left wing organizations need to embrace hierarchy and rules

clear responsibility lines and impersonal standards are good, actually

On a spur of the moment thing, I quit my job of 5 years yesterday. I did not wake up Monday morning planning to quit, but here we are.

On one hand, I’m very sad to leave—I believed in the org mission and I found the technical work interesting. On the other hand, my day-to-day had become absolutely horrible to the point where the big picture goodness didn’t really matter. And I had been trying to remediate this in all the normal ways you do at a company for 3 months, which in my mind is enough time to get a relatively simple problem solved.

The immediate cause of me quitting was a very painful working relationship with one of my former colleagues. A relationship that made me feel insulted, belittled, and unimportant. The deeper cause of me quitting was the organization failing to draw clear lines of responsibility and make it clear who the ultimate person in charge was. I want to talk about both.

the proximate cause

My goal is not to harm anyone’s career, so I will talk about this situation only in general terms. But let’s say that I had a work relationship which featured a more junior colleague insulting me and my intelligence, telling me that the entire company did not like my work, negging my projects (this won’t work!) and being wrong about it, telling me what to do, failing to respond to specific requests, etc. Perhaps the most difficult behavior for me to deal with was the practice of assuming I did not know what I was doing, and so swooping in and demanding to take over projects I was in the middle of, and then if I agreed to pass off some of the work to avoid an argument, disappearing and/or coming back a few days later and saying “I don’t actually want to work on this.”

I did everything from direct 1:1 “how do we work together” convos to escalating thru the management chain to just arguing directly. None of it changed the behavior on the other side. The ultimate judgement of my company, communicated via inaction, was basically: “you should just react less to this behavior.” No thank you! I am blessed to come to work because I want to, not because I have to, and I didn’t want to put up with any more of this.

a reason why left wing orgs fail

The deeper cause of why I quit was a basic inability of the org to correct or modify this behavior on the part of my former colleague. Such modification could come in a lot of ways—the most basic is to just separate people and make it clear to both people that they will not work together. I was told this is what happened, only to have another project takeover demand the next week.

Deeper modifications are like career training and career coaching. In some cases a tough review or some tough love and going “hey if this behavior continues, this isn’t the right job for you.”

But if you are a certain flavor of left wing org, this feels wrong. Like, shouldn’t we be able to solve all of our problems through a nice conversation? Through sitting in a circle and singing campfire songs?

Well, no, actually sometimes you need to draw clear lines.

My opinion as one of the longest tenured people in the org who was responsible for our statistical machinery and also doing a project to re-build our statistical machinery was that I should be the responsible person for the statistical machinery. The org never really made this clear, even tho I asked a few times to do so because I anticipated conflict with this other colleague (we had been having issues on and off for a few years).

That never happened, so we were thrown into this situation where you had two people who both thought they were in charge. And it caused a lot of conflict.

If the org didn’t want me to be the responsible person, they just should have made that clear. Instead it was like a non-answer. You actually need someone empowered to make a call when there are disagreements, and the org never blessed any setup, despite me trying to get one set up.

(If the org had formally decided that my junior colleague whom I had a lot of conflict with would be the project runner, I just would have quit at the beginning.)

The sense I got was that I was secretly the project lead but they didn’t want to actually say anything presumably to not hurt the other guy’s feelings, or something? Maybe it’s just a general distaste of hierarchy, or other brainworms about org structure being bad. Maybe I was just completely deluded about my place in the company. Who knows!

Whatever the underlying reality may be, the fact that I don’t know what actually happened is a problem—responsibility lines on a big project should be clear from the beginning. A desire to not cause even the smallest amount of hurt feelings gets in the way of structuring an org effectively. We never get all of what we want, sharing responsibility in an org comes with dashed hopes and hurt feelings sometimes. But that doesn’t mean that is bad, and sometimes people eventually realize that their small disappointments were actually good from a broader perspective.

de-emphasizing feelings

When I did bring up issues, like being told all of my colleagues secretly hate my work, I ended up having to bring up the issues repeatedly, say they were causing me distress, etc. Talking about the action itself was not enough to merit an organizational response. In my view, me having to get into my feelings, and then my higher-ups expressing their own feelings of how sad they are that I’m leaving, is completely insane.

If your colleague tells you something rude, you shouldn’t have to plead and get into therapy speak to get an organizational response. There should be a manager who is like, in our org we don’t treat our colleagues like that, you can change your behavior or move on.

Ultimately, I decided I didn’t want to continue being part of an org that tolerated that kind of behavior—towards me or anyone else. We lefties say we like benevolent central authorities, but in organizations we act like CHAZ where you have to fend for yourself with your AK. No thanks, I don’t want to have to autonomously enforce my turf just to do some technical work.