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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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my last place was toxic and dysfunctional as hell. the institution had/has problems, but my department was known for being a disaster and had been as long as I was there (10 years), but getting worse every year. the institution would do employee surveys and the story was always the same: cannot retain talented and valuable staff, the routine loss of institutional knowledge was brutal.
the boss's solution to this was to give more salary bumps to the middle management tier (that drove people away) and to ignore staff reporting documented, verifiable bullying by middle management of junior staff.
it was so bad that they brought in a new middle manager with huge salary and initial offer with promises of full autonomy for selecting and running his team. he left after six months, once he realized how fucked and incompetent everyone else at his level was. and how shit the support staff were treated. the boss was completely embarrassed by how obviously unrecoverable the situation had become.
the boss would blame COVID and work from home as "destroying the culture" of the department and kept trying to force us all back into the office all the time, but all that did was turn the turnover rate up even higher. ultimately the inability to acknowledge reality and the tolerance of bullying induced me to fundamentally re-evaluate my professional life's trajectory and repeatedly apply elsewhere until I got something better, far enough away that I could sever my association.
I think there's a distinction between an organization operating in the neoliberal / capitalist ideological soup that still endeavors to adapt and function within those constraints based on information, and an organization that refuses to even acknowledge reality at a basic level or protect people from trauma for which the organization could be held liable. these are very fundamental requirements of an organization at least trying to preserve itself. nothing about me leaving was honestly heroic... I was just another rat fleeing a sinking ship captained by an aggressively incompetent fool who would go down shifting blame onto whatever he could.