Change jobs, probably? A toxic environment like this will not make you happy, and you can't easily fire your boss. The good news is that if you're working in IT, you probably have the luxury of being able to go somewhere else with relative ease.
On that topic, I'm a huge believer in a degree of financial independence, a rainy-day fund [1]. When you don't have to worry about having money for next month's rent, it really changes your outlook on things and makes it easier to make decisions that are just or right for you, without stressing over every possible misstep. And it's pretty easy to build such a fund [2].
Hope they actually steal it and implement it properly rather than completely butcher it so badly that you wouldn't want anyone to hear that this was supposedly your idea.
Erm, no. Speaking as someone who was raised on ideas like this.
This is convenient for others, but not for you. They will take advantage of you if you think like that and you not be seen as leadership material.
Either challenge it, leave or find a way to prevent that next time. If you truly have no choice but to put up, then you have no choice. But don't be naive doormat.
It depends on your professional goals. If your goal is to be esteemed by your peers then you are correct.
If your goal is to see how much good stuff you can coerce into existence for the company then it doesn’t matter who does the work, who takes credit, or even whether anyone realizes anything happened. All that matters for you to hit that goal is the stuff getting done.
Tolerating ideas stealing (and other sorts of toxicity) is not good for company either through. Because what will happen is that people who steal ideas will go up and others will grow resentful or will stop sharing ideas. Not reacting to things like that enables it and makes it more frequent. If you want to be leader, you have to be conscious of shaping culture and this is part of it.
Also, leader needs to be able to protect team or company from under-the-belt attempts of customers, suppliers, competitors and such. Some of them will try that for sure and it is leaders job to deal with it.
> So, to start with, shut down the rules against discussing salaries or university costs with coworkers and other students, respectively.
No, this will expose evidences of institutional and systemic racism and question people about the country name. Should it be United State or Segregated State?
That's one oddly insightful little comment. It would be interesting to see the relationship between perceived performance and actual performance (by some impartial metric) in teams/management made up of people that get along well versus teams that don't particularly get along, but also don't actively dislike each other.
The trends in 'emotional intelligence' are largely based upon one psychology paper that did not reasonably show what many think it did. The author broke people into groups and found that average aptitude test scores did not work as a predictor for tasks such as 'planning a shopping trip as a team' whereas the average scores of another test, "seeing in the mind's eye", did.
The conclusion was therefore that a team's performance is not determined by the aptitude of its individual members, but their 'emotional intelligence.'. That is quite absurd since in order to make that conclusion you'd need to take the people who are individually best at 'planning a shopping trip' and put them in a team and compare their results to another team that scored well on the "seeing in the mind's eye" test but individually not as well on 'planning a shopping trip.' I think the author did not do this as she was well aware of what the result would be, and it's not publishable.
The reason for this tangent is that 'emotional intelligence' is now being used as a cornerstone for many things, and this article/company is yet another group feeding off of this. Yet wouldn't be it be quite remarkable if having groups that get along 'too well' could end up being counterindicative for performance. Most people find it difficult to be objective around those they're fond of. Create teams/management systems full of people fond of each other and everybody's going to say everybody's incredible and doing incredible things -- regardless of whether or not that's true.
> If your manager likes you, s/he will give you good reviews.
That is interesting, because I do my best to work with my manager to define success criteria that are independent of how either one of us feels. The goal being that when one or both of us has a lapse in "liking the other", which can happen for a number of unrelated reasons: depression, stress, illness, pressure, etc. It's hard, especially since I am often the only one that has ever asked my manager for that kind of understanding.
Thank you for sharing your story. Happened to me several times too. Once I received a rejection letter with 200 other candidates in CC list. We had a good conversation with each others.
As an Asian, I disapprove this message.