[Part 1/4] Inflection Points

When I was a fledgling manager, I was interviewing for a new job and one recruiter asked me a question that I thought was pretty clever at the time: "Tell me about your career arc. I don't want to hear about your responsibilities at each job. I want to hear about the inflection points. What were the catalysts that led you from one job to the next? What were you running away from or towards at each transition?" I thought it was so clever because it allowed a person to talk about growth and ambition, rather than regurgitate content that was already listed on a resume. But as I matured—shedding some naivety and gaining my own emotional scars—I realized that there's the story that people tell recruiters and hiring managers (the "safe truth"), and there's the story that only they and their closest confidants know. It's not that these job seekers are lying. They are just omitting portions of the story—usually the parts that include the trauma. If, like me, you identify with one or more historically excluded groups in your field, chances are that you've left a job for reasons that have more to do with who you are than what you are capable of accomplishing.

In that vein, these are the questions I pose today: Why do we place a moral imperative on job searching? Why is escaping a toxic situation not a good enough reason for leaving a job?

Despite having been pretty fortunate and privileged in my career, I've experienced my fair share of workplace aggressions. This newsletter kicks off a series about my various inflection points (in no particular order, because ~NDAs~), including the bits I typically don't disclose to prospective employers. In some ways, I'm thankful for my experiences, because they've been formative in helping me define who I am as a leader, but at the same time, I don't believe that suffering trauma is a prerequisite for empathy. I hope that sharing these stories are validating to some, and educational to others.

Let's dive in.

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Part 1: Don't become a martyr for "the mission"

One of the biggest misdirections us techies get told is when we join a "mission-driven" company. "You're part of something bigger than yourself now. You will make the world a better place." The hidden subtext though, is that someone will try to convince you to be complacent to certain abuses of power under the pretense of "the greater good."

Sometimes that means being asked to accept lower than average salaries, other times it means taking on unsustainable workloads. In my case, it was both of these things, in addition to protecting an abuser. When I left this position, it was because I wasn't being compensated or recognized for the level of work I was doing (which was effectively building and leading an entire software engineering department), and I wasn't getting the executive support I needed to address the burnout I saw so many members of my team rapidly or already approaching. This is the story that recruiters and hiring managers know.

The untold story is that I knew I needed to leave this job mere months into starting it. There was one member of my team who was there since the early days of the company, and he had the full trust and ear of the CEO. In becoming his manager, I quickly learned that this individual was above reproach, despite numerous complaints I received about his condescending and sometimes combative attitude towards other people in the company. Any failings he had as a teammate were reflections on my ability to manage his emotional state. I was not tasked with holding him accountable for his actions; I was tasked with being his custod and his therapist.

This all came to a head when his combative attitude become fully belligerent and pointedly directed at another member of the team. The irony of the situation was that I really felt for my employee. We both knew that he was burnt out, he knew that he was prone to lashing out when he was burnt out, and he knew his behavior wasn't acceptable. But he and the CEO had a toxic, codependent relationship, and the CEO always found ways to justify and excuse his bad behavior as "being passionate about the work." So I found myself in the middle of this situation, having to tell the rest of my team why verbal abuse and intimidation were being tolerated in our organization, and why this employee was not getting fired. In fact, the CEO asked that I do everything in my power to retain this employee.

Thankfully, in a moment of self-realization, my employee fired himself. He recognized that he needed to address his inner demons, so he resigned from his role and signed up for therapy. Towards the end of all this, I ended up becoming the go-between—my employee refused to speak to the CEO one-on-one because he was scared of being coerced into taking back his resignation for the sake of the company mission. From then onwards, the CEO silently blamed me for not saving his star employee, and he never considered me for any advancement, despite having me do all the work.

To this day, I have a lot of complicated feelings about how this all played out. Absent in this incident was any real reconciliation or closure for the verbally abused team member, and I played a big role in gaslighting their experience. My employee was aware enough to recognize the harm he had done, but he ultimately got to leave the company on his own terms, and faced no repercussions for his actions. At the same time, I also recognized his actions to partially be a byproduct of the duress and trauma inflicted from this and his previous job. And perhaps most unsurprisingly, the CEO continues to lead that company to this day, and has established a new inner circle of codependent engineers.

The moral of this story is that you'll likely encounter people in your career who will try to use their power to convince you that you must sacrifice your own personal comfort and success for a greater purpose. They'll ask you to compromise your values, ethics, and integrity and call it an act of service. Don't become a martyr for "the mission." There's nothing wrong with believing in your organization and in what you're building, but it shouldn't come with the heavy toll of self-sacrifice and perpetrating further harm. It's a lesson I learned the hard way, and hope to never have to learn again.