So do you really believe that workplace bullies are so universally powerful that it is quite nearly impossible to prevent them from ruining one's career?
I recognize your posts immediately and appreciate your iconoclasm, but this assertion seems quite at odds with what I've seen. I've worked with, for and around a few bullies/assholes (though certainly not at every job). I've seen literally one or two people get caught in the maelstrom and be unable to escape, but most people either work around the jerks. Sometimes if it gets bad enough people change jobs (probably getting a raise to boot)
The boss who loses his temper a lot but doesn't engage in prolonged campaigns of harassment is the archetypical "asshole" boss, but not a bully. People realize he's a "Volcano" (see here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/gervais-macle... ) and his credibility drops, so he is really only a danger to himself after a while. As long as you can tolerate superficial verbal abuse (and not everyone can, but I can deal with it at this point in my life) you're not at major risk of long-term career harm from the Volcano/Cartoon Asshole.
The asshole wants, out of work, things that normal people want (money, prestige, accomplishment, progress) and just goes about getting them in an emotionally retarded way. He can't persuade people or lead, so he falls back on abuse, but he doesn't actually enjoy hurting people (he might not care much about others' emotions, or he might be utterly blind to his effects on other people, but he's not sadistic). Bullies are different; they actually enjoy destroying people. They like abusing power even more than they like getting rich or climbing the ranks.
Assholes can be worked around. Even if one gets you fired, your reputation will usually be intact. In fact, you're likely to get sympathy because people who know their reputations are impressed that you held out for that long. "Really? You worked for him for 15 months?" Bullies are different, in that they deliberately ruin your reputation, and because they're selective in their choices of whom to attack, they keep their credibility intact. Workplace bullies know that they can only target a small number of people, and only the socially weak (new guys, young people, women) and they're superficially nice to everyone else, so they end up with sterling reputations.
Bullies are nice to everyone except the people they perceive as being weak. The danger is that most people will have moments of (usually transient) weakness. A bully boss can turn transient weakness (a health problem, a failed startup, child-raising complications) into a permanent career smear.
I worked for one of these at Google. He was superficially very nice, but he sabotaged people. I investigated him quite a bit while I was there, and after I left, got access to a bunch of shit I shouldn't have been able to see. He had an HR record as long as my forearm of using fake performance problems to tease out reports' health problems, rescheduling meetings to conflict with peoples' medical appointments; but HR did nothing because he had a superb reputation for "delivery" on projects (mostly because he was a great blame-shifter). I was weak at the time because I was coming off of a failed startup. Had it not been for that, I doubt I would have been his target.
Also, it's a misconception that a workplace bully is only going to do typical boss things in the nastiest way. They deliberately interfere with work performance. Bully bosses don't let you go off and do great things but give negative reviews. (That's an asshole boss having a shitty day.) They actively make it impossible for you to perform, so it looks like you melted down and that they had nothing to do with it.
Yes, if you're attacked by one of these, you're off the Sheryl Sandberg track for good. It doesn't mean that you'll never have a decent career. It does mean that you're out of the running for CxO implants into existing enterprises-- you need a smear-free career history for that, unless you go full-on Don Draper-- and now that VC-istan is fully corporate, you're probably not fundable either.
I just want to remind anyone reading this that there are many sides to any story. I am truly impressed by how much mileage the parent poster has gotten from his negative experience at Google, but I think it would be a grave mistake to take his claims at face value.
Are you fucking kidding me? I would be far ahead of where I am right now if I hadn't had that misadventure. That spell (and its aftermath, including the horrible startup where I landed afterward) took 3 years off my career, easily.
HN karma doesn't come close to buying that back. I'm still owed.
Then I looked at the comment author.
Despite this pessimism I think you make some great points, but I do feel that your persistent negative bias towards corporations (and people in general) can detract from what are often great insights within your comments.
[citation needed]
No doubt this is true in an abstract sense, but is there any recorded data on this (reports of scandals, etc) or is this just speculation.
In the real world, it's so much more likely to be "he's a cool guy, we went to the same prep school, why not?" Which renders the same result, but in less of a movie-script dramatic way.
Wrong. It's extremely common, but it's also subtle.
It's best if the target doesn't know what you have on him. That's the beauty of business school. You were out drinking with him 25 times and he doesn't remember half of them, so you don't have to mention "the dirt". (Also: you shouldn't. Explicit extortion will put you in jail.) He has no memory of what specific episodes you have on him, and there might not even be any. He just knows that if you say, "introduce me to <Y>" or "invite me to your winter party" that he has no choice.
(I was there in that capstone project where you had a bug in the excel spreadsheet and we just pasted value over it!)
There are apartments selling for $100 million. Who lives in those? How did they get there? What are their stories? The answers are not what middle-class Americans think (hard work! pure luck!) but you don't exactly have to become one of them (almost impossible) to learn how they do things. They don't even bother to hide it anymore.
After about 5 years, you'll realize that most of the "effortless" rises are cases of people who learn something damning about a powerful person and leverage it into all kinds of social currencies.
Stupid extortion: "Give me $10 million or I'll reveal <X>." That's far too direct and really dumb. You go to jail for that.
Smarter (if still evil) extortion: "Hi. You may not remember me but I was with you on January 24, 2007 in New York when <X>. Those were fun times, no? I heard that a lot of venture capitalists attend your winter party in Aspen. I'd like to attend, because I'm looking to start my own company." That's how 90+ percent of the most successful people got where they are.
In a lot of ways, frats and university clubs do similar things, formally and informally. When people do embarrassing, dangerous, illegal, or immature things together, it bonds them in interesting and tight ways.
One can imagine that if it was 1999 and you had been one of GWB's close Yale or MBA buddies who had blown a snowstorm of cocaine together, and you called him up for a little favor or consideration, that such a thing might come through rather quickly and discreetly.
http://www.littlespeck.com/content/economy/CTrendsEconomy-06...
The title alone is enough to give me pause. "Lean In" refers to the antiquated idea that the reason why so few women succeed in the workplace is because they "lean back" instead of "in" during meetings. Right, because all you need to do to wring a few more dollars out of a stingy, psychopathic billionaire institution that would throw you out on the street if it saw profit in it, is a little more work on your posturing. Keep an acute angle between your spine and your pelvis and everything else will follow.
Reality: most people who are successful have no insight into how they got there, and the system's supposed to work that way; the elevator up is made of glass, but the people allowed into it were deliberately picked not to look anywhere but at the digital red numbers that say what floor they are on. Of course, most people who fail (and that's most people) have little insight either, which is why these books sell so well.
Also, let's talk about Small Data, the realm not of normal distributions but of Poisson distributions on discrete events. Reputations are a Small Data problem. So are introductions, resumes, and all of the other mechanical rat-traps that make up the career game. You can control serendipity to some degree. If you know a disgusting secret on a Harvard MBA alumnus (which is not that hard, because as unethical people become increasingly arrogant, they get worse at hiding it) you can use it to get a powerful recommendation, get in to Harvard Business School, and make influential friends. Sure, there are things like that that you can control. Then there are things that you can't.
Filthy secret: the workplace is full of extortionist thugs, bullies, and generally horrible people. I'd estimate that horrid people are 1-in-10 in the general population (but you rarely see them in daily life, because there isn't money involved) but they are 1-in-5 co-workers at the most competitive companies, and 1-in-3 bosses. Okay. Let's just get that on the table. Unless you have extreme luck that makes you independent in your first 5 years, you will meet horrible people who will fuck up your career, damage your reputation, gaslight you until you embarrass yourself in a major way, steal credit that you needed to get out of corporate hell, possibly even give you PTSD (that's rare, but if you have the condition pre-existing, it can flare up again). One such encounter takes you out of the running for those COO/Facebook jobs that require a flawless career history, but you can still be modestly successful. Two hits and you will never raise VC. You're too damaged for that. Three and you're barely holding on to the upper-middle-class. Four, and you're lucky to stay in the middle class. Now, some people manage to get hit zero times. Look up Poisson distributions if you don't believe me. It's not many of them, but it happens. Good for them.
Why do so few women succeed in the workplace? This "they stop leaning in!!!111" bullshit is useless, because it glosses over the real problem. It's because bullies (including workplace bullies) prey on the people they consider to be weakest, and those are disproportionately going to be women. It's not that they're sexist. Not all bad people are everything bad (i.e. not all psychopaths are sexist or racist). They're just opportunists. They hit women disproportionately because they presume them to be weak.
You can really tell what kind of career (in a corporate context, and VC-istan is corporate because of the king-making around funding) someone will have based on one integer number: how many times that person has been attacked by a workplace thug. You will never be a Sheryl Sandberg if you've dealt with a true workplace bully, and at least 90% of people get hit at least once in the first 10 years. Your reputation and career history are too damaged, and you really can't "start over" because every achievement is age-graded.
It's great that some people like Sandberg are able to enjoy legitimate careers, but the fact of never having been bullied or attacked (they might have been laid off once or twice, but never robbed or extorted) makes them extreme statistical anomalies. They end up with these rosy-eyed half-picture views of the workplace, and they're able to sell it in business books and TED talks, because most of the proles want to believe there's something different out there, and that they're just missing one easy insight (i.e. just "lean in" during meetings!)
Success Crack presents a view of the workplace that is so non-repeatable and often self-serving as to be indistinguishable from a fantasy novel-- but with a less inspiring setting and worse writing.