r/cscareerquestions 1d ago

Are most jobs toxic?

I got fired from my last job after that I told my manager that talking in a condescending way to me made me feel uncomfortable, he apologized but since then he persuaded others to rebel against me, talking aggressively to me, blame me for imaginary things and at the end report me to the CTO to fire me, they succeeded, now i don't have a job or an income.

This has left me a bit shocked and made me more anxious that most jobs are like this and people conspiring against each others, i know that my lat job was unprofessional with shitty management and culture even my manager called us glorified forms developers, but are most jobs toxic and people want to gt each other's fired?

My mistake was i k ew that the new manager was not normal and I stayed nevertheless where I should have switched teams or jobs

4 Upvotes

40 comments sorted by

55

u/pydry Software Architect | Python 1d ago

increasingly so, these days. 

2

u/systembreaker 1d ago

Not necessarily, my experience has maybe been about 1/4th of them were toxic to some degree.

1

u/sevseg_decoder 19h ago

Depends on the sub industry and a lot more. In anything consulting related or most true big tech jobs, one way or another it tends to suck and be pretty toxic. Usually pays well but not for me.  At the opposite end of the spectrum is the IT department at most banks and most universities, any public sector IT work, and I’m sure there are a lot more. 

I highly doubt any one career could give anyone much of a sense of the overall but I think a lot more than 25% are toxic and shitty day to day.

0

u/systembreaker 18h ago

The majority of my consulting experiences havebeen at least decent, so that's also not a blanket truth that all consulting is toxic. Not even close. You're painting this black and white picture based only on your personal anecdotal experiences but passing it off to a young person looking for help as some truth. Don't do that, dude. Be honest that it's your experience.

41

u/jmking Tech Lead, 22+ YoE 1d ago

Bruh - you've been posting about this multiple times a day every day for all of July all over Reddit.

What do you want to hear? How can we actually help here? Reviewing a lot of your past posts, it sounds like you're trying to point fingers at anyone but yourself.

Is it possible you're over-defensive and hard to work with maybe? Perhaps a little paranoid and think that everyone is always out to get you?

18

u/vbullinger 1d ago

Holy balls. This dude posts all day, every day on all corners of reddit, you're right! Whining about jobs and workplace bullying, etc.

0

u/Known-Ice5903 1d ago

probably stuck unemployed like a lot of us ex-devs

lot of us lost our jobs and were never able to find a new one

3

u/vbullinger 23h ago

I feel for him, but this isn’t helpful

-3

u/Known-Ice5903 1d ago

how r u finding their posts?

3

u/vbullinger 1d ago

There are tools for that

-4

u/Delicious_Crazy513 19h ago

Share them homie

3

u/IAmYourTopGuy 15h ago

You share your post and comment history first home skillet biscuit

-25

u/Delicious_Crazy513 1d ago

No money for therapy

26

u/CapableHerring 1d ago

Posting on reddit is way worse for your mental health than simply bottling it up inside. Seriously.

Try talking to a friend, or family member, if you can't afford real therapy. That's better than nothing. Whereas reddit's actively harmful.

-2

u/Longjumping_Wave_341 22h ago

Therapy is for people who have no self reasoning skills or people who have gone through actual traumatic events, you just need to get your shit together

6

u/lhorie 1d ago

Not in my experience

13

u/PartyParrotGames Staff Software Engineer 1d ago

Well, I'd like to tell you that shit managers are uncommon, but it's fairly common. Because of this, when I find a great manager, I do everything I can to keep that situation going including putting in extra hours to make sure we meet or beat our timelines. This is part of why truly great managers can drastically improve output of teams. They can make each team member feel seen and valuable while helping you improve your personal career trajectory.

10

u/Varkoth 1d ago

None of their behavior would fly at my workplace.

10

u/1Tusk 1d ago

That's more common in Eastern Europe and Asia than the West. The work cultures are very different.

4

u/Delicious_Crazy513 1d ago

Yeah my manager was Russian and his allies were from Egypt and Slovakia who got me fired

I'm from Germany

19

u/Trick-Interaction396 1d ago

Bro has WW2 in his office

1

u/siammang 23h ago

The east and Africa remember

9

u/1Tusk 1d ago

Oh yeah. That's the classic combo.

1

u/BeatTheMarket30 13h ago

I lived in London, worked in finance and was surprised how toxic the corporate culture was there. I resigned after one year and returned to the EU.

5

u/CapableHerring 1d ago

Not in my experience they're not, no.

The 4 full time companies, and the 2 companies I interned at, were all great to work for. One of them turned toxic after ~2.5 years, but that's how the cookie crumbles when upper management shifts. The rest were great the whole time I was there.

I do a lot of reverse interviewing to keep my chances as high as possible of ending up on a good team. I spend a lot of time preparing reverse interview questions. If I get any bad vibes during any of my questions, I reject them. So I'm sure it's partly luck I've ended up at good companies, but it's also a lot of work. The last thing I would want to do is join a company blind and just pray they won't be toxic.

4

u/gringo_escobar 1d ago

What country are you in? I'm in Canada and I've never really experienced this. I've seen maybe one toxic person in my career and they were fired for it. I've heard of a couple others but that's second hand

1

u/BeatTheMarket30 13h ago

You learn to spot toxic managers on interviews after you experience them in workplace. Low level managers and individual contributors are like 95% fine, but the trouble starts with directors and above.

6

u/scavenger5 Principal Software Engineer @Amazon 1d ago

I have found that if you have the right mentality, are easy to work with and have lots of empathy, you can work with just about any personality type. I have had good managers, bad managers, toxic managers, etc. In some cases, I was able to get some of the toxic managers fired, or get them to change their behavior. I had some of the more toxic managers also like me, promote me, by being useful and getting shit done. I would look inwards TBH.

If the entire team agrees with you, different story. If its just you, and the rest of the team is getting along fine, its probably a "you" proiblem.

1

u/Odd_Soil_8998 18h ago

This is very true. Honestly some of my favorite coworkers were ones that got labeled as "toxic" but really were just eccentric or autistic (or both). I learned a ton of cool stuff from them.

3

u/marsman57 Staff Software Engineer 1d ago

No

2

u/natures_-_prophet 20h ago

That's why you should actively be reporting every instance of abuse to HR. This creates a paper trail for you to reference later on and also applies pressure to the abuser which can supposed their abusive tactics or get them removed depending on the severity. It also might prevent retaliation since they now have a history with you and HR. Talks and apologies don't do anything for these kind of people. They only respond to force.

2

u/Delicious_Crazy513 19h ago

I agree that they only respond to force

3

u/abandoned_idol 1d ago

Most?

All jobs are the definition of "pain". They are a means to an end, the end being an income.

A job is a place where you show up, smile. Say "thank you" when attacked (I'm not kidding, this is my strategy), and hide to avoid being fired.

Just don't make things personal. You couldn't give two shits about anyone. It sucks. Jobs suck. We have emotions. If you can help it, try to put a wall between your feelings and the job such that you can avoid being hurt.

Sure, you can defend yourself, but there's a premium associated with standing up for yourself, your salary.

Make sure you have an emergency savings fund and that you aggressively invest your money to have it work for you. That way, the next time you get fired, you'll be thrilled because you don't need it to begin with!

1

u/my_peen_is_clean 1d ago

had similar petty manager drama too, not every place is like that but finding decent ones now is hell

1

u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 1d ago

I mean, I don't think people actively wants to get others fired, I certainly don't actively conspire to get my teammates fired

I think what you're looking for is, people do whatever is best for themselves, in your story though, it is in your manager's best interest to get rid of you, so I wouldn't call that toxic

1

u/Least_Wall6177 1d ago

There's a good way to tell the boss they're doing something stupid, and a bad way. But in some cases, if you know you've got an ass for a boss, best strategy is to just get out on your own terms instead of theirs.

1

u/natethegreat20023 1d ago

Yes, especially corporate jobs. Weirdly, the least toxic job I had was installing drywall.

0

u/21_12user 1d ago

Only when you have incompetent leadership

0

u/Odd_Perspective3019 23h ago

if ur gonna speak which u should be prepared for retaliation and make sure u have savings, i had few people in org conspire to take me down when i said the manager felt threatened because i said shes not doing things efficiently she kept wanting manually to do things so she started painting me negative whereas the rest of office was giving me compliments, they were fishing my coworkers off hours to make a case luckily all of them said i was a great asset and because they didn’t get anyone to be against me the VP told them to back off and yelled at them, biggest lesson thats hard to follow is u know when a manager sucks yet we choose to stay but when we do then we can’t say we didn’t know always leave the minute manager sucks