Thread by @asuph

One of my earliest jobs was at a startup. It was a toxic work culture. And over years, I've seen much better workplaces, and now culture is key criteria for me for work. But what I've observed is, people tend to discount the toxicity because "work is challenging" 1/

https://twitter.com/AnantBhan/status/1397881785619464194

In the early years, when you want to learn a lot, sure, it does help to be in those sort of "cutting edge" (self-certified) workplaces, on purely the work axis. But given a chance to start fresh again, I'd not want to be in such setups. It does invisible damage. 2/

And it normalizes the toxic culture in the name of "productivity" and "achievement". The key years of your life are wasted without personal development because there is just no time. Even taking a day off is scoffed at. Self-care is basically office parties/events. 3/

Of course, it all assumes that people have a choice, but that's orthogonal. Where you have a choice, choose wisely. If enough people do it consistently, it will make it harder to normalize and shrug off horrible bosses, and terrible cultures.

4/

Maybe I'm different, but I can't place quality of work over quality of the workplace. Give me shitty work in a good workplace. Life's too precious, and you only get one chance at it. My advice (and I loath to give advice, but ...) is: put it before work.

5/

About one in ten startups fail. Even those that succeed, many of the projects and products fail and are abandoned. Teams are let go or redistributed (if you're lucky). All that "achievements" and "productivity" goes down to /dev/null.

6/

And many of those "gajars" like stock options become empty virtual papers with no value. While you're left with bad work habits, horrible work-life balance, internalized bad culture (which you will propagate, believe me you), lost personal development opportunities.

7/

That's not to say don't join startups. Corporates also have similar problems in teams/groups/BUs. There are good and bad startups and established companies. Just that (bad) startups tend to make a philosophy out of their terrible culture, which can be seductive in short term.

8/

Be mindful of it, that's all. Make conscious decisions. There are always tradeoffs to be made. You don't have to continue to work in toxic workplaces a minute longer than you have to, however tautological it sounds.

END/