The whole company hates engineers, and I'm not being hyperbolic. We created an amazing app, and all we hear are complaints about it, and complaints about us.
We're criticized if we don't behave in a way that's more suitable to a sales person than a software engineer. My peers expect me to be direct and to the point, logical, and independent. Every other person at onX expects me to interact with them in the way that they want, and they expect me to just know how they want to be interacted with. I never took a "soft skills" class when I studied computer science. I believe my professors fostered the traits that they thought would make successful computer scientists and developers. But that doesn't matter here. If you say or do something that offends someone, it can hurt your chances for advancement. And they get to deteremine what is offensive.
Ironically, engineering leadership are probably the worst offenders, but were able to move up the career ladder. The behavior that we see from other departments like Marketing and HR can also very poor. It seems to be about the delivery. You can be as toxic as you want as long as you deliver it well. Or if people are scared to speak up, which is the case with HR. They can be very spiteful and mean.
An attempt by us engineers to foster fairness in hiring also went south very quickly. We're not racist, but we also don't bias towards ethnic diversity. Part of that is Montana. Diversity here means hiring women. I don't have a problem with that, but it shouldn't be the only diversity initiative.
We had one manager that advocated for us, and he's gone now. We saw what he went through here, and we don't blame him. It feels like we're taking shots from all sides, and our own leaders are pointing out the targets. It was nice having someone fair and level-headed shielding us. And someone that was not only a very good manager, but also a very kind person. No ego, quick to apologize when he was wrong, and that took away much of the anxiety of working here. It's devastating on a personal and professional level to see him go.