Yesterday was my lastday at my previous company.
I have mixed feelings about leaving but it's mainly a big relief. It's over. There are many colleagues that I care and love to work with, whom I shook hands and said goodbye; but I'm ultimately disappointed by the management and the general company culture. It's a sinking boat, so I left, even without a place to go yet.
It's at this company that I bought the "three signs of a miserable job" and learnt the word "power distance", and learnt about company culture and did lots of readings on people skill and management. I bought "good to great", "7 habits of highly effective people", "Winning", and watched lots of videos on youtube about company culture and software dev management, Scrum, Kaizen, theory Z, etc. I also received the Zappos Culture Book two days ago, for free, thank you Zappos! Yes, I want to be a cathedral builder, and I believe in equality and fairness.
The ultimate purpose of a buniness should not be just making money. It should be for the well-being of everyone. Everyone, company, stake holders, customers, and employees as well, for only a win-win relationship can last in long term, and that is as it should be.
This company defines customers as "gift from heaven", and then turn around and treate their employess like crap, this leads me to the conclusion of them being "money driven". If what they real care about is money and self only, everything else becomes just tools. That is my observation everyday - no communication, no transparency, very low level of trust and respect. The daily conflicts, yelling, struggles are unbeliveable, new hires soon become discouraged and unhappy, so many people just don't work together well. We don't have happy customers. They are mad with us. Not a surprise.
Imagine the dark age of Europe, there are king, prince, dukes, aristocrats, and under priviliged people. It's highly hierarical and unfair, e.g. depends on your "social status", you may have a good chair or crappy chair, you may have a faster computer or one so slow that it takes 5 minutes to compile the whole solution, still if you complain about your computer, a new machine will be purchased and given to a more senior employee and you will get his not-so-slow machine; depends on your social status, you may have an office with a view, or a cubicle in an open space; the CEO has the biggest office(of course!....of course?), larger than the biggest meeting room; only the CEO and president have reserved parking; People who has long tenure or are high in "social status" can work from home, while many other people are not allowed to.
Above all, no equal "political rights", people at the bottom of the hierarchy don't have a voice, no vision is shared with them, no future, no thrive, just survive. I had only one review in two years, and it took < 3 minutes. People in my department have to talk to our manager is a very rush way, become the manager ALWAYS responses with very short/explosive words like "ok", "perfect", "excellent", strongly implying that he is super busy and doesn't have much time to talk to you...a manager's job is to create good jobs for the employess...to me this is unbelivable...and when I sent out an email about Scrum, immediately I'm asked about my task and status...clearly they don't want me to talk, fine.
But a life without a hope is not a life, and I refuse to continue so.
Steven Jobs speech at Standford inspired my greatly, I listened to it so many times before I quit. "your time is limited, so dont' waste your time living other people's life"... If I didn't even have the courge to leave a place that makes me immensely unhappy, what else I can do? So, I walked away, after taking the time to make decision. There are lots of better places we can go, and there are a lot we can do, we only need to get started.
This is the end of the beginning.
