The work culture on my team is pretty bad. There is high burn out, lots of fighting, finger pointing, working 24/7. When I bring this up, the leaders mention that this is just how tech culture is. It is worse at other companies. I haven’t worked at another company so I feel like I can’t counter. What should I say?

I got dinged on my latest review for not participating enough in the team channels, and I feel like I’m back in middle school. Apparently, shipping clean, bug-free code ahead of schedule takes a backseat to not dropping enough memes in the #random channel. My manager literally told me that social presence is a core metric for our remote culture this year. Is this normal? I’m so grumpy about it.

Does anyone else find it difficult to get another job while you are currently employed? Most people say that it's easier to get a job while you have a job, but that has never been the case for me. What normally happens is I go to an interview with the knowledge that I can mess up the interview and perform poorly. Sometimes I ask questions that I know are going to make the interviewer uncomfortable. This is probably both good and bad. Most jobs I have landed happened when I was unemployed.

How do you deal with the feeling that your entire professional output is meaningless? I’m watching my company ignore every single one of my user-centric findings. They pay me to conduct deep-dive interviews and usability tests, but at the end of the day, the CEO just goes with whatever gut feeling he had. It’s soul-crushing.

Sad, my LinkedIn profile rarely gets any views and even with Premium only appeared on 20 searches last week😥