, but IC. To be fair none passed the inteview. Perhaps it was just the UK google offices. Similar for facebook. At facebook some of the people I know working there are abolutely vile. The types that threatened their coworkers and somehow got away with it. Each organisation favours a certain type and it all comes down from the top.
The most toxic, conceited, selfish, inflexible, basically the worst stereotype of "genius asshole" engineers I've ever studied with, or worked with, all wound up at Google.
And is it a surprise when the entire interview process consists of "Are you good at computer science?"
This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time there, as opposed to previously presuming some level of excellence as a result of working with what I at one point thought were other great engineers.