I realize I’ve spent over a year in an organization where things kept falling apart because, ultimately, people in the organization just plain didn’t like me.
It started, perhaps, when I brought up that HR’s onboarding process made me uncomfortable because it involved a third-party sending out a third-party email to go to a third-party website to entire our personal information. Since this was a training by the larger corporate IT department, and we had just finished talking about the dangers of phishing, I thought it was a good time to mention it.
Mistake.
The next week I was visited by someone who took issue with, “not what I said, but the way I said it”. Lesson: don’t embarass HR in company-wide trainings.
Anyway, after a few similar call outs by me, I was labelled a trouble-maker, sidelined, ignored, and mistreated. This is an organization, I note, that assiduously avoids contradicting or discomfiting superiors in ANY way. That is deffos not my style.
Anyway, my question really isn’t about my toxic workplace, but what you learned about YOURSELF by working in a place that didn’t like you.
I’ll give you two more stories:
1
When I just graduated from school, I started working with a team model. I was paired with someone with fewer certifications, and I was to lead us boldly on our mission. The person I was assigned was a very beaten-down older, brown woman in a field dominated by young white women (seemingly universally with long, straight hair). She seemed to be universally disliked and disrespected by everyone. Because I was incompetent both at my job and my Spanish (sabo kid in denial), this woman essentially did my job and HERS and still got treated like absolute shit.
She invited me to an event that had nothing to do with work, an event for an organization she volunteered for where she was on the board. People treated her with respect and, in return, she was bright and bubbly. I saw a completely different side of her that night.
Lesson: Where we are beaten down, we get small. Where we are supported, we flourish.
(Kind of an aside, she was from a small country, and when I told her I was visiting, she INSISTED I go see one of her family members; he turned out to be an extremely well placed person in the government; she wasn’t royalty, exactly, but she had a social prestige in her country that was unsustainable as a middle-aged brown woman with an accent in the USA.)
2
I was working retail at one store. I’d been there for maybe two years. I always lived in fear of being fired, and when I made mistakes that I worried about getting me fired, nothing happened. I learned that, ultimately, what mattered is if people liked you, and, there, people liked me.
I eventually had to leave because of some restructuring but the manager found me the EXACT SAME POSITION at a nearby store. After a few weeks, I noticed people did NOT like me. Conversations were kept short, nobody ever volunteered to talk to me,. I got along with exactly one cashier, who was an awesome dude. It wasn’t a horrible experience, I was allowed to do my job and I did, but there was always an empty, hollow feeling.
Then the original store invited me back and it was like night and day. “Oh, so this is how people act when they like you.” I’d almost forgotten. I loved going into to work to see my work buddies and I loved shooting the shit with them during downtime.
The onboarding processes at most companies is broken. The bigger the company, the more likely it’s terrible.
The big companies I’ve worked for tend to keep you in their weird bloated and labyrynthine propietary HR systems.
Here it was some random site I’ve never heard of before with an e-mail like, “Bro, we heard you got a new job. Enter all your bank account info on our awesome website.”
Among the MANY HR e-mails (directly from HR) was one saying that I would receive an email from this site, so they made SOME kind of effort to not make it completely blind, but, really, all they’re doing is training employees to be phished.
Two jobs ago, we got an email out of the blue from our “new payroll provider” telling us to log in and provide our banking details. It was so obviously a phishing attempt I thought no one would fall for it.
Except it was correct and finance emailed us all a day later to tell us to click the link in the email and follow the instructions. Heads up, guys, heads up.
I’m very disliked - I’m not afraid to call BS out, speak my mind, I’m not false around senior management and treat everybody equally. I put my foot down with wrong doings, particularly those affecting employments rights (where others put their head in the sand)
I don’t do socials, I’m probably overly keen and grab work at any opportunity which makes others look bad. I’ve made suggestions that have improved the way we work, which others have taken credit for.
What have I learned?
It’s just a job. The only thing I have in common with most people is we work in the same place. I’ve learned not to care.
I guess you’ve also accepted that:
a) you’ll never be promoted and b) you’re liable to get fired
?
Edit: asking if this is the situation?
A) There is no further progression in my role.
B) Everybody is a number. There’s employment laws and trade unions for a reason.
There’s employment laws and trade unions for a reason.
Ah. Non-US lemster detected.
Carry on.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Do others see it the same way?
No offence, but I’ve heard this a lot over the years and every time (in my experience) the person was really over their head and wasn’t contributing as much as they thought they did.
You might have few good impacts, but the overall negativity causes a lot of other, more severe problems.
But as you said, it’s just a job. But if you make it tough on everyone else? Then you’re making it a painful job for everyone else.
I get that, some of this is what others have told me (in a positive way) and it’s actually gained respect.
But where it really matters, I’m seen as more of a problem in jobs (despite outputting more than a lot of people and having a lot of feedback/input)
I find in jobs that I get a lot of praise and respect from immediate colleagues, which is generally how I progress so quick (plus putting in the effort) but I can tell higher up I’m seen as more of a problem
Being self aware is important. Just remember it’s a very fine line you’re walking and you can easily have big impact on those around you.
So what I learned from my experiences are:
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I don’t really fit in in an organization of ass inveterate, invertebrate kissers.
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Sometimes people don’t like me and there’s not much I can do about it.
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If I’m in a place where people don’t like me AND I’m not respected, I’m probably going to be acting “irrationally” eventually (I call this the Palestinian Problem), because the context of nobody ever having your back is fucking exhausting. I remember at a holiday party, one supervisor gathered everyone him to discuss “the true dysfunction” of the person he’d just fired. I thought, “huh, that’s an odd way to be talking about an ex-employee at a company party” followed by “huh, I wonder what you did to piss her off that much–I doubt you’ll tell us.”
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I’m actually OK with not being liked. It’s fine. I know what I’m good at and my style of working with other people, I just need to find the a place that appreciates that.
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There are layers to being liked:
- Are you nice and pleasant around people? Always do this.
- Are you agreeable and easy to work with? It really depends on you and the job, but here you have to be smart.
- Do people respect you? You have to be honest and good at what you do, while keeping a careful balance of the second point.
Balance is hard and sometimes you may just find out that the issue is that the workplace do not deserve you and you need to move on.
Thanks for this, I wasn’t sure how to phrase this as well as you did.
Work is always a compromise between you and your needs, coworkers and their needs and management. If you know how to navigate that it goes well, or well enough till you find something better.
I had a very slow decline over a couple years. Basically a senior VP got a married male coworker drunk at lunch and then they “stopped by VP’s condo real quick” where my coworker was SA’d.
The coworker tells everyone, HR gets involved, coworker gets a huge promotion reporting directly to the VP, and suddenly coworker “think it may have happened differently” when I asked him what in the gd fuck he was doing.
Over 2 years my team of 8 + director bailed. I stayed thinking I’d outlast the shitty leadership and be a shoe-in for the vacant director position. Instead I got put on another team where I trained a handful of actually nice people on how to work with a data warehouse but leadership was still soured on me. What broke me finally was when my new director gave a promotion related to the job I’d been teaching everyone to another person. Also after hours one day while I was teaching a different coworker how to code and my new director came by to ask if it was done. I told him it wasn’t but it would be as I was letting this person take the reigns while I watched. My director told me “just quit bitching and get this shit done.”
At our standup the next morning I resigned in front of him and the entire team. The calls I got for MONTHS after that still help me fall asleep some nights. I’m talking about being asked to debug entire log files and providing admin credentials for the database that I “couldn’t remember exactly” but they were “stored somewhere on [a cluster of 16 different servers”.
So I took a lateral move to another agency where I had the same pay but since then have more doubled my salary and been promoted 3 times in 7 years.
What I learned was actually from something my douchebag director told me: “you can’t make people act how you want to” which was a dig at me but I’ve thought about it a lot. I wanted my agency to see the wrongs, see the people fleeing, have my coworker be honest about the SA that he almost resigned over, and I wanted to be vindicated. But that’s just not what happened.
If you’re in a toxic place where someone like my old VP has the ear of leadership and turns them against you, just bail. I knew my time was coming when I’d turn the corner on a city block and see my building and I’d feel my heart race. It’s always good to fight the good fight and we all need to but you’ve also gotta realize when it’s best to walk away and do what’s solely best for you, not some higher broader moral principle.
It also taught me a lot about workplace politics. I shouldn’t have been so open about about my displeasure and the betrayal of the coworker getting everyone involved and then doing a 180 when he got a promotion to be quiet. I’ve learned to keep the smile on my face and be more covert; otherwise the people you don’t like see it coming.
A funny part is that within a couple years of me resigning my old agency fired all the top brass - president, CIO, top VP and the VP who SA’d the coworker and that coworker also resigned. I think something blew up or happened again and it wiped that place out. It’s also seen a 70% turnover in the time I’ve been gone with 50% of that being within a few years of me leaving. It’s also never quite recovered and they’ve had to bring in “morale experts” because people breakdown and are seen crying in the hallways.
So your key mistake was in not supporting your co-workers decision to trade in their sexual abuse for career advancement?
What a shit show.
I have to agree with you on bailing. There really is nothing to be done once the narrative against you is set.
I have never been the center of dislike at the company i have worked for. I have been disliked by singular people, and it has hurt personally, but not affected me professionally.
I have however worked for 2 companies where i disliked the majority of my co workers. I have found that how much i look back at the time i have spent working, my enjoyment at the places i have worked is more about how much i liked my co workers and less to do with the work itself. Even in places where the work was hard and long hours, if they were with people i enjoyed, i still look back fondly.
Yeah, I had a horrible job with a horrible manager. I’d close the store at 9:00, leave by 9:30, be home by ten at night. Then this motherfucker would come in at 5 in the morning and fucking text me pictures on my day off about anything he didn’t like about closing. And he expected a reply from me because he paid me an extra 95 cents to be “management.”
Anyway, as stressful and horrible as that job was, I absolutely loved the people I worked with and, yeah, I, like you, remember it fondly.
I’ve had a pretty easy time getting along with people for most of my adult life, and I’ve learned to not take coworkers who are in a bad mood or always rude too seriously, so I can’t say I’ve had the experience of being actively disliked.
But I’ve always seen people as friends pretty fast and I’ve realized that a lot of my coworkers don’t see me the same way, which has made me realize that if I didn’t work in the same place of them, most of them would probably forget me pretty fast. I don’t really have a lot of friends who live nearby outside of work so it’s always kind of stung that my coworkers who I get along with great at work don’t really want to keep in touch at all outside of work. So I guess what I’ve learned is that I should expect that the people I like, respect, and even admire at work probably don’t see me the same way and that I shouldn’t expect friendships from coworkers.
Uf, I feel that. My last post here was exactly about how it seems “friendship” is just another form of casual entertainment for most people. “Do I watch Netflix tonight or get together with schipelblorp”.
I don’t think it has that much to do with work–though the forced contact might give you a false sense of familiarity–there is a deep level of cultural rot.
I was going back-and-forth with someone about if we were friends or not at work. I would always be there to empathize with her about a bad work day and would ask her about her personal life; she sometimes did the same.
We had an explicit conversation about it–we ageed we were friends. Then she just kind of ignored me until it was convenient for her, and yesterday she totally threw me under the bus, so we’re not any kind of friends after all.
But I’d like to think seeing someone every day does give you the OPPORTUNITY to make a real friend, but I think most people just aren’t capable of it. Unless they can have sex with you or you are the biological result of them having sex with someone else, you’re just a streaming service they cancel when the cost goes up.
my coworkers who I get along with great at work don’t really want to keep in touch at all outside of work
This could be a time-of-life kind of thing. Before I had kids, I had all kinds of time for socialising, once I had kids pretty much all my spare time was for my wife and daughters. If your coworkers have kids, they’re prioritising their family time above other things.
Turns out that the vast majority of people don’t actually dislike me - I just think they do.
This is something I think about. “Am I just being paranoid and reactive?” That’s kind of why I think about places where I was liked, because it tells me that I can tell the difference between being liked and not liked.
I’m still convinced that people don’t like me and that someone is constantly mad at me for something I did without knowing but the longer I live, the higher the stack of evidence against that view has grown.
Perhaps the actually unlikable people don’t, infact, spend much time thinking about this stuff.
Huh. I find that I can always find evidence for stuff I’m LOOKING for evidence for. Selection bias is a hell of a cognitive distortion. Have you ever tried explicitly looking for evidence that people like you?
No - I’m constantly on the lookout for evidence to the contrary.
I’ve learned how to enjoy it, when I am disliked by the scum of the earth, I fucking love it.
That’s how I used to feel about reddit. Like, if I’m getting a ton of downvotes, I must be doing something right, because society is a horrible place because people think in all kinds of wrong ways.
One of the foundational realizations in the last few years came from listening to the podcast If Books Could Kill, which skewers bad books that peddle nonsense philosophy, politics, and self-help. The thing that is almost universl about ALL the books they cover is how MASSIVELY popular they are. Society is absolutely addicted to delusional thinking. It’s really lead me to becoming, as one lemster put it, “a self-obsessed butthurt doomer”. Now when I get downvoted (usually without any replies other than personal insults), I know I might possibly be on the right track.
That said, there is a huge difference between the hivemind of the internet and a workplace with flesh-and-blood people I interact with everyday. I try to take the compensatory thrill of “being right” out of those interactions as much as possible, because those people in real life are my opportunity to connect to humanity as best as my little autistic soul (internet-diagnosed) can manage.
Have you considered the possibility that you are in any part culpable for this? I’m not at all saying you are, but I have a few times worked with people that thought they were beyond reproach but were actually just insufferable. Even when they were sometimes correct, they did harm the group by not being able to read the room and work together.
Again, no blame. May not be the case at all here. Just wondering if it had crossed your mind.
I don’t want this whole thread to be about me and my situation, but, yes, I do consider my role in things, absolutely. I also consider the whole context, too, and sometimes I’m reacting in a way that seems bad in isolation, but looked at in context makes TOTAL sense.
A good workplace will work through things with you and listen.
Three weeks ago, I had an issue with a boss making an emotionally-charged and urgent demand on me that was a total reversal of previous policy. I told him I didn’t appreciate it, and he got mad, basically threatening to fire me if I continued the conversation, “be very careful what you say next.” He’s also said the phrase, “You work for me,” more than once to end conversations.
This week he called me into his office to say, “I sense there is something personal between us. Would you like to talk about it?”
And I said, honestly, “No, I’m not comfortable talking with you alone about it.”
And he said, “OK,” with a sense of relief.
So basically, I said “You’ve created a work environment so hostile I am uncomfortable criticizing you in any way for fear of getting fired.” And his response was basically, “Well, thank G*d I don’t have to do anything more about that.”
I mean, ok, I get it, I can be a little rough around the edges, and I’m autistic enough to have been evaluated for autism but not autistic enough to have gotten the diagnosis, but toxic work environments DO exist, and I suspect I am in one.
Edit: I can also add today’s story, where I had a bad reaction to a coworker from another department telling me to do something against policy. She was very rude about it and dismissive and refused to give me an even minimal exception that would justify me violating the policy. I stormed out (autistically?) while my supervisor observed the whole thing.
Later, I asked why my supervisor why she didn’t back me up; she said I overreacted and asked her what exactly I expected of her. I told her I expected her to not let someone from another department harass one of her workers into violating policy. My supervisor just ended the conversation, literally refusing to hear my side of it.
So, like, I’m totally willing to look at my side of things. I shouldn’t have stormed off. But what really irked me more than the disrespect I got from the co-worker was the placid non-defense I got from my supervisor. It just reinforces that people don’t like me there and are perfectly fine treating me like garbage.
Anyway, I also reached out to someone else involved and apparently there WAS a reason behind the request; I don’t think it rose to an exception and I would have refused just the same, but it’s just yet another example of the total lack of respect I get at this workplace that I was expected to violate policy just because someone was telling me to.
This is fine. Everything is fine.
That’s a very thoughtful reply, and I just want to apologize for implying you are a problem at all. Good that this crosses your mind. I’ve definitely been in similar situations, and sometimes I come away thinking, “maybe I was wrong here,” where other times it’s more, “they’re so wrong.” So it goes both ways. I really didn’t mean to make it about you.
But my actual key learning in decades of work is about my own introspection. Recognizing one’s own biases and considering one’s own role in bad vibes is very helpful. Sounds like you do that too.
As an aside, I’ve also found sometimes a situation gets ahead of its own skiis and it is very difficult to change course. I’ve been in workplaces where a group really hates me, and it bums me out because I can sometimes see where it went of the rails… but there is just no putting the train back on the track sometimes and it sucks.
I remember hearing a story about a kid that was getting bullied. The mom tried everything and nothing worked. Was the kid somehow manifesting the bullying? Was it just something about him? They moved the kid to a different school, and, voila, everything was solved.
Sometimes you’re just the scapegoat, the outsider, and there ain’t shit you can do about that. Scapegoating is a powerful social glue.
When I started where I am, there was a woman who was being treated like trash. She was treated with such contempt that she chose to ghost us rather than quit, so HR dragged out her firing for months. Well, guess what happened once she was gone? I became the new scapegoat. It’s just how things work there.
I was too much of a straight shooter. Every new project my boss gave me, id explain all the pros and cons. And they’d just stare at me and go, “Okay so are you going to complete it?”
I didn’t realize how toxic and annoying it was until years later, when I met a guy who did the same thing when I was manager.
To some people the idea that others might die wasn’t as important as them being perceived as being in charge.
I just recently had this happen and have started looking for new jobs as a result. Our company fired someone and a VP sent an all staff email and was publicly telling everyone that the now fired employee couldn’t be trusted etc. Rather than responding to the email so everyone could see, I sent a private text that information like that didn’t need to go to everyone and if someone needs to know that the individual was fired, it should be explained that “They were no longer able to uphold company standards.” And leave it at that, because anything more opens you up to a libel lawsuit. The VP’s apparently didn’t like that I was trying to protect the company, and hold to HR’s standards. So now I’m looking and realized I should have started looking 4 years ago because I can get a 40-50% raise by jumping ship.
My time at this company is coming to an end.
I learned that people are overrated but also needed to make things much easier to be in the know about certain things. Yeah, it’s great being your own person and outside of the influence, but when you know shit, you know the real shit, the drama, what’s going to happen. You’re interested as well.
I, uh, kind of don’t understand what you’re saying.
Hawkeye Pierce has always sort of been my ideal hero–someone able to speak his mind freely because he was indispensable. Unfortunately, I’m not an ace surgeon in a theater of war; I’m highly replacable.
It takes time to become the Hawkeye of any workplace. For me, I feel like I currently am, but it was probably the first 2 of now 5 years of keeping my head down, listening but not contributing to gossip, apologising and correcting “mistakes” that were pointed out, saying yes to extra shifts, etc. But after a while I became someone relied on by all as a truth teller and a solid employee. I sometimes even tell people when explaining my workflow/training, “but I do what I want”. I can always justify my actions even if there is another or zero policy, and my opinion is generally valued. A blessing and a curse, as now the expectations on me are simply higher than for others in similar roles. But, I do what I want.
bwahaha truth teller. bro, being a truth teller is what got me absolutely FUCKED. Can you explain what you mean a little more? Because, yeah, I think employees willing to point out flaws in your organization are fucking gold, but, holy shit, do you need some cred to pull it off.
I was listening to some youtube podcast about work politics, and your “keep your head down” approach, according to one youtuber, would lead you to be overworked by your boss and passed over for promotions because you
a) do everything asked of you and more
b) do not promote yourselfIt’s easier for bosses just to extract value from you, and you are vulnerable to attacks from people who do play politics.
The way to become the “Hawkeye” is to shamelessly promote yourself, protect your reputation among management (fuck what the little people think); they are ethical and unethical ways to do this… but I think I have to get autistic about how I approach politics and treat it as a game while still somehow keeping my integrity and self-respect.
Basically, when you’re well-liked, you get the perks of a community.
But if you’re not-well-liked, you get the cons of being an outcast. And sometimes, the managerial might have a heatseeker for you to be removed.
Some have been useful things about being more incisive, direct, clear, plainspoken.
Others have just been that people are competitive and look for any advantage to get “ahead” and curry favor with the boss, even when there’s no competition, no prize, no winner, no advantage. They just feel that by “beating” someone they “win” somehow - or might in the future.
In the latter case i console myself that a complement from one of my coworkers means almost nothing in the grand scheme of things and the promotions at my job hardly make a difference in pay but mean starting an hour earlier.
