Toxicity — Where Does It Come From

IT is not a kindergarten. It's a place for adults guided by logic and common sense. They don't need to be coddled, you don't need to watch your words around them, you don't need to worry that they'll develop complexes. If a person is incompetent, you need to make that clearly known to them, not protect their delicate feelings at everyone else's expense.

So why the hell is my beautiful IT industry turning into the "Happy Program-Bear" daycare?

I fundamentally disagree with both the actively imposed notion of workplace ethics and the ideas about its consequences. I don't like these candy-coated rails, greased with pink snot, onto which various dreamers and populists are trying to steer the industry. They lead not to rivers of milk and honey, but to jungles of intrigue and a desert of talent shortage through a tunnel of negative selection.

What, exactly, is currently postulated as the norm of workplace ethics? Here's a quote from the Code of Conduct of one conference that explains it:

"We want the environment to be safe and friendly..."

Well, nothing wrong with that, right? What's the problem?

Everything is fine. This is correct. The problems lie in how it's interpreted.

The Problem with Banning All Criticism

For some reason, the opinion is being actively promoted that you can't criticize people, that you can't express any negative assessment of them at all. The justification isn't research results or even a working hypothesis, but a stream of demagogic garbage. The argumentation is on the same level as tabloid journalism — fact manipulation, false conclusions, and often outright lies.

Why should "safety" mean the absence of any negative emotions? Why does workplace safety only go in one direction? It feels like some kind of sadomasochism to me. A person can send you code for review with the same mistakes over and over, and you're supposed to respond with politeness and a smile? I certainly wouldn't call that "safety." "Being in a state of constant stress" fits much better.

Programming may not be construction work, but you're not making sandcastles in a sandbox either. You work with real people, often with real money, and some even work with airplanes or tower cranes. It is YOU who should be making the environment safe, understand? Don't lose someone's account, don't strip someone of their purchased license, don't crash an airplane.

Stress Resistance as a Professional Skill

What nonsense — trusting the management of a bank's server to a young bearded fellow who cries from jokes about his orientation? This should be a seasoned sysadmin with steel nerves, decades of experience, and a virtualized container of professional skills in their left hemisphere, inaccessible to emotions. He's unlikely to grow from a delicate hipster who was carefully shielded from sarcasm and criticism.

The greater the responsibility in a profession, the greater the stress resistance should be. A store clerk can cry in response to an inadequate customer's abuse and call the manager. A long-haul trucker on the road should swear back even harder and deliver the cargo on time with a satisfied smile.

Respect Must Be Earned

Friendliness of the environment is also, for some reason, only considered in one direction. Respect and good treatment are fairly easy to acquire and hard to lose. You can only earn them through your attitude toward colleagues and your work. Why would respect suddenly appear for a person who ignores criticism and advice? For a person who performs their duties poorly?

A new person on a team always receives a minimally positive attitude. Nobody will insult or shun them. Being hired typically guarantees two things — that this is a smart enough person to be a programmer, and that they're polite enough to make it through the interviews. Usually these two factors are sufficient for respect and friendliness.

What, exactly, does one have to do at work to make it necessary to FORCE colleagues to be polite? I can't even imagine.

Respect is probably the first reason (after money, of course) to improve your professional level. You can't control it, much less demand it. That's not how it works. The possible maximum is the appearance of respect and mockery behind your back. But that's perhaps even worse than open contempt.

You Can't Improve Without Criticism

Without criticism, you can't improve. Only an outside perspective lets you evaluate your own skills. Many things are hard to learn without mentorship. Can you convince a person to learn new things and fix mistakes without negative reinforcement? Of course. But its presence significantly speeds up the learning process. Certainly, insulting a colleague over a lack of knowledge is unacceptable, but the obvious format of "Your code is bad, I'm now going to explain why in detail and give advice" is already considered toxic behavior.

Where Will Stress Resistance Come From?

Crunch time in a programmer's work, if not the norm, is a frequent occurrence, and you need to be prepared for it. You can't catch all bugs in dev; situations inevitably arise that require urgent solutions. You must be ready for at least one day a year spent in extreme mode — possibly an extreme night, and if things are really bad, an extreme week. But where will stress resistance come from in a friendly and safe environment? What will our kindergarten programmer do when the director messages them every half hour asking "Well? Is it done yet?"

Hidden Intrigues Are Worse Than Open Conflict

And here's another thing — people have likes and dislikes. They can be logical or emotional — even just based on a hairstyle trend — but they will always exist. And by closing off people's ability to express opinions, you won't get rid of them; it will all just move underground. How about this scenario — getting negative feedback from colleagues without any apparent reason? And no, you won't find out the details; you'll simply fail to get promoted time after time without knowing why. There will be no opportunity to change your behavior or fix relationships in the team, because nobody will say the terribly toxic truth — you've driven everyone crazy with your fishing stories!

The First Fruits of This Evil

Let's look around; the first sprouts of this evil are already bearing fruit. Here's a bit of reality for you.

Active devaluation of titles is happening. Right now it's very easy to find job listings for seniors, team leads, and architects with one year of experience. ONE YEAR. It can't be that all HR people have collectively lost their minds; someone actually believes that with one year of experience you can be a top-level specialist in the profession. Hmm... Then what are all those multi-year university programs for, not to mention school?

An unexpected fact — programmers won't work without cookies. Are you serious? Why the hell does every senior position listing mention those damn cookies? Your 200k salary doesn't allow you to buy them? You could hire a personal baker! This is pure surrealism. Describing interesting tasks, the tech stack — heck, your work hardware even — many somehow forget about that, yet everyone mentions cookies. Without them, a senior won't condescend. Obviously they write this to show the candidate will work in a comfortable environment, but all the cookies in the world won't replace a proper machine. A note to everyone looking for a job — you should ask about the specifications of your workplace, just in case.

A Real Story About Underground Intrigues

Regarding underground intrigues, there are many stories too. Here's one from a person I personally know. A developer joins a company, works for three months, everyone is polite and courteous to him. After three months — a conversation with HR, during which it turns out the team hates him. After that — a binge, transfer to another team, and paranoia. Although I don't know if you can call it paranoia when you actually are surrounded by two-faced bastards.

Conclusion

I like to think of programmers as a subculture. There are certainly all the prerequisites for this — a fairly closed community of shared interests with its own mythology and informal leaders, with its own criteria for evaluating a person. Don't try to eliminate all of this under the contrived pretext of "toxicity." What is being offered in return doesn't look even remotely equivalent. An industry of infantile, two-faced amateurs? Thanks, just what I always dreamed of!

Go to hell with your "toxicity"! I say this because only friends can afford to say such things to each other. And what is being pushed as a "friendly and safe environment" looks like a cult.