Leave Toxic Work Environments in 2023: Spotting and Fixing Unhealthy Work Cultures

Dave Yeager, Director of Data Infrastructure at Recurve, shares aspects of healthy organizations, lists some signs of unhealthy ones and gives you actionable tips that you can implement today to make your company a better place to work at.

Sign up to the Level-up Engineering newsletter!

In this interview we're covering:

• Creating healthy work environments in bigger vs. smaller organizations
• Some aspects of a healthy culture
• Spotting an unhealthy culture
• The impact of managers
• Advice for managers

Excerpt from the interview:

“One thing I find very interesting about continuous integration is that it only works if the tests are successful. However, there are endless stories about engineers not understanding why the release failed on the test, so they change the test itself. 

It’s a good example of a broken company culture - instead of being vulnerable and admitting there’s an unsolved problem that the team needs to address, we just twist the tests around to meet a deadline. This way, nobody’s going to learn anything. Pull requests should be an opportunity for engineers to walk each other through the task, discuss solutions and overcome potential hurdles.”