I went from being a waiter, to a bootstrapped startup CEO with 20 employees after 4 years, who couldn't grok why employees didn't want to get involved more.
Then went to Google: I was absolutely stunned, stunned, at just how reactive people are.
When you're offering unsolicited advice, you have 0 idea how it's going to be taken. Even the gentlest, most caveated things can set someone off.
In 7 years, I saw exactly one post-mortem, and it was well-understood doing one was seen as aggressive.
One time someone was being a bully in code review, something like 7 rounds of review for 200 lines. 600 review comments from the reviewer total. I'm not kidding. Can't remember exact line count but it was 3:1.
The person being reviewed, at that point, wrote a comment on the meta-situation, something relatively innocuous, can't remember it for the life of me. Within 2 quarters he was PIP'd, and it took 3 years to get a release so he could transfer to another org.
This factor is probably at a high at Google, as reality can't really intrude as much as a normal company. But I did greatly change my perspective on how to communicate in the workplace when you're working for someone else.
There is perceived (likely valid in most cases) risk with criticizing employers. It is entirely possible that if you go directly at leadership, you may be shown the door, regardless of whether you are ready to go or not.
The counterpoint to this guy's story is many of us who have told an employer the issues that we were concerned with in an exit interview, or even in a feedback period during employment, and seen it come right back around to bite us.
IMHO, once you have decided to leave a company, it's almost always a bad decision to be convinced to stay. As such, it doesn't really matter how serious your complaints are, it's not in your best interest to try to change the problems.
Even if they offer to promote you or give a massive pay rise to stay, the fundamental problems that lead you to look elsewhere originally will likely still remain. Any inducements to stay look shallow when you question why they were only offered in response to a resignation.
Making the decision to quit is usually tough and involves weighing up a lot of different things. Once you've crossed the threshold and realised that quitting is the right course of action, it's hard to undo that process and convince yourself to stay after all. The things that you tolerated before will now be more apparent than ever.
I've stayed in places accepting a pay rise after quitting twice, and both times I appreciated the extra money but regretted my choice within weeks. Both times, I'd left within the year.
Similarly, once you've decided you want to leave your current job, just get on with it and find something new as soon as you can. I find this harder advice to take myself, but several times I've stuck around for 6-12 months after I've mentally checked out of a job. There's a very real risk of others noticing your apathy creeping in, and it can have a massive impact on how people remember you once you've gone.
Yeah, but who knows why they aren't listening to you? If they could fix the problem, but they don't think it's a serious issue, they're not motivated to fix the problem. But if it's serious enough that someone quit their job over the issue, then they may get motivated to fix the problem before more people leave. Not a guarantee, obviously, but it does make a certain amount of sense.
probably doesn't help that's not what I wrote. I made no such comparison. I did give reasoning why comments made by someone leaving could be seen as a serious complaint, instead of whining, however.
Once I suggested that we need to have a meeting, a sort of post-mortem, about why two teams were working on nearly-identical projects.
My manager told me that our PM got yelled at because of that, and told me that negative comments should be restricted to private channels, without other managers present.
So, uh, why would I give any feedback that could be even remotely construed as negative again? Especially when the fallout could land on my coworkers as well?
