So I understand, but I don't classify it quite that way. Note that I'm talking about "we onboarded right as the pandemic hit" -- like we chose to road-trip to California to bring our animals along and on that road trip there were hotels telling us "well you're lucky you came today and not tomorrow because as of tomorrow we have to shut down!", that's how fresh it was. It makes sense that a company that was always focused on in-person interactions was raw while onboarding. Some of the rest can be attributed to just "I was working on the wrong team for me, I'm very extroverted and everybody else except for this dude in Singapore was more introverted and used the newfound videoconferencing barriers to just focus on their own work" etc.
I think that the way they offboarded us was awful; the fact that I know that as of 1PM the day prior my immediate manager had no idea (because like I said, he was at this workflow meeting super-excited and asking questions, whereas if he'd known I'm sure even if he had to be quiet he's a very honest man and he'd have been like "uh, Chris, I appreciate your enthusiasm but let's come back to this topic next week...") ... and the fact that the business was doing well revenue and cashflow wise, it's hard to not be salty about that. But again that's kind of a separate issue.
The Perf culture is one big thing, and is the reason that Google's reputation is as "we will cancel everything:" that is what their old perf culture incentivized. And I cannot emphasize how bad it was to have to devote like four weeks twice a year to doing performance reviews, right, those quarters were just like "you will only have two thirds of your scheduled time this sprint, and also this work you spend making it easy for your manager to present your achievements and your team's achievements to the faceless committee, is not going to be rewarded by the faceless committee." But that procedure was canned because the managers complained about how long they spent perfing. (Also the four-weeks thing is dependent on how much your manager keeps apprised of the team's work and progress, I happened to have, at least at first, a very hands-off manager who needed the whole 6 months of work collected and summarized.)
I think the big thing I was missing was just mentorship. This was not for a lack of trying to find it, but I mean in terms of jobs where I've had really good mentorship, I think I've only had one (and maybe one or two jobs where I've succeeded in providing really good mentorship) so maybe I'm not criticizing that strongly enough, but I think "that's a problem everyone has", it was just much more visible in this case because I was aching loudly for it and still not getting it.
I think that the way they offboarded us was awful; the fact that I know that as of 1PM the day prior my immediate manager had no idea (because like I said, he was at this workflow meeting super-excited and asking questions, whereas if he'd known I'm sure even if he had to be quiet he's a very honest man and he'd have been like "uh, Chris, I appreciate your enthusiasm but let's come back to this topic next week...") ... and the fact that the business was doing well revenue and cashflow wise, it's hard to not be salty about that. But again that's kind of a separate issue.
The Perf culture is one big thing, and is the reason that Google's reputation is as "we will cancel everything:" that is what their old perf culture incentivized. And I cannot emphasize how bad it was to have to devote like four weeks twice a year to doing performance reviews, right, those quarters were just like "you will only have two thirds of your scheduled time this sprint, and also this work you spend making it easy for your manager to present your achievements and your team's achievements to the faceless committee, is not going to be rewarded by the faceless committee." But that procedure was canned because the managers complained about how long they spent perfing. (Also the four-weeks thing is dependent on how much your manager keeps apprised of the team's work and progress, I happened to have, at least at first, a very hands-off manager who needed the whole 6 months of work collected and summarized.)
I think the big thing I was missing was just mentorship. This was not for a lack of trying to find it, but I mean in terms of jobs where I've had really good mentorship, I think I've only had one (and maybe one or two jobs where I've succeeded in providing really good mentorship) so maybe I'm not criticizing that strongly enough, but I think "that's a problem everyone has", it was just much more visible in this case because I was aching loudly for it and still not getting it.