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 Toxic Environment Partially Detoxed

At my previous company, I was a lead developer.  I believe that I did good there.  I worked on making the environment less toxic.  There was a "me me me" attitude when I first got there.  It was shocking.  I did little things to help.  I was certainly not skilled in this area. A simple example of what I did was to pass out our lunches.  The company bought our lunch and we made our individual orders from the restaurant chosen for the day.  I'd distribute those.  Before that, people would just barge up to the desk, toss aside other's food and grabbed theirs.  In a few months, most people were passing out food to their coworkers.  There were still issues, but it was much more collaborative than when I first started.  It wasn't all me, but I think that I helped move us in a better direction.

Insulted

I had to undertake the daunting task of rewriting the company's public website.  I made suggestions on what I believed to be the best course of action based on technical debt avoidance.  The suggestions were ignored.  The head of IT hired a contracting group to upgrade the CMS instead of doing a rewrite on the latest.  It was not pretty.  I don't know the details, but I feel like the contracting group quit.  We had an upgraded CMS, but with all the technical debt and mess of the old one.

Long story short, head of IT made my life a living hell.  He constantly changed his mind.  He berated our work.  He fired the two people working for me, so the project was left to me alone.  The last straw was when I was walking by the lunch room to hear him tell the president of the company that the web team wasn't doing their job and that's why the project was behind.  I was furious.  I was the only one left on the web team, and my days were filled with changes, reversals, tweaks, and all sorts of madness courtesy of the head of IT.

Quitting

I told my boss that I would be quitting once I found a new job.  I told him why.  He fussed at the head of IT and was probably the only person in the company that could get away with that without being fired (we lost our PM due to her disagreeing with the head of IT.)

It took about three months of searching, before I found the right job. And that's where I'll end this post.