It's commonly said that "people don't leave jobs, they leave managers" and speaking from my own accidental tenure in the Grand Game of Software Engineering I'd say that this statement is pretty accurate.

Whether it's micro-management, aggressiveness, pettiness, rigid adherence to corporate doctrine, or just general incompetence, managers can make any software engineer's life, progressive or not, a thoroughly miserable experience and cause them to move on to pastures new.

However, it is possible that the semi-technical, or indeed sometimes the technical, people in an organisation that can evolve into something that itself becomes offensive, repulsive, and ultimately fatally toxic when it comes to retaining employees.

We've discussed in the past how employees can become company fixtures — managers or not — and how this can be avoided.

Today we're going to discuss how becoming such a permanent fixture, an employee who has lost their will to develop and even leave the company themselves, can sow the seeds of ultimately terminal toxicity in the workplace¹.

Once an employee has spent a significant amount of time with a company, no matter what their position, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to realise their own self worth when it comes to the outside world and their individuality begins to fade.

This could be a result of being stuck in the same role too long, passing up possible opportunities to develop, or simply because of bad people management within the company leaving them to atrophy in place.

The employee may not always notice this, them having their head down and churning out product, thinking they're earning those loyalty points, and believing that they're doing a great job often in the face of adversity.

After all, why would a company choose to move someone who's performing so well where they are? Sure, they're doing great maintaining that legacy product.

Or, perhaps, they ran out of their usual work and got reassigned to something not quite their field but pushed on through and succeeded through gritted teeth and grim determination, all the while not realising they were falling increasingly into obsolescence and irrelevance.

This is extremely dangerous in the technical disciplines as, for example, progressive engineers lose that edge in terms of curiosity when it comes to new technology, fail to keep up with developments in their key fields, and settle into a pattern of doing the same thing day in, day out.

Others, in the tangentially technical, such as IT, design, marketing, sales, or DevOps (sorry, couldn't resist it, please don't kill my pods) feel it too — sliding irreversibly into a rut like a needle trapped in a tired and well worn record groove², shunning advancement, eschewing new paradigms, and getting increasingly stuck fast, plodding along in the same manner.

This pattern of doing the same thing is insidious to everyone as it turns the employee into the human equivalent of a sponge, one that soaks up corporate doctrine so overwhelmingly into the voids left by innovative atrophy, that the employee inadvertently becomes a mindless automaton, a mouthpiece of propaganda, and a tedious and monotonous stickler for company rules and regulations for want of anything else to do.

Whether this is an compulsive adherence to policy in terms of software development methodologies, precise health and safety rules, or just an obsessive need to repeatedly and systematically "check in" with junior staff it increasingly becomes an irritant to those in the immediate vicinity.

Often this situation arises when an employee stays with a company beyond the expected lifetime of the task they were originally taken on to complete as previously mentioned or, in some cases, a lack of opportunities to move on initially and the decision to "just stay a few more months" rather than making a more concerted effort to up sticks and find something more challenging, and rewarding, to do.

Perhaps they do it voluntarily to safeguard their employment through the inbuilt insecurity and imposter syndrome that we all have at first before we discover the necessary and vital secrets in the Grand Game that help us get over this or, perhaps, they're spotted by management as a potential target and deliberately weakened gradually and surreptitiously because of it like a lobster slowly bring brought to the boil in a pot of water.

It can easily begin with a sense of faux loyalty, innocently taking on a few duties that weren't quite in their remit, going along with management suggestions to "take on more responsibility", which inevitably results with the aforementioned loss of technical edge, curiosity, and losing the will to leave.

The effect this has on other people in the organisation is profound as it seems like what was originally a valuable individual in the organisation has become someone to avoid, someone who parrots the company line at every opportunity, and someone who ends up just being a conduit for every management and HR piece of propaganda oozing down the chain of notional command.

Not only that but being trapped in a field to which that are unsuited and perhaps now intensely dislike they become bitterly unhappy and leak their repressed venom inadvertently to all they come into contact with.

They're unhappy, trapped, unable to move because of insufficient skills and contingency, frightened of being let go and having to find another job with their confidence shattered and skillset eroded.

That spark they had was lost, their conversation has pivoted from a gentle cynicism of management⁴ to a bland blanket support of what they're doing, a refusal to voice (or even hear) any criticism, and even sometimes a reporting back to management of any dissent at all.

You may come across this when talking with what you thought was a trusted colleague, whether socially, in a notional review, or even during lunchtime if you're unfortunately enough to be in an office, and subsequently hear back your thoughts echoed back from someone in the management, or most likely HR, hierarchy.

Once could be a coincidence, twice is most likely a Quisling, a deliberately bred snake imprisoned in the corporate grass.

I think it's fair to say that having such employees entrenched on the progressive engineer's side of the Grand Game is a poisonous prospect as it's one thing to be playing the Game against management, but very much another to having to look over your shoulder within your own team as well.

But, it's hard to hold them completely to blame as they have become victims of their own circumstance and the other team has duly noticed and taken full advantage to rob them of their individualism and vigour.

That they made a few bad calls, most likely when in a weakened state — perhaps they worried about losing their job when a project ended, or that their skills weren't good enough yet to move on — shouldn't be wholly held against them. After all we all have bad days within which we can make unfortunate decisions.

Often though, they're extremely hard to help. This is because they, unlike the "permanent fixture", can't easily be brought back from the abyss of management induced torpor and would most likely report any attempt at removing the brainwashing to their new masters.

In the end their toxin spreads outward and begins to demoralise the people they work with who subsequently find it hard to speak freely, have to put up with holding their tongues, and ultimately fragment into smaller groups who can trust us other leaving the workplace divided and pitted against each other.

Management win this war through divide and conquer but, unfortunately for the company as a whole and the progressive engineer, we are forced to throw in the towel and move on as dealing with this insidiousness is just often too much to bear.

Try, if you can to free the snake but be careful as although its bite is often inconsequential its venom is truly posionous.

[1]: Homeplace, for the best life / work balance. [2]: You remember vinyl records, right? Let's not call them phonographs though, I'm not that old. [3]: "Go for" this and "go for" that. [4]: This is an essential part of any organisation as anything else is literally a management or personality cult, a faux-democracy, a management rule by decree that allows no critical discussion whatsoever.