Signs you work at a toxic company
Constant reorgs, fear-based management, and the slow creep of dysfunction. Here's how to recognize a toxic workplace before it burns you out.
👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I share lessons, and stories from my journey to help you lead with confidence as an Engineering Manager. To accelerate your growth see: 50 Notion Templates | The EM’s Field Guide | CodeCrafters | Get Hired as an EM | 1:1 Coaching
Paid subscribers get 50 Notion Templates, The EM’s Field Guide, and access to the complete archive. Subscribe now.
How do you feel about work on Wednesday?
Monday dread is normal from time to time. Everyone feels it, even people who love their jobs. But Wednesday? By then, you’ve hit your stride. The week is flowing. If you’re still dreading work on Wednesday, that’s not because you miss the weekend. That’s probably because of the job itself.
After years in engineering leadership, I’ve seen what makes the difference between healthy and toxic teams. The warning signs start small - a reorg here, some blame there. But they add up. And by the time you notice how bad things are, you’ve often already accepted behaviour that would have shocked you a year ago.
Here’s what I’ve learned to watch for.
Constant Reorgs
Reorganizations aren’t inherently bad. Sometimes teams need to be restructured as companies grow or strategies change. But constant reorgs (three in a year, say) signal that leadership doesn’t have a strategy, or they’re using reorgs as a substitute for solving the actual problems.
When nobody owns anything for more than a few months, institutional knowledge evaporates. Engineers either duplicate work because they don’t know who else is working on what, or they let things fall through the cracks because they assume someone else will handle it. Technical debt accumulates because nobody sticks around long enough to pay it down.
By the time experienced people start jumping ship, the dysfunction is usually well entrenched. They’ve seen where this goes, and they’re not waiting around to watch.
If you’re enjoying this article, consider subscribing to get:
✉️ Free: 1 original post every Tuesday, my favourite posts of the week every Sunday + 10 Notion Templates for Engineering Managers
🔒 Paid: Full archive + 50+ EM templates & playbooks + The EM Field Guide
Fear as a management tool
There’s a particular flavour of dysfunction where failure is punished rather than treated as a learning opportunity. Where perfection is demanded over progress.
This isn’t accountability. Accountability means owning outcomes and learning from mistakes. Fear-based management means hiding problems until they explode, because surfacing them early gets you blamed for creating them.
Your reaction to the first mistake on your team sets the culture. If you punish it, you’ll never hear about problems early again.
The blame game
Finger-pointing when things go wrong. Vague accusations you can’t defend against. Leaders who never admit fault for any reason whatsoever.
These are symptoms of leadership insecurity. When leaders feel threatened, they protect themselves by shifting blame downward and hoarding credit upward. People learn quickly that the way to survive is to play the same game.
What I advocate for is to take blame as well as give credit publicly. When your team screws up, you own it to leadership. “I should have caught that” or “That’s on me, I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again”. When your team succeeds, you name names. “Sarah’s architecture work made this possible” or “Raj spotted the issue before it became a problem”.
This is the fastest way to build trust, and it’s one of the few management practices that actually works the way the textbooks say it should.
Chronic firefighting
“Everything is always an emergency”. I’ve heard some version of this at bad companies more times than I can count. Little to no planning. Pressure to work long hours, usually because of the planning problem. Firefighters get praised while the people doing prevention work get ignored.
Chronic firefighting means someone upstream isn’t doing their job. Maybe it’s product managers who can’t say no to stakeholders. Maybe it’s executives who promise impossible timelines. Maybe it’s a technical debt burden that nobody’s willing to address because the business always needs “just one more feature”.
Whatever the cause, this pattern burns out your best people first. The engineers who care the most will work the longest hours to save the day. They’ll be heroes repeatedly. And then one day they’ll be gone, because nobody can sustain that pace forever.
Your job sometimes as a manager is to shield your team from upstream chaos, not transmit it.
Too many managers
Five different managers giving conflicting direction. Manager 1 approves work. Manager 2 says it’s completely wrong. Manager 3 introduces a third approach. Manager 4 runs to the CEO and scraps everything.
“I’m constantly redoing the same tasks over and over because nobody can agree on what done looks like.”
This isn’t a planning problem - it’s a power problem. Multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests and no mechanism for alignment. The engineer becomes the bad guy for flagging the contradictions, because nobody wants to have the conversation about who actually gets to make decisions.
Before you assign work to your team, align with your peers. Your engineers shouldn’t be the ones discovering that leadership disagrees.
Tenure distribution
Look at your team’s tenure distribution. A healthy company has a mix - some people who’ve been there for years, some who joined recently, and people at every point in between.
Everyone’s been there forever? Maybe it’s a great place to work. Or maybe they’ve become unemployable elsewhere. One engineer told me they realized this at their first job: “I couldn’t get interviews anywhere else. And when I did, my answers about how we worked seemed weird to them”. They’d gotten so used to dysfunction they couldn’t see it anymore.
Everyone leaves quickly? Something’s pushing good people out.
Either way, unusual tenure patterns are worth digging into.
The self-awareness check
A great mentor I had once told me:
“Some people are going to be miserable no matter what. And that’s not necessarily a reflection of the company.”
That’s fair. Not every bad experience means you’re at a bad company. Sometimes it’s a mismatch. Sometimes you’re going through something personal that colours everything else. Sometimes, you might be part of the problem.
But if you’re recognising multiple items on this list, if your senior engineers are leaving and you’re dreading Wednesday and you can’t remember the last time something went wrong without someone getting blamed, it’s time to trust your gut.
You deserve to work somewhere that doesn’t make you dread Wednesday.
If you enjoy articles like these, you might also like some of my most popular posts:
See you in the next one,
~ Stephane
This list brings back some painful memories.
In my experience, the most subtle but dangerous sign is institutionalized heroism.
I spent years working in places that praised the engineer who pulled an all-nighter to fix the production outage, but ignored the quiet engineer who built the safeguards to prevent the outage in the first place.
When a company is addicted to the adrenaline of the "save", they stop valuing the boring work of stability. To me, that isn't just toxic, it’s structurally unsound.