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.

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?

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

Engineers should probably form unions.

I’m currently managing a project where the Product Manager and the Lead Designer are exes, and my life has become a high-stakes telenovela. Every single roadmap meeting turns into a passive-aggressive debate about user flows that feels way too personal. The rest of the engineering team just sits there on mute. Should I take this straight to HR?