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Toxic and Woke Engineering Orgs
Why are organizations committed to positive ideals so often shitty to their employees?
I have a checklist of things I talk to new hires joining my team about during our first 1:1. Top of that list is the word boundaries double underlined. By the end of that first conversation I want to have covered the importance of three different categories of boundaries I consider absolutely essential to doing any kind of social impact based work.
Internal boundaries: How you treat yourself. Getting enough sleep, eating right, getting regular exercise, etc. Everybody’s different here and what I want from my employees is not that they fit a certain mold but that they give me a general idea of what these boundaries look like for them so that I can flag when their patterns have changed. Some software engineers legitimately prefer to work at 3am. I don’t have a problem with that, but I have a problem with an engineer working both days and nights.
External boundaries: What parts of your life are work zones, and what parts are personal zones. This is something we set together because part of my job (as I see it) is holding the organization accountable to these standards. External boundaries include traditional “work-life balance” issues like work hours, norms around overtime and the conditions in which it’s considered okay to violate those norms and infringe…