Toxic Positivity: “Everything is always great” and the unspoken rule to never talk about your issues.
Mental health issues not being taken seriously and/or treatment being forced on you
Alcohol culture: “if we haven’t had a beer together, i don’t know you”
meetings. As a programmer i can be super productive, but then i’ll be interrupted by a meeting… and that meeting is an hour long… completely stripping my concentration and now i gotta get it back up…
retro-meetings … talking about what has been done in the last week… and what we liked and what we hated… i never know what to say “yeah i finished shit” or “i hate working with this shit”
but then you have to elaborate…
So, I figure all modern corporate offices are exactly the same then. There is some good stuff in there, but it is so over the top and forced that it sort of ruin the benefits imo.
Positivity is great, even if it is forced a little, but hiding all negativity, issues and criticism make forced positivity completely useless. Not to mention that at the office I worked there was virtually always one or many of your “bosses” in earshot, in every situation. There wasn’t a daily, a meeting or a workstation in that job where some guy responsible for my promotions and employment wasn’t listening. This is how you make sure nothing of value is ever said in your dailies and retro meeting. It’s all great!
Now let’s play the game of figuring the smallest politically correct nitpick to mention during the retro so that we can check that self-improvement/self-organizing checkbox in front of the boss. What, you think over 10 hours of useless scrum meeting is wasteful, on top of the actual important meetings? Well, better not mention it. I mean you could, but shitting on scrum will get you canned. Do you think the way points/hours/complexity is evaluated completely miss the mark? Or are you tempted to mention Goodhart’s law when reviewing whatever metric in Jira? Well, better not do that, because you might as well say that your boss’s job needs not to exist. Better not mention anything that might compromise someone else in front of the boss, or anything that could be used against you in a review.
Because that’s the thing, since no one ever admit to mistake and make themselves vulnerable, if you’re the only one to do it it’s gonna raise “red flags” and you’re gonna hear about it in your next review. Better give a good not-so-anonymous review to your immediate managers too, raising any sort of issues could prevent one, or both of you from getting promoted with increased pay.
So, I figure all modern corporate offices are exactly the same then. There is some good stuff in there, but it is so over the top and forced that it sort of ruin the benefits imo.
Positivity is great, even if it is forced a little, but hiding all negativity, issues and criticism make forced positivity completely useless. Not to mention that at the office I worked there was virtually always one or many of your “bosses” in earshot, in every situation. There wasn’t a daily, a meeting or a workstation in that job where some guy responsible for my promotions and employment wasn’t listening. This is how you make sure nothing of value is ever said in your dailies and retro meeting. It’s all great!
Now let’s play the game of figuring the smallest politically correct nitpick to mention during the retro so that we can check that self-improvement/self-organizing checkbox in front of the boss. What, you think over 10 hours of useless scrum meeting is wasteful, on top of the actual important meetings? Well, better not mention it. I mean you could, but shitting on scrum will get you canned. Do you think the way points/hours/complexity is evaluated completely miss the mark? Or are you tempted to mention Goodhart’s law when reviewing whatever metric in Jira? Well, better not do that, because you might as well say that your boss’s job needs not to exist. Better not mention anything that might compromise someone else in front of the boss, or anything that could be used against you in a review.
Because that’s the thing, since no one ever admit to mistake and make themselves vulnerable, if you’re the only one to do it it’s gonna raise “red flags” and you’re gonna hear about it in your next review. Better give a good not-so-anonymous review to your immediate managers too, raising any sort of issues could prevent one, or both of you from getting promoted with increased pay.